“Fiona?”
“The way he kissed me, as shocking as it was, was the most thrilling moment of my life,” she told her with some understatement.In fact, she had been desperate with yearning, taken about by the force of her ardor.Had Harry felt the same?“It was rather earth-shattering, really.I felt it to the tips of my toes.And the way he held me!His arms nearly crushed me against him.I was...”
* * *
“...simply appalled withmyself,” Aylesbury confessed.
“But not so appalled that you stopped,” Glenrothes ground out tightly, his fingers whitening around his glass.
“But I did,” he insisted.“Perhaps not as promptly as I should have.”
Not promptly at all.He had been so hungry for her, ravenous after weeks and months of cumulative desire.Months of telling herno.Of telling himselfno.He had kissed her in a manner quite at odds with her lack of experience, but she had met him kiss for kiss, urging him on until he had been ready to take her up against a tree with all the urgency that had been accruing in him.The comprehension of what he had been about and with whom had hit him like a cold bucket of water.
He cleared his throat.“Admittedly, I should have never let it go so far.Finally, I pushed her away and told her rather rudely to return to the house.”
Like a good little girl, he had said and perhaps even patted her on the head.It was a lowering memory, how he had hurt Fiona to save himself.
“She told me then that she was in love with me.”
His throat tightened unexpectedly, and Aylesbury lifted his glass again to soothe the burning at the back of his throat with something more fiery.She had laid her heart before him, gifted him with something so precious, and he had tossed it back at her like so much garbage.
* * *
“What did he say?”
Fiona closed her eyes, recalling her desperate confession, rashly declared after he had already pushed her away from him.Scolded her like a child.Her chest clenched, reliving the heartbreak of that moment.So terrible, but nothing compared with what was to come.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“No, not straight away.”Her voice constricted with the painful memory.“He just stared at me with such an appalled expression on his face...”
* * *
“Iwas dumbfounded byher confession, of course,” he admitted, the words nothing compared to the emotion of that night.“Disbelieving.You have to understand that I had convinced myself that she was too young to have anything greater than an infatuation for me, that she was merely flirting with me all along.Practicing, as it were.Honing her skills.So I said...”
“She told ye that she loved ye and ye saidwhat?”
The threat was back in Glenrothes’ voice, but Aylesbury couldn’t find it in himself to be wary any longer.“Much that is regrettable,” was all he offered, sparing them both the embarrassment of recounting what had followed.
Sparing Fiona from having even one brother possess the intimate details of how gravely he had humiliated her.What had come next...what he had said to her!He hated himself for those words.Words born from the desperation to make her flee before he did something he would really regret.Instead, he regretted it all.
Even more now, knowing how deeply her emotions had truly run.
* * *
She had first triedto kiss him again, to renew his unexpected passion, but Aylesbury would have nothing of it.From there, things had gone from bad to worse.Instead of walking away and managing to retain even a shred of her dignity, she had clung to him, confessing her love again, begging him—begging him!—to love her back.
He couldn’t possibly love her, he had scoffed.
But he had kissed her, she protested.Had kissed her like a woman...
“He pushed me away, said it was nothing.That it was just a kiss, like a hundred before.Even then, I could not leave the matter alone.I argued that it was not.That it was so special and that I loved him so dearly.”Her face flamed at the mortifying confession.
“Oh, Fiona.”
“His words became even more brutal then.He said that I was nothing more than a child, far too young for him.Far too spoiled.”She turned Harry’s ring around her ring with her thumbnail.
