Brandon glanced where she pointed. He chuckled. “Your brand.” He moved away from her and sat up.
“My brand? Whatever do you—” She lifted her hands and had her answer. She looked at Brandon again, and he took great delight in pointing out the path her hands had blazed across his body. There were fingerprints on his arms and on his chest and, most shocking of all, on the taut side of his buttocks. Groaning with embarrassment, she buried her face in her hands and, too late, realized the consequence of that action.
“Now, don’t go all missish on me,” he said, grinning crookedly as he pulled her hands away and witnessed her smudged face. “Oh dear, now you really look like a chimney sweep.”
Shannon sat up, dragging the corner of the counterpane with her. As she covered her breasts she noticed the streak of soot that followed their curve. “You might have said something,” she moaned forlornly.
His smile softened, “I was struck dumb by your impassioned little speech, and later, well, later it hardly mattered.”
“I don’t know how you managed to keep from laughing.” She remembered every word she had said to him, offering a face she thought he found attractive and a body she thought would please him. Her cheeks flamed with color as she realized how absurd she must have looked to him.
“It never occurred to me,” he said seriously. He pulled at the sheet beneath him and used one corner of it to wipe her face. “You are much more to me than the physical attributes you mentioned, which, by the way, I do find very pleasing, soot or no soot.” After rubbing away the prints on her forehead, he kissed each spot and then concentrated on the smudge on her jaw. “If you think on it, you know that it’s true.”
“Because of Aurora, you mean. Because I look like her.”
He nodded. “I don’t feel toward her as I do toward you.”
“That’s because she hurt you.”
“No.” Brandon dropped the sheet and took her face in his hands. His thumbs brushed the corners of her mouth. “No. It is because she neverwasyou.”
She continued to stare at him gravely. “I don’t understand.”
“I met you first, Shannon,” he answered quietly. “I chanced upon a lovely young woman sleeping in a field of strawberries. I shall never forget your face as it was then, as it is now in moments when you don’t think I’m looking. There was a tranquility about you, a serene sort of confidence that everything would be as you wished when you woke.”
“I wanted it to be that way. It never was.”
“I know. But I fell in love with the woman who dreamed it could be.”
“Then? You loved me then?”
His hands dropped away from her face. His faint smile mocked himself. “I only wish I had understood it then. I realized it too late. Much too late. I had already married Aurora.” He wrapped the sheet around his waist and leaned back against the headboard. Shannon went willingly into the circle of his arm. His fingers sifted idly through her hair. “I didn’t have the courage to approach you again while I was at Glen Eden. I could not forget the way you looked at me in church. You loathed me then, but probably no more than I loathed myself. I had arrogantly disregarded your wishes the previous day and escorted you to the vicarage. And you were the one who suffered.” His fingers stopped their movement. “Stewart beat you, didn’t he?”
Shannon nodded. She would not say it was the first time her stepfather had tried to rape her. Brandon would blame himself as she had done at first. It was senseless to burden him with that. Not when the fault lay with Thomas Stewart. She was beginning to understand that now.
His fingers resumed their threading, and after a long silence, he spoke again. “When I met Aurora I believed that fate had intervened to offer me that which I had desired most and foolishly lost. It was an accident that I had arrived in Philadelphia anyway, the result of a mid-Atlantic storm that played hell with the captain’s schedule. She was coming from her father’s shipping office as I was leaving the ship. I followed her shamelessly and manufactured an excuse to speak to her. The rest you know.”
She knew. Every detail of his courtship with Aurora had been engraved in her mind when she agreed to pose as his wife. Things she did not wish to know, she would never be able to forget. Yet, as he continued, she realized there were motives behind his actions that she could never have suspected.
“I knew she wasn’t you, of course, but that didn’t stop me from convincing myself that she possessed your same qualities. She was too young to marry, younger than you in many ways. I ignored it. She set her cap for me. I allowed myself to be flattered. By the time the scales were lifted from my eyes and I became acquainted with the Aurora everyone else at the folly knew, the point of making amends had passed. She was carrying Clara then, and I could not bring myself to divorce her no matter how she provoked me. We agreed to each go our own way and merely keep up appearances. The arrangement satisfied her for a while. It was pride that made me chafe at her for fleeing with Parker. But the truth is she was never happy at the folly, and I had married her for all the wrong reasons.”
“Because you thought she was like me,” Shannon said slowly, a trace of sadness in her voice.
“Yes. And when fate intervened again in the form of your arrival, I made all the same mistakes in reverse. Even when I realized you were not Aurora, I warned myself that you were like her. I was cruel to you. It was the only form of protection I had left.”
“You were never cruel.”
“I frightened you.”
“Yes, but not in the way you think. You made me fear myself.”
“And yet you came to me tonight.” His fingers tightened in her hair.
“I struggled with the decision for what seemed like hours. In the end I couldn’t stay away.”
Brandon turned her face toward him, and his kiss was gently thorough and thoroughly gentle. “You’ve made me very happy.” He grinned when he saw that he hadn’t quite erased the mark on her jaw. “Tell me, when you are struggling with a decision, do you always set about cleaning the hearth?”
“I wasn’t cleaning anything,” she told him indignantly. “I was searching for the key to unlock the door.”
