Page 94 of A Stolen Heart

“It is the only answer.” Alexandra tried to keep her voice steady. “It will nip the scandal in the bud.”

“So will marrying me.”

“That is a rather large sacrifice on both our parts, don’t you think, for being forced to spend the night together by a freak accident?”

He crossed the room to her, his eyes boring into hers. “It was more than that. What they are whispering is exactly true. You were in my bed. We made love.”

Alexandra found it difficult to breathe. Her knees trembled, and she was afraid she might embarrass them both by slumping against him.

“It isn’t as if I were a naïve maiden,” she told him shakily. “I went into it with my eyes open.”

Her eyes strayed to his lips. She remembered how they had felt against hers. The truth was that she wanted to feel them again. Brazenly, right here in the drawing room in the middle of the morning, she wanted him to pull her into his arms and kiss her.

“Dammit! You were a maiden, naïve or not. Why are you so stubborn? Why won’t you marry me?”

Because you haven’t said you love me, she wanted to cry, but she held back the words. Words of love were no good if they were forced.

“You are a British lord. You can scarcely marry an American nobody.”

“I can do whatever I please. I usually do.”

“I have told you about my mother,” Alexandra reminded him stiffly.

“Yes. What does that matter?”

“You think your family would want you to marry someone with madness in her family?”

“She is probably no madder than a good number of peers I’ve met. Every noble family has one or two skeletons in their closet. Mrs. Ward would probably be considered merely an eccentric.”

“Don’t be flip. She is…peculiar in her actions and her words. People would be bound to notice, and they would comment on it.”

“I believe I have told you how little public opinion means to me.”

“But you have to think about the future—your heirs.”

“I am thinking about the future.” The expression in his eyes sent heat spreading through Alexandra’s loins. “You are the woman I want to have heirs with. I know you, Alexandra, and I see little chance that you could have a child who was not quite sane.”

Alexandra turned away, breaking the spell his eyes cast on her. “No. Please stop.”

“I won’t,” he replied. “Besides, your reason is most likely invalid, anyway. The way things look right now, Mrs. Ward probably isn’t even your mother, so it doesn’t really matter whether she is wholly sane or not.”

“But we don’t know!”

“There are many things we don’t know. We cannot foretell the future. But we cannot live our lives in terror that something bad might happen.”

He started toward her again, but much to Alexandra’s relief, her aunt walked into the room at that point, and Alexandra seized the opportunity to flee.

THERE WERE NO UNTOWARD EVENTS over the next two days. No one tried to break in; there were no fights; no more ragamuffins came knocking on the door wanting to give them information.

However, Alexandra found the atmosphere anything but tranquil. It was extremely unsettling to have Sebastian around all the time. It was not that he irritated her nerves, for she discovered that he was surprisingly companionable. Nor was it that he bored her, for he was ever an interesting conversationalist. But she could not be easy. His constant presence was a reminder to her of the night they had shared—and of the many more nights they could share, if only she gave up her scruples.

But she refused to go into a one-sided marriage, where she loved and he did not, and Sebastian was maddeningly silent on the matter of love. Sometimes he tried to persuade her with reasoned arguments about the ruination of her reputation. Other times he teased her, laughingly reminding her of what a catch he was on the marriage mart. Now and then he lapsed into a brooding silence, watching her. And, far too often for her peace of mind, he looked at her with hot, hungry eyes or slipped behind her in one of the corridors and planted a kiss upon her neck or ear or cheek, and asked her in a husky voice when she would give in to him.

But never once did he say that she was the love of his life, that he could not live without her. Alexandra supposed it was a foolish thing to expect, especially given the businesslike transactions that British noble marriages seemed to be. But she could not help it. She wanted a marriage of passion, not reason. She wanted a husband who loved her beyond all else, the way her father had loved her mother.

She spent an extra amount of time in her mother’s room, relieving Willa and Aunt Hortense. At least Sebastian did not disturb her there. But sitting alone with her silent mother, she found that she could not escape her thoughts, and those invariably returned to the night of love she and Sebastian had shared.

One afternoon she was sitting beside her mother, her hand clasping Rhea’s, talking to her about her indecision regarding Sebastian, when she felt her mother’s hand close around hers.