Forbidden by Susan Johnson (best feel good books txt) 📗

absolute antithesis of what she sought in a man, the Duc de Vec was too handsome, too charming, too facilely competent—too idle. Men of his rank did nothing but pursue pleasure and sport. She found the aristocratic ideal disgraceful and reprehensible, a frittering waste of one's life.

Which made her unusual reaction to the Duc so disconcerting.

The thought brought her motionless, her hand suspended over the antique silver hairbrush on the bureautop. Her initial impulse to reach out and touch him when they'd been introduced had been overwhelming. Whether consciously or unconsciously, the Duc de Vec exuded an intemperate virility, as though he were offering luxurious pleasure with his lazy smile and tall lean body and starkly handsome looks.

It was his eyes perhaps which most enhanced that seductive magnetism. They were heavy-lidded, sensationally lashed, intense somehow despite his insouciance—a deep glittering jungle-green, she remembered with a tiny shiver, like some great stalking cat's. And when he'd bowed over her hand, his gaze automatically holding hers for a long moment with a whisper of invitation habitual and unconscious, only steely willpower had restrained her from touching the dark silk of his bowed head. She'd also wondered in the next flashing moment before he stood upright once more how the powerful muscles of his shoulders, visible beneath his impeccable black evening jacket when he moved—how they would feel. Or how he would look with his jacket off.

With anyone else, perhaps, she might have given into those singular sensations. She wasn't prudish, she thought, grasping the brush with a steady hand and sweeping it through her hair as though she could as easily sweep the Duc from her thoughts. She understood emotion and feeling. Anyone raised an Absarokee on the windswept, open-skied northern plains understood profound emotion.

But the Duc de Vec was too familiar with the power of his charm, too confident of his attraction, a casual predator of female affection. She hadn't cared to be another casual conquest. Her dark hair gleamed in the lamp-lit room as she counted the ritual one hundred strokes before replacing the brush on the mirror-topped bureau. There. Finished. Like her brief meeting with the Duc. She'd been right to deal with him curtly, she told herself, tying the peach-colored ribbon at the neck of her lawn nightgown into a neat bow. There was no point in any degree of friendship with a man who viewed women as transient entertainments, she reflected, slipping between the silk sheets.

Sleep eluded her, however, with the music from Adelaide's ball drifting up the stairs and through the open bedroom windows. How would it feel, she inexplicably mused—a Viennese waltz silvery sweet in her ears, the scent of lilac from the gardens fragrant on the night air—to be held in his arms as they danced? Not only the fantastic thought, but the sudden vivid image of the Duc de Vec holding her close, shocked her for a moment like a numbing blow. The music and the scented air must be affecting her, she decided with swift relentless logic. With reality restored once again, she drew in a small calming breath—a strange necessity if she'd allowed herself leave to notice. Priding herself on her sensible-ness, aware of both her personal assets and liabilities, she'd always credited herself most for her practical assessment of a situation. Overlooking her need for a forced calmness, she reminded herself that both her instinct and logic had judged the Duc and found him unsuitable.

For her particular interest, she quickly qualified. The Duc de Vec, of course, was highly suitable in his aristocratic world. Closely related to the royal family, his pedigree perhaps purer in some respects, his wealth princely by all accounts, his personal attributes—looks and charm, his expertise on the playing field and hunting field, his manner of success with women—were all the inimitable standard for his class.

How could she be even remotely attracted to him? Why was he even in her thoughts?

He was the archetypal bored aristocrat interested only in his pleasure; her roots were in the boundless freedom and simplicity of her ancestors' way of life, where pleasure was a part of life, not its purpose, and common interests supported the clan existence.

Even her training as a lawyer was predicated on the ultimate goal of helping her tribe. She'd learned well from her father about reality and her anchors to the past. Being tied to two cultures wasn't new, but a dilemma that had existed from the moment of first contact with the white man centuries ago. She understood assimilation. You used what you needed, you learned to compromise and negotiate, but beneath the incorporation and discipline, intransmutable and renegade was a deep and abiding knowledge of who she truly was.

She was the daughter of a chief who was himself the descendent of chiefs going back to a time beyond remembrance. Despite the veneer of couturier gowns, continental languages, and college instruction, she was her father's daughter.

And the seductively magnetic Duc de Vec was anathema.

The following morning with his own plans of an opposite nature, the Duc arranged to have himself invited to an intimate dinner party at Adelaide's.

"You surprise me, Etienne," Adelaide said, intent on the reason de Vec and Valentin were at breakfast with her. "I didn't know you rose so early."

She obviously wasn't aware her husband rose early either, Etienne thought, since he and Valentin made a practice of riding most mornings at dawn when the day was fresh and cool. "A habit from childhood," he pleasantly replied. "I blame it on my nanny. She liked sunrises."

"How sentimental." Adelaide wasn't being condescending or coy. She was in fact genuinely astonished, her opinion of the Duc quite altered.

"I loved old Rennie most as a child," Etienne honestly declared. "She was my family, my friend, my playmate." Essentially without subterfuge, he was secure in his own self-esteem. That too he attributed to his Scottish nanny. Certainly neither of his parents were competent models of maturity. His father had had two obsessions: