The Love List by Deb Marlowe Page A

a young man lagging behind her.  The boy’s reluctance was clear, but she didn’t let it slow her down.  Ignoring the fearful awe on his face, she yanked him along and marched boldly up the stairs.
    Aldmere spun around.  There was something there, deep inside his chest, far below the numbing layers of endless obligation and encompassing duty.  A twitch.  Interest?  Intrigue?  He could scarcely say. 
    From this distance her knock was muffled, but the ensuing argument with his butler was more easily discernible—and ringing clearer every second.  He moved abruptly away from the window and back to his desk.  Retrieving his report, he frowned down at it just as the door swung open. 
    She stalked into the room, ignoring his butler’s protests and tugging the youth behind her.  And for the smallest moment in time, Aldmere stilled.  Not just physically.  All of him.  Inside and out.  Once again he found himself held in check by a peculiar green gaze.  He stared, and shockingly, felt all the tumult inside of him ease.
    “Your Grace.”  The girl spoke and stepped forward.  Dropped a perfunctory curtsy and broke the spell.  And suddenly the restlessness was back with a vengeance, leaving him vibrating harder than his old music instructor’s tuning fork.
    “Miss Wilmott, what a surprise,” he said smoothly.  He stood.  “It’s all right, Billings,” he said to the sputtering butler.  “I’m acquainted with the young lady.  I will see her and her friend, Mr. . . .?”
    “Watts.  Joe Watts, yer honor.”  The boy—on closer viewing, Aldmere could see that he was indeed a young man, wiry, spotted and on the cusp of adulthood—snatched off his cap and worried it in his hands as Miss Wilmott relinquished his arm.
    He nodded.  “Just close the door on your way out, Billings.”
    She didn’t wait for the closing click of the latch.  “You made me a promise, your Grace, when last we met.”
    “Hmm.”  He set the report on the desk.  “I do vividly recall the bit about no marriage proposals.  I hope you haven’t changed your mind about that.”  He gestured toward the seat before his desk and tried not to stare at her mouth.  What he recalled was the promise of a kiss that lived there.  And there it remained, waiting.  Pointedly, he turned his gaze away.
    “ No one ever need know a thing about what happened here tonight ,” the girl proclaimed saucily.  Her color rode high, as did her chin.  “Were those not your very words, your Grace?”
    He did not answer at first.  He just marveled at the sight of her here—so fey and dainty, such a frivolous looking creature, entirely out of place in this masculine shrine to power, privilege and obligation.  Yet her spine continued ramrod straight, and there was nothing frivolous in the direct and steely way she met his gaze.  She ignored the chair he’d indicated.  Instead she strode forward, up to the very edge of his desk and planted herself there, a quivering testament to indignation. 
    “Were they?”  He’d forgotten the intensity of her gaze.  Emotion flowed over her face like sunlight over water. 
    He blinked to clear his thoughts.  “Oh yes, they were.”  He shook his head.  “An easy promise for me to keep."
    "Then why did you not?" she demanded.
    He straightened.  "I kept my word, Miss Wilmott.  Though it didn't seem to guarantee your privacy, did it?"  He scowled.  "If you doubt me, then you should recall that although your name undoubtedly has become a byword in the papers, you’ll notice that mine has not.” 
    Truly, though, byword was too soft a name for what she had become.  Scandal had bloomed three months ago when her disappearance from her father’s house became widely known—but that had been as nothing compared to the furor a few days later—when it was discovered just where she had gone. 
    Miss Brynne Wilmott had become a sensation.  Londoners lived on a steady diet of scandal broth and her