“Touching my sister.”
“No! I wanted him to. Stop. Let him go.”
Still Dando held the gentleman. The gentleman did not look frightened, but he had grabbed Dando’s wrists, and that was pure foolhardiness as there was no way he could break her brother’s grip. Dando had forearms and wrists and hands of iron.
“It was nothing,” she said.
It wasn’t nothing. In fact, it had been too much, but saying that would not rescue the gentleman.
She took a deep breath and summoned the voice. It was the voice she had used on all of her brothers at one time or another. The voice known to mothers everywhere, save,perhaps, her own mother, who had been barely able to muster the breath needed for a scold.
“You let go of him right now, Andrew Beasley.”
The voice worked. Dando let go. The gentleman fell backwards but not to the ground. He stumbled and recovered himself, put his fists at the ready.
She went to her brother’s side, laid a hand on his arm. “It’s all right.”
“No.” He shook with rage.
“Yes, it is. I wanted him to.”
Dando finally looked at her. She could feel the violence still coursing through him, but there was also concern, fear, and disbelief in his face. He didn’t believe her. She’d never understand why men found it so easy to accept the desire that lived within themselves yet so difficult to accept the same in women.
But she should allow Dando this. For so many years, he had stood between her and the men who wanted to use her. Dando and growing old had been the only things that had made some of those unwanted attentions fall away.
But this had not been unwanted attention. Even now, she wanted it, wanted her gentleman.
“Yes,” she said airily. “I fancied a buss in the moonlight.”
Dando glowered at her. “Don’t know him.”
“And who around here would try to kiss me in the open when they know you’re my brother?”Besides Ned.“Only someone not from these parts would dare.”
Dando shifted his gaze to the gentleman, and Susannah did, too.
“Are you hurt?” she asked him.
“Didn’t hurt him,” Dando said. “Just shook him.”
The gentleman dropped his fists, pulled the cuffs of his shirt down below those of his tailcoat. “Iam uninjured.”
“Go,” Dando said through his teeth. “Go back to Sutton Hall. Stay there.”
So her gentleman was a guest of Sir John’s. Well, she’d guessed he was a gentleman, hadn’t she? Likely part of that exclusive set who made sure men like Father never had their chance. Landed gentlemen with their inherited estates and their degrees from Oxford and theirnom de guerres.
In her mind, she set the gentleman aside. Her body throbbed. Her heart ached. But those two were traitors. Her mind knew best.
“Go,” she said to the gentleman.
The world narrowed, closed in, became just the two of them as it had when he had given her a kiss that ended worlds.
“I’m leaving tomorrow,” he said. “You’ll never see me again.”
Never.
“No,” she said. “You’ll never see me again.”
Eight
