Page 5 of Bad Luck Bride (Scandal at the Savoy #3)

S he ought to have known, she supposed, that this moment would come one day.

After all, in a city populated by a mere six million people, of course she’d be bound to stumble upon the only man she’d ever loved, the man who’d left her flat, broken her heart, and ruined her life. Yes, indeed. Her luck was just that good.

But she hadn’t known. He’d taken her father’s bribe and gone off in that craven way for Africa, and after more than two years with no word from him, after watching helplessly as the rumors of their botched elopement had spread far and wide, destroying her reputation and her future, after over a decade with no indication that he ever intended to return to England, she’d been lulled into the heavenly belief that she’d never see the contemptible cad again.

So now, as Kay stared into Devlin Sharpe’s face, she felt all the shock, all the pain, all the humiliation of the past come rushing back in a flood. Heat rose in her cheeks, rage burned like fire in her chest, and she could only stare at him, paralyzed into immobility.

In appearance, he looked different somehow from the man she remembered.

His eyes were still that extraordinary shade of turquoise blue, but in a face bronzed by the African sun, their color seemed more vibrant, more startling than ever.

Beneath the brim of his hat, his hair was still the color of a moonless midnight, but at his temples, there were a few faint strands of silver amid the black, marking the passage of time.

His face was still lean and angular, the planes of his cheekbones as sharply chiseled as ever, but there were faint smile lines at the corners of his eyes and the edges of his mouth that made him seem mellower somehow, less hard, less rebellious and defiant than the man she’d known so long ago.

His once-straight Roman nose was ever so faintly out of place, showing that it had been broken at some point, probably by a hard right hook he no doubt richly deserved.

His face wasn’t the only thing that had changed, she realized, her gaze sliding down.

He still topped her five-foot, four-inch frame by a good ten inches, and he still had the same wide shoulders and mile-long legs, but during the past fourteen years, the gangly, whipcord thinness of his youth had filled out, transforming his body to a more powerful, muscular one than that of the younger man she remembered.

His gray wool suit and gray homburg hat were commonplace attire for an upper-class Englishman, and yet, somehow, his appearance reflected not the isle of his birth but the continent from which he’d just come.

He looked strong, primitive, and almost laughably out of place in the civilized confines of a London florist’s shop.

One thing about him, however, had not changed at all, Kay noted in chagrin as she lifted her gaze again to his face. He was still the best-looking man she’d ever seen.

How nauseating.

“You,” she said with soul-deep loathing.

“Well, well,” he drawled, tipping his hat to her with a bow, “if it isn’t Lady Kay.”

The contemptuous way her name rolled off his tongue shredded any notion she might have had that he had mellowed with time. It also flicked her on the raw. What grudge was he nursing, in heaven’s name? She’d been the injured party all those years ago, not him.

She scowled. “What in blazes are you doing here?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” He gestured to their surroundings, and her shock deepened as she realized what he meant.

“You mean…” She paused, appalled by the implications. “You don’t mean you’re staying here at the Savoy?”

“Staying at a hotel is rather a novel concept, I know. But there it is.”

Kay recovered her wits with an effort. “I didn’t know a hotel of this caliber allowed dogs.”

He laughed. “Why, Kay, what a thing to say. Are you angry with me for some reason?”

That question was too much. “Don’t pretend, you bastard,” she choked. “If I’m angry, you know exactly why.”

Something glittered in those brilliant blue eyes, the triumph of knowing he’d gotten under her skin, and she cursed herself for giving him that sort of satisfaction.

“Do I?” he murmured, his voice low and mocking. “And even if I do know, society doesn’t, do they?”

She stiffened, looking away, knowing he had a point, hating him all the more for it.

When their elopement had become public knowledge and sordid fodder for the gutter press, each of them had chosen the only possible course: denial.

They’d claimed that they hardly knew each other, that the elopement had never happened, and that the rumors were nothing more than ill-founded gossip.

Their simultaneous efforts hadn’t mattered, sadly, since most people hadn’t believed either of them.

Nonetheless, the course had been set, and there was no changing it now.

Granted, the odds were low that anyone they knew was watching them at this particular moment, but if he was in London for the season and staying at the Savoy, there would surely come an occasion when someone they knew would see them encounter each other.

If she displayed any hint of her animosity and contempt for him, it would only serve to confirm society’s long-held suspicions.

She might as well stand on a rooftop and shout out to the world the humiliating admission that yes, he really had ruined her and jilted her, and she hated him for it.

No, however hard it might be, polite indifference was the only choice open to her.

Resolved, she looked up, but the smile curving the edges of his mouth fractured that resolve at once, and she wondered what would happen if she just hurled sensibilities and propriety and playing safe and watching eyes to the wind, hauled back, and slapped that faint, insolent smile right off his arrogant face.

“You want to know what I think?” he asked, breaking into her turbulent thoughts.

She forced herself to offer a polite smile. “Not really, no.”

His smile widened a fraction, showing that her offhand reply hadn’t fooled him for a second. “I think the sight of me makes you angry because you still care.”

Of course that’s what he’d think, the conceited scoundrel. “That must be it,” she countered brightly. “I’m absolutely pining. Can’t you tell?”

He flashed her a grin, his teeth startlingly white in his bronzed face. “Glad to hear you admit it.”

Kay’s palm began to itch.

Thankfully, however, she had no chance to give in to her temptation to do him violence, because another voice entered the conversation at that moment, saving her.

“Devlin?”

Both of them turned as a woman came to his side, a young blond beauty with a face Kay recognized.

About the same age as Josephine, Lady Pamela Stirling had attended the same finishing school as Kay’s young sister and had been the acknowledged beauty of the season during her coming out two years before.

She was also from one of Britain’s finest, most influential families, a family Kay could not afford to antagonize.

As Kay wondered how a girl of barely twenty even knew Devlin Sharpe, much less knew him well enough to call him by his Christian name, Devlin turned to the girl, his impudent grin softening.

“Darling,” he greeted, his voice low and unmistakably tender.

Darling? Kay’s mind echoed the word in shocked disbelief. Darling?

“I need to make introductions, I would imagine,” he went on, and when he looked at Kay again, she forced herself to don an expectant smile of greeting. “Lady Kay, allow me to present my fiancée.”

Fiancée? She stared at the couple, thinking she must have misheard, but then, Pamela’s fingers curled around Devlin’s arm in a clearly proprietary gesture, and Kay realized she had not misheard anything.

“There’s no need for introductions,” Pamela said, returning Kay’s pasted-on smile. “Lady Kay and I already know each other.”

“You do?” Devlin asked, sounding surprised.

He wasn’t the only one, she thought. Her own wits seemed to have disintegrated, and she couldn’t seem to stop staring at Lady Pamela’s hand tucked intimately into the crook of his arm.

But when he pressed his palm over Lady Pamela’s gloved fingers in an obvious show of affection, smiling at the girl as if utterly besotted, Kay stiffened, her considerable pride coming to the fore and reminding her that a warm, friendly demeanor was absolutely vital.

Anything less would only reinforce Devlin’s conceited presumptions, and that was something Kay refused to allow.

“Of course we know each other,” she answered his question with a pretense of hearty good cheer. “We met at Willowbank Academy, if I remember rightly.”

“School?” Devlin gave a disbelieving laugh. “You two could never have been at school together.”

For some reason, Pamela found that amusing. “Of course not, silly,” she replied with a tinkling laugh of her own. “Lady Kay graduated many years before I was ever there.”

Inwardly, Kay grimaced. Ouch.

“No,” Pam went on, “I was at Willowbank with Lady Kay’s sister, Josephine. We were friends there. Lady Kay and I met during the graduation ceremonies.”

Other than a brief introduction during the event in question, Kay could not recall Jo making any mention at all of Lady Pamela, so the two girls being friends was a doubtful prospect, but Kay had no choice but to give Pamela the benefit of the doubt.

“All of you looked so lovely that day in your white caps and gowns.”

Pamela laughed again. “We thought ourselves so grown up in them, I daresay. Although to someone your age,” she added, “we must have seemed terribly young.”

Biting back a sarcastic rejoinder about being older than Methuselah, Kay kept her smile in place, but the effort of doing so was already making her jaw ache, and she wondered just how long she had to stand here with these two, making small talk, before she could escape.

Fortunately, Fate chose that moment to come to her aid.