Isolde touched it gently. “It’s the color of the dress I’ll be wearing to the assembly. You’ve only ever seen me in colors that match dirt.” She twitched her skirts ruefully.
He fell mute. He expected his eyes told her she would look lovely in anything, because her own eyes went soft.
“You must have it then.” He gently plucked it and handed it to her. He was stunned to realize his hands were trembling.
A shade the color of the rose spilled into her cheeks as she accepted it with pretty gravity.
She ducked her head to bury her nose in it.
Longing surged in him so violently he nearly swayed.
If only this interlude were a story he could read whenever he wished. If only he was a character in a book who could sweep her into an embrace and mold her lithe form against his hard body. The skin of his arms hummed at the very notion of holding her.
What would happen if he did it now? To both his thrill and horror, his cock stirred.
“Friends of our family are coming to visit Pennyroyal Green. They will likely be attending the assembly, too.”
His words emerged almost hoarsely. He’d needed to say it in order not to hate himself. Though of a certainty he’d already breached the fine line between honor and dishonor and he could not undo it.
Something flickered in Miss Sylvaine’s gaze as she searched his face: puzzlement, a question. Then caution. For while his words sounded like a non sequitur, she would likely conclude that they were not.
“How lovely,” she replied with evident sincerity, after a hesitation. Miss Sylvaine was neither a fool nor naïve. But she was kind. Dear God, how he yearned toward her kindness, even as he felt he did not deserve it.
“I must dash,” she said swiftly. “Thank you for the adventure, Mr. Redmond.”
“Until tomorrow?” he called on a rush.
She didn’t reply, but her smile flashed like a shooting star over her shoulder just before she disappeared from view.
ChapterEight
That night, Isolde leaned over the rose bud Isaiah had plucked for her—she’d tucked into a little glass vase on her writing desk—to open her bedroom window.
She leaned out and whispered. “Jacob, where are you? Please come home.”
Her words hovered in the chilly dark, white and gossamer, like a handkerchief waved in distress. Then drifted away.
Anxiety was rubbing away her starry-eyed faith in him like mist on a windowpane. She resented that she could now clearly see how her parents and other seasoned adults in Pennyroyal Green probably saw him: The…Everseanessof informally courting her, then leaving without a proposal.
Did they think her a fool?
Wasshe a fool?
She slammed the window shut as if a host of pitying, judging people stood outside.
They didn’t know Jacob like she did.
She was steadfast. Wasn’t she? She was spirited, but not fickle. She might have enjoyed a moment or two of flirtation in her life, but until Jacob, not one man had ever captured her imagination.
Which was why something else that she could now clearly see frightened her.
She had fallen in love with Jacob quickly, passionately, moment by memorable moment.
But what she felt when she was with Isaiah somehow transcended time and place. She knew a strange sense of vastness and…rightness…in his presence. As though she had not only always known him.
But had always loved him.
Beneath his reserve, something devastatingly tender and beautiful wanted to emerge. But she was forced to admit to herself that the mysteries of him held allure, too—that streak of something unyielding and unforgiving she sensed, a tamped intensity that promised both passion and danger, the kind held by mysterious dark rooms and unfamiliar wild woods.
