Hero, Come Back (Cynster 9.50)

She didn’t believe him, but she was not going to chase him off by calling him a liar. Nor would she betray her rather reckless need to comfort him. He didn’t seem the type of man who wanted to be cared for, but since the first moment she’d seen him, she’d felt a loneliness about him, a wildness that defied taming, like the wild bird they’d tried to rescue. She thought if she reached out her hands, he would fly away with the same strong, serene soaring that that hawk had shown them. And while she couldn’t deny—didn’t want to deny—the passion, with him she experienced an affinity of being. They laughed at the same things, they spoke of the same matters, they kissed…with an ardent obsession.

“Rather than letting me recover at home, my mother rather forcefully suggested I needed a holiday and arranged for me to come here.”

Feeling sorry for him, she said, “Your mother sounds just as eager to have you home as my stepmother is to have me.”

“Actually, Mother’s quite fond of me and complains I don’t visit often enough or for long enough.” He frowned as if his mother’s behavior puzzled him.

“Perhaps you arrived at a bad moment.”

“Perhaps…” His attention focused on Jessie once more, his blue eyes gray in the dusk of candlelight.

The illumination put part of his face in shadow, and that seemed right. He seemed a man of shadow to her, someone who, when she turned around, would disappear, never to be seen again. She had to snatch this time with him.

A smile played around his handsome lips. “So. Tomorrow we have our third and last suitor. Will you accept this one?”

“How can

I? To marry a stranger, sans affection or desire.” She didn’t want to talk about the suitor. “If I were courageous, I’d run away.”

“Run away? No, not you. You’re young and soft.”

“I am not soft.”

“As butter left in the sun.”

She gurgled with laughter. “Nor am I runny.”

He smiled, a hard slash of amusement. “It’s a hard, cold world out there.”

“Hence the need for courage.” Picking up a narrow slice of a pale, mild Swiss, she nibbled the edge. “But I know my father. If I ran away, he would never forgive me.”

“How would you support yourself?

“Without my fortune, you mean? The usual way that impoverished gentlewomen support themselves. I would become a governess.” She smiled woefully. “I wish I could find a way out of my circumscribed life, one that didn’t involve a repulsive man, and one that wouldn’t completely cut me off from the past.”

Harry watched her lips, her teeth, her fingers, so closely, she could only imagine what he was thinking—and she knew what she was thinking. She was thinking that she would not waste herself and her body on a pathetic, unwanted bridegroom. Schooling herself to look and sound sensible, she said, “I do understand, you know. What’s involved in mating.”

She took his breath away with her combination of boldness and innocence. “It’s not every young lady who would confess to that.”

“That’s because most young ladies don’t know about mating. They live circumscribed lives, managed by a governess, two parents, and possibly older siblings. My governess left as soon as my father deemed my education finished, my mother is dead, I had no siblings until my stepmother delivered of a son two months ago, and I’ve done what I liked.”

Harry lifted his eyebrows high.

“No, not that. I know better than that. What I mean is—I run Papa’s farm when he’s not there. Actually, I run it all the time, but I don’t tell him. So I’ve observed the cows and the sheep.” She scowled. “Although I suspect humans go at it differently, for sheep don’t kiss.”

He was almost faint between the desire to laugh and the desire to…just the desire. “No, they don’t, and I can safely promise you they don’t baa, either.”

“Or butt each other.” She ran her finger around the rim of her glass. “And from the conversations I’ve overheard among the servants, I believe mating among humans to be congenial.”

He scarcely knew which part of that speech to address. Taking the coward’s way out—although he preferred to call it the wise man’s—he said, “Overheard?”

“I was hiding in the pantry, eating jellies.” She waited as if he would scold her.

He was breathless, trying to keep his unruly body under control.

She straightened her shoulders and used a lecturing tone. “I suppose you’ll say it’s not right for me to give my maidenhead to a chance-met stranger when I’ll be married before the summer’s out, but I ask you—why is it right that I should never know the pleasure a man can give me? Never, in the whole of my life?”

He thought he understood her, but he had to ask. “What are you proposing?”