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June 26 - July 4, 2022
He sat no closer to her than Mather did, but Beth’s awareness of him screamed at her. She could feel his hard knee against her skirts, the firm pressure of his thumb on her hand, the weight of his not-stare.
A woman wouldn’t be comfortable with this man, she thought with a shiver. There would be drama aplenty. She sensed that in the restlessness of his body, the large, warm hand that gripped her own, the eyes that wouldn’t quite meet hers. Should she pity the woman those eyes finally rested on? Or envy her?
“I wouldn’t expect love from you. I can’t love you back.” Beth plied her fan to her hot face, her heart stumbling. “Hardly flattering, my lord, for a woman to hear a man won’t fall in love with her. She likes to believe she will be the center of his abject devotion.” Mather had said he’d be devoted. The crumpled letter burned her again. “Not won’t. I can’t love you.” “I beg your pardon?” She’d been using the phrase so often tonight. “I am incapable of love. I will not offer it to you.”
She was like rare porcelain, he thought, delicate beauty with a core of steel. Cheap porcelain crumbled to dust or shattered, but the best pieces survived until they reached the hands of a collector who would care for them.
“Never mind. You are a rogue and a scoundrel, and I love every single second of it.”
He would soon arrange it so he never had to leave. He’d marry her for a very basic reason: to have her with him every night, every day, every afternoon, and every time in between. He walked down the boulevard, something in him awakening and breaking free.
“Desire is part of it,” she said slowly. “The love for another’s body. But also love for their heart and their mind, and for all the silly things they do, no matter how absurd. Your world brightens when they walk into a room, dims when they leave it again. You want to be with the beloved so you can see him and touch him and hear his voice, but you want his happiness as well. It’s selfish, but not entirely so.”
Ian cannot do something so simple as hold a woman’s hand. He moves his thumb up my wrist and under my glove, finding points that shoot wild heat through my body. He caresses the inside of my palm with soft fingers, and then he threads his fingers through mine and holds hard, as though teaching me that my hand belongs there with his.
“We don’t fit in, you and me,” he said. “We’re both oddities no one knows what to do with. But we fit together.” He took her hand, pressed her palm to his, then laced their fingers through each other’s. “We fit.”
“Is this what love feels like?” he whispered to her. “I don’t like it, my Beth. It hurts too much.”
“All of us are mad in some way,” Ian said. “I have a memory that won’t let go of details. Hart is obsessed with politics and money. Cameron is a genius with horses, and Mac paints like a god. You find out details on your cases that others miss. You are obsessed with justice and getting everything you think is coming to you. We all have our madness. Mine is just the most obvious.”
