She got to her feet suddenly and went to stand by one of the trellises over which roses grew. She bent her head to smell one particularly perfect red bloom.
“I am sorry,” she said, “for what happened earlier.”
A number of things had happened earlier. He knew to what she referred, though.
“It was my fault,” he said. “I ought not even to have thought of kissing you.”
But he hadnotthought about it. That was the whole trouble. If he had, he would not have come so close to doing it. He would have released her hand as soon as she regained her balance and moved away from her.
She turned her head to look at him.
“But it was I,” she said, “who almost kissedyou.”
Her cheeks suddenly flamed.
Ah. He had not realized that. But she had stopped herself—and now felt that she owed him an apology. He looked down and brushed a speck of dirt from his breeches.
Once, three weeks or so ago, she had set her fingertips against his cheek—and then removed them as if she had scalded her hand.
Today she had almost kissed him—and then moved jerkily away.
He was aware suddenly that she was standing in front of him. He looked up at her, prepared to smile and suggest that they go and look at the house. But her eyes were huge and deep, giving him the curious impression that he could see right through to her soul. And she set her fingertips again just where they had been that other time.
“You are not ugly, Mr. Butler,” she said. “You are not. Truly you are not.”
And she bent her head and set her lips against the left side of his mouth. They trembled quite noticeably, and he felt her breath being released in awkward little jerks against his cheek. But she did not give him just a token little peck of a kiss to prove that she had the courage to do it. She kept her lips where they were long enough for him to taste her, to want her with a yearning so intense that he gripped the arm of the seat almost hard enough to put a dent in the wood.
When she lifted her head, she looked down at him again in that peculiar way she had of focusing on both sides of his face. Her eyes were swimming with tears, he noticed.
“You arenotugly,” she said again almost fiercely, as if, perhaps, to convince herself.
“Thank you.” He forced himself to smile, even to chuckle. “Thank you, Miss Jewell. You are very kind.”
He understood fully what it must have cost her to touch him thus. But she was a woman of some compassion. It was not her fault that he felt bleaker than he had felt in a long, long while.
She had tasted of sunshine and woman and dreams.
“May I show you the house?” he asked her, getting to his feet.
“Yes, please,” she said. “I have been looking forward to it all day.”
And then he did something terribly distressing that he had not done for a long time. He offered her his right arm to take.
Except that nothing happened.
It was not there.
She fell into step beside him, not even knowing he had made the gesture.
For a fraction of a moment he had forgotten that he was only half a man.
She was terribly aware of him as they entered the cool, silenthouse and he showed her each of the rooms upstairs and down. She was aware of him as a man, as a sexual being for whom her own woman’s body ached.
She was half terrified by the feeling, half fascinated by it.
She had been very careful as she kissed him not to touch his right side. But she had been very conscious of that right side, afraid that she would reach out and touch him after all—rather as people who are afraid of heights are terrified that they will jump from a tower or cliff.
Yet it was not his right side she most feared.
