At Last Comes Love by Mary Balogh Read Free Book Online

remarked a lady whose name Margaret had entirely missed, and the marquess extended a hand toward Miss Milfort.

    With her peripheral vision Margaret became aware of a flash of scarlet off to her right. Without even turning her head to look she knew it was Crispin and that he was making his way toward her, perhaps to ask her to dance with him, perhaps to seek an introduction to the Marquess of Allingham, who was betrothed to someone else .

    The ghastly truth rushed at her.

    She was not engaged.

    She was not about to be engaged.

    She was thirty years old and horribly, irreparably single and unattached.

    And she was going to have to admit it all to Crispin, who had believed that she needed his gallantry since no other man could possibly want to offer her his company. Her stomach clenched with distress and incipient queasiness.

    She could not bear to face him just yet. She really could not. She might well cast herself, weeping, into his arms.

    She needed time to compose herself.

    She needed to be alone.

    She needed…

    She turned blindly in the direction of the ballroom doors and the relative privacy of the ladies’ withdrawing room beyond. She did not even take the time to skirt the perimeter of the room but hurried across it, thankful that enough dancers had gathered there to prevent her from looking too conspicuous.

    She felt horribly conspicuous anyway. She remembered to smile.

    As she approached the doors, she glanced back over her shoulder to see if Crispin was coming after her. She was in a ridiculous panic.
    Even she knew it was ridiculous, but the trouble with panic was that it was beyond one's power to control.

    She turned her head to face the front again, but she did so too late to stop herself from plowing into a gentleman who was standing before the doors, blocking the way.

    She felt for a moment as if all the breath had been knocked from her body. And then she felt a horrible embarrassment to add to her confusion and panic. She was pressed against a very solid male body from shoulders to knees, and she was being held in place there by two hands that gripped her upper arms like a vise.

    “I am so sorry,” she said, tipping back her head and pushing her hands against his broad chest in a vain effort to put some distance between them so that she could step around him and hurry on her way.

    She found herself gazing up into very black eyes set in a harsh, narrow, angular, dark-hued face—an almost ugly face framed by hair as dark as his eyes.

    “Excuse me,” she said when his grip on her arms did not loosen.

    “Why?” he asked her, his eyes roaming boldly over her face. “What is your hurry? Why not stay and dance with me? And then marry me and live happily ever after with me?”

    Margaret was startled out of her panic.

    His breath smelled of liquor.

    There had been no ball the evening afterDuncan 's interview with his grandfather. Not one single one. London positively teemed with lavish entertainments every day and night of the Season, but for that one infernal evening there had been nothing to choose among except a soiree that was being hosted by a lady who was a notable bluestocking and that would doubtless be attended by politicians and scholars and poets and in telligent ladies, and a concert with a program clearly designed for the musically discerning and not for anyone who happened to be shopping in a hurry at the marriage mart.

    Duncanhad not attended either but had been forced to waste one of his precious fifteen days. He had gone toJackson 's Boxing Salon yesterday afternoon when he might, he thought too late, have joined the afternoon promenade inHyde Park to look over the crop of prospective brides. And today, when he had thought of going there, rain had been spitting intermittently from low gray clouds, and all he met were a few hardy fellow riders—all male—and one closed carriage filled with dowagers.

    He had been reminded of those dreams in which one tried to run but