Page 10 of Bad Luck Bride (Scandal at the Savoy #3)

P amela was right. He needed to hire a valet, even if it was only temporary.

Devlin straightened from the trunk he’d just opened, staring in dismay at the rumpled mess that only yesterday had been two stacks of neatly folded evening clothes.

All his things had been packed with meticulous care by a footman at Stonygates before his departure, but the contents of this trunk, at least, were now a mess.

Worse, he realized in chagrin, it was his own fault.

Due to his failure to secure the interior straps after pulling out a spare handkerchief at the last minute, all his evening clothes had been left to become a hopeless jumble during the journey from Yorkshire to London.

Devlin tossed aside the dress shirt in his hands and picked up another, only to find it was as wrinkled as the first. The same could be said of all his other evening coats, waistcoats, and trousers. Not a thing in this trunk was fit to wear.

He glanced at his watch, noted it was half past five, and did a few quick calculations. Half an hour or so for the Savoy laundry to iron his clothes—if he was lucky—then a quarter hour to dress. Then another quarter hour to arrive at Lord Barton’s house for dinner before the opera.

“That’s cutting it close,” he muttered.

His future mother-in-law already didn’t approve of him, and he very much feared that arriving late to her brother’s dinner party would do him in forever as far as she was concerned.

On the other hand, showing up in wrinkled clothes was probably an even greater sin.

For the former, he could at least invent some excuse.

He pressed the call button beside his bed to summon a footman. When the servant arrived, Devlin handed over his best evening suit, requested the quickest service humanly possible, and gave the young man a very generous tip, hoping for the best.

The tip, he appreciated a short time later, must have done the trick, for he’d just finished scraping away the day’s beard stubble from his face when there was a knock on his door.

Suitably impressed, Devlin set aside his razor, retrieved his discarded trousers from the floor, and pulled them over his naked hips.

He then did up the buttons, snagged a towel from the rack on the wall, and left the bathroom.

He wiped traces of shaving soap from his face as he crossed the sitting room of his suite, happily relieved that the Savoy laundry was so much more efficient than he’d anticipated.

But when he opened the door of his suite and saw that the person standing in the corridor was not a Savoy footman with his evening suit, Devlin’s relief evaporated, and a mingling of astonishment and consternation took its place.

“Kay?” He glanced past her, noting no one else in the corridor. “What the devil?”

“Ssh. Not so loud. Are you alone?”

He blinked, his surprise deepening at the abrupt, rather suggestive question, but even putting everything in their past aside, the expression on her face was enough to make it clear she wasn’t here for the usual reason a woman came to a man’s room.

That dangerous, silvery glint in the depths of her green eyes, the proud tilt of her chin, and the determined set of her jaw were all very familiar to him, though he hadn’t seen them for years.

Kay had always had a quick temper, and right now, she was mad as hell.

It was obvious, for some reason he couldn’t fathom, that he was the cause, and that alone made the temptation to needle her irresistible.

“Why, Kay, you naughty girl,” he murmured, smiling. “I’ve only been back in town a day, and here you are at my hotel room door asking me questions like that? I’m flattered, my sweet, but you know I’m already engaged to someone else.”

A wave of pink washed into her pale cheeks. “Don’t be absurd.”

“Is it so absurd?” He paused, dabbing the last bit of soap from his chin, then he slung the towel across his shoulders and went on, “What else is a man to conclude from a visit like this, and at this particular time of day, too?”

“I didn’t come for a cinq à sept ! Especially not with the likes of you. I’d rather be tortured on the rack.”

“You mean you didn’t come here to ravish me?” He shook his head, putting on a show of mock regret. “How disappointing. What did you come for, then?”

“We need to talk. It’s important,” she added when he didn’t reply.

“I daresay,” he conceded. “To bring you alone to my hotel room, it must be.”

“Well, then?” she prompted when he fell silent. “May I come in?”

He didn’t jump to let her. Instead, he tilted his head to one side, studying her through the open doorway, unable to imagine what she could possibly want to discuss with him now that was so important she’d take this sort of risk.

Still, whatever her reasons, from the look on her face, he was sure letting her in would be something he’d regret.

“I’m not sure that’s wise,” he said at last, compelled to remind himself and caution her. “Someone might find out, and that would start tongues wagging about us all over again. If anyone sees you here, the scandal would be—”

“The longer you make me stand here in the corridor,” she said, flattening a hand against his chest, “the greater the risk becomes.”

Even through the cotton of her glove, he could feel the heat of her palm, and his stomach dipped as if he’d just started down in the Savoy’s electric lift.

When she pushed, her hand pressing against his heart, arousal flickered dangerously within his body, and even as he tried to suppress it, he allowed himself, for some stupid reason he could not fathom, to be pushed backward into the sitting room.

“Besides,” she assured him as she followed him in, closing the door behind her, “scandal is nothing new to me, thanks to you.”

Guilt shimmered through him at that reminder, for he knew he deserved a good part of the blame for what had happened, though not all of it, by any means.

Either way, a chap had his pride, and Devlin decided he’d rather be damned for all eternity than allow Kay to see any pangs of conscience on his part.

“Is that why you came?” he asked instead, shoving aside any foolish emotions of guilt or desire, reminding himself the days of both were gone for good. “About fourteen years too late for us to talk things through, isn’t it?”

“Your despicable conduct in the past is not what I want to talk about. I’m here about the present. And no one’s going to find out I’ve been here, unless you tell them.” She paused, her eyes narrowing. “Not that such conduct from you would be much of a surprise.”

The accusation that he would pull such a dirty trick flicked Devlin on the raw. “Now, wait a damn minute—” he began, but she cut him off.

“I came here because there’s something I simply must know. Did you—” She stopped abruptly and swallowed hard, her anger suddenly, inexplicably faltering. “That is… I mean to say, if you—”

She stopped again. Lifting her hands, she hooked the fingers of one hand with the fingers of the other, took a deep breath as if bracing herself, and opened her mouth to try again. But then she tossed up her hands as if in surrender.

“I can’t,” she declared as she let her hands fall to her sides. “I simply can’t have a conversation with you when you’re in this state. Will you please put on a shirt?”

At that question, his anger faded, and amusement took its place. “No, Kay,” he answered, grinning, immensely gratified by her obvious discomfiture. “I don’t believe I will. Why should I?”

“Because it’s not decorous. It’s not…” She paused, and though she didn’t look down, her tongue darted out to lick her lips. “It’s not decent.”

“So much maidenly modesty,” he murmured. “I never knew you were such a prude.”

She didn’t reply, and he grasped the ends of the towel around his neck in a deliberate move to draw her eye, provoking her for reasons even he couldn’t quite understand. “After all, it’s not as if you’ve never seen my naked chest before. Remember?”

Just as he’d intended, her gaze slid down to his chest. As he watched the blush in her cheeks deepen, his mind flashed back to the last—and only—time she’d seen his bare chest. That fateful night at a roadside inn just north of Birmingham was as close to Scotland as they’d managed to get before her friends, the Duke of Westbourne’s sisters, had come swooping in to rescue her from his nefarious clutches.

Looking at her, he wondered if she was thinking of that night, too.

Not that it mattered, he supposed, for when she looked up at him, her expression made it clear that if she was thinking about that night, it was not with any tender regard or lingering passion or even regret about her choice to leave him there and return home.

He shouldn’t be surprised by any of that, he supposed, and yet, it stung.

Because for him, the memory of what they’d felt for each other fourteen years ago was as vivid as if it had all happened last month.

He kept his gaze on her face, for if he looked down, his imagination would begin stripping her down to her chemise and drawers, just as he had that fateful night on the road to Gretna Green, reminding him of how close he’d stood to paradise, and how it had slipped through his fingers.

And that, he realized, was what compelled him to goad her so mercilessly.

To cover his own weak spot, a weak spot he’d had from the first moment he’d ever laid eyes on her lined up at one side of a London ballroom with all the other wallflowers, a weak spot that he’d only realized he possessed when he’d pulled her into his arms on the ballroom floor and those strange, haunting eyes had looked at him as if he were king of the earth, a weak spot that even after all that had happened and all the years that had passed was still there inside him, making him as much of a fool at thirty-four as he’d been at twenty.