Hello Stranger (The Ravenels, #4)

by Lisa Kleypas

London was readying for the night, adorning itself with strands of lights, humming in anticipation of sin and pleasure.

There’s nothing convenient about joining your life to another person’s. Marriage is a sack race: you may find a way to hop together toward the finish line, but you would still reach it more easily without the sack.” “Then why do it at all?” “Our existence, even our intellect, hangs upon love—without it, we would be no more than stock and stones.”

Shadows didn’t always harbor fearful things. Sometimes shadows were the only place for a little magic to hide.

“Don’t mistake softness for weakness. Only a strong man can be soft with a woman.”

He would never seem ordinary to me, even if he were ordinary.

A humbling thought occurred to her. When you meet the right man, the list of things you would never do suddenly becomes much shorter.

“There will always be people who say your dreams are impossible. But they can’t stop you, unless you agree with them.”

“The first moment I saw you, I knew you were my share of the world. I’ve always loved you. If I could choose my fate, I’d never be parted from you. Acushla . . . pulse of my heart, breath of my soul . . . there’s nothing on this earth more fair and fine than you. Your shadow on the ground is sunlight to me.”

“You haven’t one romantic bone in your body,” he muttered. That sounded so much like his usual self that Garrett almost smiled. “I reassembled an entire disarticulated skeleton in medical school. There’s no such thing as a romantic bone.”

The flash of his smile was so oddly like Ethan’s that Garrett felt a sharp pang in her chest. Tugging a handkerchief from inside his coat, he came forward to give it to her. Mortified for him to have seen her crying, Garrett wiped her cheeks and eyes, and blew her nose. “How much did you hear?” “Most of it. Sound carries all through this library.” “Do you think Havelock was right?” “About which part?” “That I should make Mr. Ransom comfortable during his last few minutes on earth instead of torturing him with surgery?” “No, you’ve already managed to ruin a moving deathbed scene. I couldn’t wait to hear what came after ‘your shadow on the ground is sunlight to me,’ but then you started giving orders like a drill sergeant. You might as well operate on Ransom: we won’t get any more good lines out of him tonight.”

“Mrs. Abbot, I’m going to the kitchen to wash. You’ll want to warn the housemaids to shield their eyes from the sight of my manly torso.” Kathleen, Lady Trenear, came to Garrett. “Whose housemaids would he be referring to?” she asked dryly. “Ours will be crowding into the scullery to obtain the best possible view.”

“What a specimen,” she heard Ravenel say flippantly. “He has muscles in places I didn’t know there were muscles.”

“Mr. Ravenel, if you don’t stop talking, I will chloroform you and do this by myself.”

What kind of gentleman went outside in the sun for that long with no shirt? Ravenel’s lips quirked as he saw her expression. A twinkle of arrogant amusement appeared in his eyes. “Farmwork,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone. “And I do some quarrying.” “Half naked?” Garrett asked tartly, setting the transfuser on an expanse of clean linen. “I’ve been loading rock into horse carts,” he said. “Which suits my intellectual capacity perfectly. But it’s too hot for a shirt.”

“You may wish to look away, Mr. Ravenel,” Garrett murmured, “and keep making a fist.” “Call me West.” “I don’t know you well enough for that.” “You’re draining the life essence from my median basilic,” he pointed out. “I’m on a first-name basis with women who’ve done far less to me than that. Son of a bitch!”

“You curse so beautifully,” she heard Ravenel say dryly. “Few women can do it with such natural ease.” “I learned at the Sorbonne,” Garrett said with her hand still over her eyes. “You should hear me curse in French.” “I’d rather not, or I might fall in love with you.

He wanted to tell her he’d slipped too far, there was no coming back. But her will was stronger than his weakness.

“If you like, I’ll try to make you presentable before Dr. Gibson sees you. Before you refuse, you should know that your beard is like steel-brush wire, and you smell like an Angora goat—and I know whereof I speak. If you’d prefer someone other than me to spruce you up, I suppose I could sterilize my valet. Although I’m not certain he’d hold still for it.”

“Better yet if she were educated. A sense of humor would be icing on the cake. Red hair isn’t a requirement, but I do have a fatal weakness for it.”