Page 4

He imagined her breathy laughter in his ear, and his spine shivered in anticipation.

He imagined her thighs parted on either side of his waist, and his hips jerked in response.

Imagining what she might taste like made his hand pump more quickly.

The thought of burying his face between her lush breasts made him groan.

Water sloshed around Harry as he worked his body to a frantic state of arousal. The rasp of his panting breaths filled the room, echoing until he could almost pretend Mina really was there with him, surrendering herself to the same desire that burned so brightly within him.

Picturing Mina reaching climax—experiencing the same mind-altering bliss that overcame him whenever he came—was what finally sent Harry over the edge. A few more swift strokes and the pleasure that had been building at the base of his spine finally erupted in white-hot ecstasy that made his jaw fall slack on a guttural groan, and his every muscle tremble with release. As the last tremors of his orgasm fluttered through his body, Harry imagined Mina resting her head on his shoulder as she held him close and breathed him in, and he knew he would carry that image with him always.

Finished bathing, Harry stood at his bedchamber window and stared out into the silver-painted night. The moon was full, casting its stark glow across every surface—both natural and manmade—to form a world of contrasts. Strange shapes took their otherworldly form as a nighttime wind waxed and waned unevenly, shifting trees and shadows.

Squinting, Harry realized there was something unmoving in the gardens below…something too soft to be stone and too solid to be a shadow. It shifted slightly, giving him the barest hint of humanoid shape, the curve of a shoulder, the shake of a head.

Was that…?

Harry frowned and decided to investigate for himself.

After hastily dressing in breeches, a plain linen shirt, and his boots, he descended the stairs with silent efficiency to make his way to the back garden and courtyard. Sculpted trees bordered the space, with its gravel pathways dotted with garden beds and carved stone benches. It was to one of those benches that Harry was headed.

Ravenshire Manor loomed behind him, a rather unimaginative rectangular building of columns and stone. Beyond the gardens, the Kentish fields lay expansive and green during the day, inky black and foreboding in the night. Hidden beyond the trees and carefully designed arrangements of flowers lay the steward’s cottage. It had been designed as a miniature version of the manor house with two stories and its own kitchen garden. It was there that Mina had been born; it was there she had spent the first nine years of her life, kept separate from him and life in the manor house.

So close, and yet a world apart.

A sniffle reached Harry’s ears, and he quickened his pace, his boots crunching along the path in a sound that was almost deafening in the night’s solemnity.

His heart plummeted when he found exactly what he’d feared. Mina sat with her head in her hands, her shoulders heaving as she sobbed. She still wore the same caramel dress from earlier, but the ivory shawl she’d attempted to drape across her shoulders had melted into a puddle around her. She cried in a way he’d never seen her before—not even when her foot had been trodden upon by one of the horses in the stables, and not when one of the Stinson boys had shoved her off one of the plank bridges spanning a culvert between two of the sheep fields. This was not the cry of a physical wound…this was the cry of someone whose heart had been broken.

Immediately, Harry rushed to her and crouched before her. “Mina,” Harry said gently, though there was an urgent undertone. His heart rattled with the desperate need to help mend whatever had been broken. “What has happened?” He took her hands in his, almost too distraught to recognize how easily she wove their fingers together, how warm her bare palm was against his. Almost.

An owl’s eerie cry echoed across the fields. The pleasantly warm night was interrupted by a chilly breeze that made Harry want to remove his shirt and wrap Mina in it, but the last thing he wished to do was release her hand.

Mina sniffed and looked up at him, utter devastation in her glistening eyes and the trembling of her full lower lip.

“Has someone caused you harm?” he demanded. Harry was clumsy and had always proven to be a horrendous shot, but he would fight in a thousand duels for this woman, even if he gave his life each time.

Her lips parted, but no sound came forth.

She had to moisten them and try twice more before she murmured the words that caused Harry’s entire world to crumble down around him for the second time in his relatively short life: “I am to be married next month. Papa has arranged it all.”

CHAPTER 3

It was true that Mina’s world had tilted on its axis when her father had revealed that he’d been quietly arranging a match for her with the son of an old schoolmate of his, but there had been an unreality about it until she’d spoken the words aloud to Harry.

Harry.

The spindly little boy who she had first encountered all those years ago and taken beneath her wing; now, the young man whom she was grateful each and every day to have in her life. Once she’d worked her way past the shy, quiet exterior, she uncovered a playful personality, a sincerity, and an earnestness that—even in her youth—she knew was rare in the world. Since their first meeting, he had become the first person to whom she ran when there was trouble; he was the one she counted on to help extricate herself from one of her many scrapes. He’d fished her from the lake when she’d fallen in while trying to untangle her fishing line, and then he’d absorbed the blame for her sodden appearance by saying he’d tripped and knocked into her. He’d protected her from the Stinson boys’ teasing and assisted her in her creative retribution of stealing and freezing their boots in the trough after they’d lain in wait by the stables to pelt her with snowballs.

This situation, however, was something she doubted Harry could help her out of.

According to Mina’s father, the marriage contract was finalized; the date had been selected, and all the arrangements had been made.

When questioned as to why he’d not considered so much as mentioning the possibility of an arrangement to Mina, her father had simply replied, “Why, I thought you would be happy, my dear.”

Rather than enrage her further, the response had deflated her. She adored Papa and had always looked at him as if he’d hung the very moon and stars. No matter how she abhorred spending endless hours toiling away with numbers and ledgers, she reveled in his praise and his admiration whenever she solved a particularly complex problem or caught something he had missed. She’d acquiesced to his lessons and his tutelage because she loved him. Now, it seemed that love was more one-sided than she’d believed…for what loving father signed away his daughter’s life without a single word to her about it?

Why did he trust her judgment when it came to assisting him in his duties as steward, but not to have a say in her own future?