Tears of the Renegade Read online

  Susan had learned, over the years, how to continue with everyday things even in the face of crippling pain. Now she forced herself away from the horror of the memory and looked around, recalling herself to her duties. She noticed that far too many people were still standing around, staring at them and whispering. She caught the bandleader’s eye and gave another discreet nod, a signal for him to slide straight into another number. Then she let her eyes linger on her guests, singling them out in turn, and under the demand in her clear gaze the dance floor began to fill, the whispers to fade, and the party once more resumed its normal noise level. There wasn’t a guest there who would willingly offend her, and she knew it.

  “That’s a neat trick,” he observed huskily, having followed it from beginning to end, and his voice reflected his appreciation. “Did they teach that in the finishing school you attended?”

  A little smile played over her soft mouth before she glanced up at him, allowing him to divert her. “What makes you think I went to a finishing school?” she challenged.

  His bold gaze slipped down the front of her gown to seek out and visually touch her rounded breasts. “Because you’re so obviously…finished. I can’t see anything that Mother Nature left undone.” His hard, warm fingers slid briefly down her back. “God, how soft your skin is,” he finished on a whisper.

  A faint flush colored her cheeks at the husky note of intimacy that had entered his voice, though she was pleased in a deeply feminine way that he had noticed the texture of her skin. Oh, he was dangerous, all right, and the most dangerous thing about him was that he could make a woman take a risk even knowing how dangerous he was.

  After a moment when she remained silent, he prodded, “Well? Am I right or not?”

  “Almost,” she admitted, lifting her chin to smile at him. There was a soft, glowing quality to her smile that lit her face with gentle radiance, and his heavy-lidded eyes dropped even more in a signal that someone who knew him well would have recognized immediately. But Susan didn’t know him well, and she was unaware of how close she was skating to thin ice. “I attended Adderley’s in Virginia for four months, until my mother had a stroke and I left school to care for her.”

  “No point in wasting any more money for them to gild the lily,” he drawled, letting his eyes drift over her serene features, then down her slender, graceful throat to linger once again, with open delight, on her fragrant, silky curves. Susan felt an unexpected heat flood her body at this man’s undisguised admiration; he looked as if he wanted to lean down and bury his face between her breasts, and she quivered with the surprising longing to have him do just that. He was more than dangerous; he was lethal!

  She had to say something to break the heady spell that was enveloping her, and she used the most immediate topic of conversation. “When did you arrive?”

  “Just this afternoon.” The curl of his lip told her that he knew what she was doing, but was allowing her to get away with it. Lazily he puckered his lips and blew again at the fine tendril of dark hair that entranced him as it lay on the fragile skin of her temple, where the delicate blue veining lay just under the translucent skin. Susan felt her entire body pulsate, the warm scent of his breath affecting her as strongly as if he’d lifted his hand and caressed her. Almost blindly she looked at him, compelling herself to concentrate on what he was saying, but the movement of those chiseled lips was even more enticing than the scent of him.

  “I heard that Cousin Preston was having a party,” he was saying in a lazy drawl that had never lost its Southern music. “So I thought I’d honor old times by insulting him and crashing the shindig.”

  Susan had to smile at the incongruity of describing this elegant affair as a “shindig,” especially when he himself was dressed as if he had just stepped out of a Monte Carlo casino…where he would probably be more at home than he was here. “Did you used to make a habit of crashing parties?” she murmured.

  “If I thought it would annoy Preston, I did,” he replied, laughing a little at the memories. “Preston and I have always been on opposite sides of the fence,” he explained with a careless smile that told her how little the matter bothered him. “Vance was the only one I ever got along with, but then, he never seemed to care what kind of trouble I was in. Vance wasn’t one to worship at the altar of the Blackstone name.”

  That was true; Vance had conformed on the surface to the demands made on him because his name was Blackstone, but Susan had always known that he did so with a secret twinkle in his eyes. Sometimes she didn’t think that her mother-in-law, Imogene, would ever forgive Vance for his mutiny against the Blackstone dynasty when he married Susan, though of course Imogene would never have been so crass as to admit it; a Blackstone didn’t indulge in shrewish behavior. Then Susan felt faintly ashamed of herself, because Vance’s family had treated her with respect.

  Still, she felt a warm sense of comradeship with this man, because he had known Vance as she had, had realized his true nature, and she gave him a smile that sparked a glow in her own deep blue eyes. His arms tightened around her in an involuntary movement, as if he wanted to crush her against him.

  “You’ve got the Blackstone coloring,” he muttered, staring at her. “Dark hair and blue eyes, but you’re so soft there’s no way in hell you could be a real Blackstone. There’s no hardness in you at all, is there?”

  Puzzled, she stared back at him with a tiny frown puckering her brow. “What do you mean by hardness?”

  “I don’t think you’d understand if I told you,” he replied cryptically, then added, “were you handpicked to be Vance’s wife?”

  “No.” She smiled at the memory. “He picked me himself.”

  He gave a silent whistle. “Imogene will never recover from the shock,” he said irreverently, and flashed that mocking grin at her again.

  Despite herself, Susan felt the corners of her mouth tilting up in an answering smile. She was enjoying herself, talking to this dangerous, roguish man with the strangely compelling eyes, and she was surprised because she hadn’t really enjoyed herself in such a long time…since Vance’s death, in fact. There had been too many years and too many tears between her smiles, but suddenly things seemed different; she felt different inside herself. At first, she’d thought that she’d never recover from Vance’s death, but five years had passed, and now she realized that she was looking forward to life again. She was enjoying being held in this man’s strong arms and listening to his deep voice…and yes, she enjoyed the look in his eyes, enjoyed the sure feminine knowledge that he wanted her.

  She didn’t want to examine her reaction to him; she felt as if she had been dead, too, and was only now coming alive, and she wanted to revel in the change, not analyze it.

  She was in danger of drowning in sensation, and she recognized the inner weakness that was overtaking her, but felt helpless to resist it. He must have sensed, with a primal intuition that was as alarming as the aura of danger that surrounded him, that she was close to surrendering to the temptation to play with fire. He leaned down and nuzzled his mouth against the delicate shell of her ear, sending every nerve in her body into delirium. “Go outside with me,” he enticed, dipping his tongue into her ear and tracing the outer curve of it with electrifying precision.

  Susan’s entire body reverberated with the shock of it, but his action cleared her mind of the clouds of desire that had been fogging it. Totally flustered, her cheeks suddenly pink, she stopped dead. “Mr. Blackstone!”

  “Cord,” he corrected, laughing openly now. “After all, we’re at least kissing cousins, wouldn’t you say?”

  She didn’t know what to say, and fortunately she was saved from forming an answer that probably wouldn’t have been coherent anyway, because Preston chose that moment to intervene. She had been vaguely aware, as she circled the room in Cord’s arms, that Preston had been watching every move his cousin made, but she hadn’t noticed him approaching. Putting his hand on Susan’s arm, he stared at his cousin with frosty blue eyes. “Has he