She closed her eyes and swallowed. If her cheeks did not burst into flames, it would be very surprising.
“No,” she said.
“What, then?” he asked her.
She opened her eyes and forced herself to look at him. As she expected, he was hard-jawed, cold-eyed, and very clearly angry despite the softness of his voice. Well, she was a bit angry too. How dare he accuse her of...interviewinghim?
“I do not know,” she said. “I wanted to clear the air. And perhaps help a bit. I seem to have made matters worse.”
He got to his feet abruptly and went to stand close to the windows at the other side of the summerhouse, gazing out over the fields beyond the village. Beauty scrambled to a sitting position, her tail thumping the floor. The break in the clouds that had allowed that shaft of sunshine through had closed up again. It was raining lightly. Abigail could hear it drumming against the roof.
“I do not need help,” he said, “though I must thank you for listening to my ravings this morning. And apologize for them. I do not need your well-meant offer of help, Miss Westcott. I will deal with this myself.”
How?But she stopped herself from asking the question aloud.
There was a lengthy silence that Abigail did not know how to break. Nor could she think of a way of decently ending this tête-à-tête. He was standing tall, his hands clasped behind him, his booted feet slightly apart, and it seemed to her as though some of the air had been sucked from the summerhouse. She felt as though it were filled instead with his very masculine presence.
Whyever had she invited him here?
“Do you wonder why she married me?” he asked, as though he had heard her thoughts of a few minutes ago. “Me, a scarred and ugly gutter rat, when she was the lovely, pampered daughter of General Sir Edward Pascoe and could have had her pick of several dozen sons of lords?”
Ah, he was a baronet, then, the general. Abigail said nothing. She did not believe he expected an answer.
“She liked to be treated roughly—at certain times,” he said. “It was why she married me, though I did not understand that at the time. She knew who I was and where I hadcome from. It excited her when it ought to have repelled her. My appearance excited her—big and rough and tough. The same for my reputation as an officer—and the fact that I had once been a sergeant. She did not want to be a lady, she told me. She was fresh out of school and bored with being genteel. She wanted to wallow in the muck and the gutter. With me.”
Abigail sat very still, appalled. There was such a contrast between the softness of his voice and the viciousness of the words he was speaking.
He half turned and looked at her over his shoulder. His face was hard and harsh and a bit frightening. He did not look away. And she could not. She shook her head slightly.
“Do you tell me this,” she asked him, “because you believe it is the way I see you? Rough and tough? Belonging in the muck and the gutter?”
He did not answer. He continued to look at her.
“If it is,” she said, “I am insulted.”
Still he said nothing, and she got to her feet, intending to leave. But she stood still instead, frowning at him. It was not a large summerhouse. There was no great distance between them. Beauty had moved away to lie down again beneath the bench.
“I am not...titillatedby your humble roots, Lieutenant Colonel Bennington,” she said. “Nor do I see you as defined by them. I am not excited by your size or the... harshness of your face or your scar. I am not your first wife.”
His expression had changed only enough to accommodate a frown.
“Neither,” she said, “am I applying for the position of second wife.”
“I am sorry,” he said, turning more fully to face her. And when she did not immediately reply, he said it again. “I am sorry.”
“So am I,” she said.
She took a step forward. She had intended to move toward the door, but the step had also taken her closer to him. And she stopped and looked up at him. She drew breath to say something but could not remember what it was, if she had ever known. She bit her lip instead, and when his hands cupped the tops of her arms and her shoulders, she took another step forward and he kissed her.
The shock of it robbed her of both breath and thought for a few moments. She had never been kissed before. She had never known quite what to expect. But not this, surely. Not fromhim, at least. He kissed softly, with slightly parted lips that moved over her own, enveloping them, warming them, tasting them while his hands held her shoulders, but not in a viselike grip. She might have moved away at any moment. But his hands held her firmly enough to keep her a little away from him. She felt his kiss with the whole of herself anyway. She felt it in every part of her being, a warmth, an aliveness, a yearning, a something else to which it was impossible to put a name.
By the time he released her she felt very close to tears.
His face still looked like granite.
She turned to the door and opened it.
“Beauty,” she heard him say, “sit.”
