Once Tempted by Elizabeth Boyle

all but enveloped his face.
    One elegant brow rose as he gazed at her. The sight of him after all these years caught her unawares. It was as if she were seventeen again, standing off to one side at Lady Bloomberg’s, a debutante of negligible connections and presence. And then he’d singled her out with just that look.
    And yet this time there was something very different about the man. Something that left her breathless and trembling for reasons that had nothing to do with their tarnished past.
    Before she could put a finger on what was so very wrong, in the blink of an eye, his features masked themselves with a practiced air, closing her off from any further scrutiny.
    Though Olivia had seen much in that unguarded moment. Appraisal. A fleeting hint of appreciation. A startling maleness to his bold, raking assessment of her.
    And something else. A revelation that hit her with a hot, searing shock, as if she’d been shot herself. He didn’t know who she was. He didn’t remember her.
    Oh, she’d heard of his head injury, but she’d never thought that he wouldn’t remember her.
    It stung more handily than she cared to admit.
    “Well?” His question hung in the air. And she knew what he wanted to know.
    Was she going to kill him or not ? Her finger trembled over the trigger. She should pull it. She should send him back to his grave. She should repay the debt she owed that poor Spaniard for giving his life to save hers.
    But for some unfathomable reason, her finger refused to move. Something about this entire situation, about the man before her seemed dead wrong.
    And, she reasoned, she at least wanted him to know who was sending him back to hell.
    “It’s been a long time, my lord.” Involuntarily she took a step toward him.
    He didn’t move. “Am I supposed to know you?”
    Of all the incredible gall. She took another step closer so she stood completely within the circle of light that now entwined them both. “Does that help?”
    She wanted him to see that she wasn’t the same naive girl he’d used for his own ruinous ends.
    What she hadn’t expected to discover by coming this close to him was that he had changed as well. Utterly. Completely.
    If it was possible, his years of captivity had only made him that much more handsome. When she was seventeen, she’d been taken with his smooth, polished looks and elegant manners, but now, at four and twenty, she found herself breathless at the man he’d become.
    The mocking and handsome features of her dreams were now hardened—there was even a jagged scar running along his jawline. The healed wound gave him a wicked, bounder type of mien. His black hair, before so meticulously coifed, was now styled in a restless sort of way that lent him a mysterious, careless quality that would draw women to him to untangle his secrets.
    Including her.
    No, don’t even think that , Olivia told herself, taking a cautious step back into the safety of the shadows. Don’t look at him. There was something alluringly haphazard about this newfound Marquis of Bradstone that set warning bells clamoring in her heart.
    As if he’d actually become the dangerous man of mystery and foreign intrigues she’d thought him to be all those years ago.
    “Do I know you?” he asked again, this time the acrid annoyance in his voice all Bradstone, jarring her out of her unsettling reverie. “Because if you haven’t noticed, I will be required downstairs very soon, so if you are here to kill me, then aim straight and sure.” He paused, then opened his waistcoat and pushed aside his mangled cravat, clearing a path to his mythical heart. “Consider it a favor, for a bullet is certainly more humane than the torture her ladyship has planned for me and that mob of hers.” A lazy grin spread over his lips.
    He chose a time like this to tease her? The Marquis of Bradstone she remembered had been cynical, sarcastic, even at times ironic, his witty remarks known to cut to the quick.
    But teasing?