A Rake's Redemption by Maggie Dallen

Author:Maggie Dallen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Maggie Dallen

Chapter Nine

With each day that passed, Claire’s struggle grew more difficult. As she sat in her family’s drawing room waiting for Nicholas to visit her as he had every day, she found herself toying with her embroidery, unable to work but unable to leave it be since she needed something in her hands to fidget with lest she lose her senses altogether.

How many times now had she torn out the stitching only to do it again? She was the Sisyphus of embroidery, doomed to forever repeat her stitches, and it was all thanks to Nicholas and his maddening courtship.

I want you to be free. Isn’t that what you want too?

That question still haunted her. Why hadn’t she said no? Perhaps then he would have ended this quest. But no, she had been a ninny—a silent, wavering ninny. She hadn’t thought to stop him, or to protest. She hadn’t thought at all, that had been the problem. Her mind had ceased working.

She blamed his kisses.

As she scowled down at the offensive and poorly executed needlework, she found herself mentally cursing the man and his kisses.

Even as she said a little prayer that he would kiss her again today.

Blast. The man had bewitched her with kisses! Had she known that kissing could be so addictive and lethal to her common sense, she might never have allowed him to kiss her in the first place.

And what a shame that would have been, a little voice taunted. A life without knowing Nicholas’s kisses? That sounded like no life at all.

That voice right there, that was the problem. It was the voice of temptation, the voice of irrational rebellion. It was a voice she’d muted for most of her life, but now it seemed to grow louder with each passing day. That voice was the root of all evil in her life.

Well, that voice and kisses.

And Nicholas.

She threw the embroidery down with a grunt not at all befitting a young lady.

Nicholas was the real problem here and he wasn’t so easy to discard as the needlework. After tomorrow he would be her husband. She would be stuck with him and his tempting lips for the rest of her life.

“Is everything all right, Claire?” Georgie asked from the window seat where she’d been perched with a book for the past hour. As her chaperone for these visits, she’d found a spot where she could read the afternoon away while Claire was left to fend for herself.

Oh, not that Nicholas was inappropriate during these visits. When he wasn’t playing the part of the proper suitor in their drawing room, he was accompanying her for a drive through the park or escorting her out for tea and crumpets at her favorite tearoom.

All the while they were chaperoned. It was all quite proper. Too proper, really. She was starting to get confused. Who was this gentleman with his steadfast attentions and his polite, charming small talk?

He surely wasn’t Lord Nicholas, the nefarious rake who flirted outrageously and spent his evenings carousing with a fast set.

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