Bella collected several of the ledgers and pivoted to face him.
“Here.” She held out the volumes and he took them, then she reached for the last. As she leaned forward, she felt something catch at her neck and raised a hand.
The daisy pendant was cool against her fingers. She closed her fist around it quickly, but she was too slow.
Rhys fixed his gaze on her neck a moment before he reached for her.
Bella opened her hand and let the pendant drop. He caught it between his fingers and stroked the opal petals with his thumb, almost as tenderly as he’d stroked her hand.
“So you didn’t hate me,” he said on a husky whisper.
Bella’s heart pounded so hard it hurt. She tugged on the chain of her necklace and the flower pendant slipped from his fingers. She got to her feet, ignoring his offered hand to help her up.
When Bella stood before him, Rhys remained kneeling, as he’d attempted to do the night before. His full, far too appealing mouth flickered into a hesitant smile that faded almost as soon as it appeared.
“We were friends for so many years, but I’m not certain you ever knew me at all.” She should call the whole thing off. The invitation she’d come to extend would just lead to more of this. Her heart in her throat, all the old feelings that she should have banished years before welling up as if they’d never left at all.
Turning on her heel, she started toward the study door. The most logical solution was to walk away and move forward rather than looking back. But on the threshold, she looked at him over her shoulder.
“We’ll gather in the drawing room at six. Dinner starts at seven.”
Chapter Seven
Rhys had never hesitated to walk through Hillcrest’s thick carved maple door in his life.
Lord and Lady Yardley’s country house had often felt more like a home than his own. They’d welcomed him, not as the neighboring dukedom’s heir but as a young man who’d befriended their daughter. And they’d encouraged him to visit nearly as often as Bella had.
If not for the Yardleys, he would have had no real notion of family after the loss of his mother when he was a boy. No notion of a loving family anyway. They’d striven to make him feel a part of theirs, and as a child he’d wanted nothing more than to be included in their conversation-filled dinners and silly parlor games.
He loved Hillcrest and everyone who inhabited the manor house.
Yet tonight he paused on the steps, pointlessly adjusting his cravat, which his valet had already arranged impeccably, and scraped a hand through his hair as he’d done half a dozen times on his carriage ride over.
He’d thought about Bella all day. The way she’d shuttered herself earlier haunted him. The stony set of her jaw and the way her shoulders trembled, betraying whatever emotion she wouldn’t let him see.
She’d always been that way. Where he’d been brash and let every emotion slip out, she’d been quiet. Observant. Calm when he wasn’t. But he knew her well enough to know she wasn’t placid or emotionless. Bella was every bit as passionate as he was, or at least she had been once.
He wasn’t sure at all who she’d become in the years they’d been apart but he very much wanted the opportunity to find out.
Through a half-open window, he could hear conversation in the front drawing room. Her cousin Louisa’s lively laughter and the voices of several men. Those bloody suitors Lady Yardley had selected in the hopes they might woo Bella.
Why did that fact irk him?
Stepping toward the door, he knocked twice. A moment later the doors creaked open and Mr. Lewes stood on the threshold. The Yardleys’ longtime butler had always been kind, and Rhys was ridiculously pleased to see recognition in the old man’s eyes.
“Your Grace, it has been a very long while.” He offered a little half bow and gestured for Rhys to enter.
“I trust you’ve been well.” The man looked far more hail and hardy than Rhys did after a week of London soirees.
“I’ve no complaints, Your Grace.”
The honorific still made Rhys want to glance over his shoulder to see if his father was there, but it sounded more right on Lewes’s tongue than it had on anyone else’s.
“Where is she, Lewes?” His question should have been familiar. It was the one Rhys had asked whenever he came to visit Bella.
“Miss Prescott has not yet come down, Your Grace.” Lewes stared at him and then glanced at the long stairwell that wound up to the family’s private rooms.
Rhys couldn’t count how many times he’d bound up those stairs to find Bella in the nursery or her sitting room.
“Guests are gathering in the drawing room,” Lewes told him quietly. “May I announce you?”
Propriety dictated he join the other guests. Dashing up to the family’s private quarters might have been forgivable when he was twelve and Bella was eight, but they weren’t children anymore. She was a proper young lady.
Unfortunately, he’d never been a proper gentleman for a single day of his life.
“Not quite yet. Good to see you, Lewes.”
The old man gave one curt nod, and Rhys stepped past him and headed for the stairs. The path to her chamber felt as familiar as if he’d tread the path yesterday, yet when he reached her door, he didn’t knock.
What the hell was happening to him? He wasn’t a man who ever hesitated. Half the problems in his life could be ascribed to his very bad habit of giving in to reckless impulses.
Whatever lingering connection he had with Bella felt fragile. He refused to let himself sift what seeing her again had sparked in him.
Rather than knock and step inside as he would have done years before, he rapped gently and waited.
Bella opened the door on a frustrated huff, as if he’d interrupted. Her cheeks were flushed, her brow crinkled in a frown, and she held her coiffure in place with one hand. Whether he’d interrupted or not, her green-gold eyes widened at the sight of him.
“You don’t look happy to see me.”
“I thought you were the maid. Why are you up here?” She gripped the edge of his waistcoat, glanced both ways down the hall, and pulled him into her room. “You really are determined to start a scandal.”
“Old habit,” he told her as she let go of him and closed the door. “I always came upstairs to find you rather than waiting for you to come down.”
She gave him a harried glance over her shoulder as she worked at winding her loose hair into artful pinned curls.
“I thought it best to decide on our plan of attack.”
“The only plan is for you to be downstairs making a grand entrance and all of our gentlemen guests nervous,” she told him as she approached her vanity to rifle through a crystal dish.
Rhys swallowed hard and curled his hand into a fist.
Three buttons at the back of her gown were unfastened, exposing her lovely freckled skin. Long auburn waves of hair had fallen from her half-pinned coiffure, and he longed to reach out and sweep them aside. To see more of her.
Good God, what was wrong with him?
He’d seen Bella disheveled before. Covered in pond muck, rain soaked, even splashed with paint from the one occasion when they’d decided to try their hand at watercolors.
This was different.
He’d seen her as a friend then. A child. Now he saw only a woman. An inconveniently desirable woman. And he had taken the liberty of coming to her room, to her bedchamber. Uninvited.