“Well, sometimes—that last bit about Grayson. But I’m attempting to be serious here, John. I’m…I’m an unnatural sister, an unnatural aunt. I’ve been trying all day long to work up even a single tear over Charlton and the boys, and I simply can’t manage it.”
“You didn’t love them?”
“No, no, of course I loved them. One doesn’t have much choice in that, seeing as we’re related. The question is, did I like them? And I didn’t.”
John kept moving toward the tall thick shrubbery that he was sure concealed the herb garden. “They weren’t likeable?”
“I suppose that would depend on whom you applied to for their opinion. Their friends seemed to like them well enough.”
“And did you like their friends?”
They stopped at a slatted wooden gate and John opened it. “No, I didn’t. Why would you ask that?”
He ceremoniously bowed her through the entrance to the herb garden, where they were immediately cast in the shade of the towering evergreens. “I don’t know. It simply occurred to me that, if you didn’t care for the people who cared for them, then perhaps the only reason you cared for your brother and nephews at all was because of an accident of birth. We can’t choose our relatives,
Emmaline. Only our friends.”
“You’re only trying to make me feel less guilty.”
“I know,” he said, leading her to a curved stone bench at the center of the small garden. “Am I succeeding?”
She sat down, gracefully arranging her skirts around her, and looked at him. “Why, yes, I believe you are. Charlton and his sons are dead, and I’m sorry they didn’t lead better lives while they had the chance. I think I could weep for that.”
He joined her on the bench. “Now?”
Emmaline was slowly twirling the rose stem between her fingers, and looked up at him in some confusion. “Pardon me? Now what?”
“I was asking if you were going to weep now,” he explained, biting back a smile.
“Oh. Oh, no, I don’t think so. But at the service it will be better if I don’t disappoint Vicar Wooten. So then I shall think about what might have been.” She sighed. “What might have been is always so sad, isn’t it? What we could have done, what we should have done. What we missed because we didn’t dare to—”
John brought his mouth down on hers, cutting off any chance that either of them would ever look back at this moment and think, If only.
He pulled back slightly, smiling into her eyes. “I’m sorry, I couldn’t seem to resist. In fact, I still can’t…”
This time when he kissed her he also slid his arms around her, pulling her closer against his chest. She responded by sliding her arms around his back, signaling without words that she didn’t dislike what he was doing to her.
What she was doing to him.
A kiss. A simple kiss. And yet his world was tilting on its axis. He prodded at her with his tongue, and she responded by opening her mouth to him, and the flame she had lit inside him the first time he’d seen her threatened to consume him.
He kissed her hair, her perfect shell-like ear, her throat. He heard her quick intake of breath as he moved his hands forward, to her rib cage…and then slowly slid them upward, to cup her firm breasts.
“John…” she breathed, but not in protest, as she still held him tightly, her head tipped back as he dared to press his lips against her bare flesh above the neckline of her gown.
Her mourning gown.
Christ!
He took her hands in his and raised her to her feet, not letting go of her as he looked deeply into her eyes. “I’m sorry. I had no right…”
“You were not lacking an invitation, Captain Alastair,” Emmaline told him quietly, shifting her gaze to the ground at her feet. “Shall we just put this down to an aging spinster feeling reckless, even desperate, on the event of her twenty-eighth birthday?”
“I don’t think so, no. Not unless we explain my behavior with the notion that I’ve been too long at sea, and haven’t seen a woman in months and months, so that any woman will do. You’re not that old, Emmaline, and I’m not that young.”
She smiled weakly and pulled one hand free, turning so that they could retrace their steps to the house. “You’ve quite the way with words, or else I’m eager to be convinced.”
She shivered then, only slightly, as the setting sun had slipped behind a blanket of thick clouds, and John slipped his arm around her shoulders, pulling her closer beside him as they walked along the path.