Trouble at the Wedding by Laura Lee Guhrke Page A

silver, and they looked directly into hers, seeming to see right through all her attempts to be a lady, finding instead the awkward girl who’d never worn shoes in the summertime because she couldn’t afford them. Looking at her as if he would have liked that girl.
    A ridiculous notion. He didn’t even know her. “I—” She stopped and licked her dry lips, feeling all muddled up. “I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.”
    â€œI think you do,” he said. “And I think you want to be changed, which is the saddest part.”
    â€œAnd I think,” she said, careful to enunciate her words, “that you are a very rude man.”
    â€œOh, I am,” he agreed amiably, “but I just can’t resist talking to pretty women. And there’s no question you fall into that category.”
    â€œWhat do you hope to gain, giving me compliments this way? I am engaged to be married.”
    â€œI know.” He looked her over, a slow, lingering glance of regret. “Deuced shame, that.”
    The heat inside her deepened and spread. Lord, this man’s eyes could melt a girl into a puddle. Billy John could take lessons from the likes of him.
    She swallowed hard, trying to gather her wits. This was crazy. She’d never met this man in her life before, she knew nothing about him, and yet she knew what he was making her feel. Like she was seventeen again and gloriously unaware she was about to get dumped on her behind by Gooseneck Bend’s biggest heartbreaker. This man was a heartbreaker, too, the sort who toyed with a girl like a cat toyed with a mouse and didn’t care two bits that she belonged to somebody else. He might be a duke, but he was still trouble, the sort of trouble she never wanted to get tangled up in again.
    She forced a smile to her lips, the charming, deceptively sweet smile her lawyers at Cooper, Bentley, and Frye knew very well. “And I suppose that if I weren’t already engaged, you’d be interested in forming an acquaintance with me?”
    â€œLove, any man with half a brain and one eye open would want to form an acquaintance with you. And my brain and my eyes function perfectly.”
    Annabel’s smile widened. It was always reassuring to be proved right about a man’s bad character, though a bit galling to think she could still find a man like that attractive. “My eyes and my brain work, too, sugar,” she purred. “And they can see a man like you comin’ from miles away.”
    If her perceptiveness unnerved him, he didn’t show it. Quite the contrary. “Excellent,” he said. “Then we both know where we are. A good beginning to our friendship, I think.”
    She opened her mouth, but before she could assure him there was no beginning and they were not friends, he spoke again. “But we shall have to wait until you’ve been married a few years before we can renew our acquaintance. The shine’ll be off the tiara by then, I expect.”
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œWell, it always happens.” His voice became serious, his flippancy vanished. “You American girls always have these romantic dreams in your heads about marrying a lord and living in a castle, but a year or two after the wedding, you realize just how dreary it is to be married to one of our lot, how painful chilblains are, and how deuced cold a castle can be in December.”
    Though she might sometimes talk as if she was just off the farm, she wasn’t. She might not know what the heck a chilblain was, but she did know a scoundrel when she met one. And she knew just what sort of friendship he had in mind.
    â€œSo when I’m married to Rumsford,” she drawled, not bothering to curb her Mississippi vowels anymore, not with this man, “and I’m all lonely and homesick, you’ll be willing to step in and console my disillusioned little heart?”
    â€œI’d