“I know.”
There was both tension and meaning in those words, but she couldn’t fathom the latter. And doing so was suddenly extremely important. “So”—airily, she waved a hand—“why pull back? Why stop halfway through the act?”
His lips tightened. Several fraught seconds passed, then he stated, “Because we’ve reached the point of no return. There is no going further.” He glanced sidelong at her and met her eyes; his eyes were darker, his gaze more intense. “Not unless you’re willing to consider marrying me.”
Genuinely flabbergasted, she opened her eyes wide. “Marryingyou?” She added the first words that popped into her head. “I’m Miss Flibbertigibbet, remember. No sane gentleman should want to marry me.”
His jaw tightened, and his gaze held hers.
Nicholas bit back the words:If that’s so, then I must be insane. Or at the very least, I’ve lost my mind.
Adriana Sommerville was not the type of lady to whom it was safe to hand such a revealing confession.
She’d driven him to distraction, to the point where he’d been putty in her hands—or rather to where he’d been so blindsided by lust and longing and need that he’d fallen in with her direction. He’d been on the cusp of surrendering—to her, to instinct, passion, and a well-nigh overwhelming need—and claiming her, in the grass by a babbling brook no less, when sledgehammer-like, reality had hit him.
If they became lovers without any stated understanding between them, when they found The Barbarian and completed the sale and he rode away…he had no guarantee that she wouldn’t blithely wave him off, let him go, and he would never see her again.
The realization that had fallen like a ton weight on him was that such an outcome would be…something he couldn’t easily live with.
When it came to it, he had no idea what she was thinking—ifshe’d even been thinking when she’d initiated this interlude by coming to find him in the stable. He had no real insight into how she saw him. If she had any vision of them beyond them being just incidental lovers.
Looking into her big blue eyes, all he could see was genuine surprise tinged with disbelief.
He shifted his gaze back to the sky. “I’m not like the gentlemen you met in London. I can promise you I’m not interested in your birth, dowry, or connections.”
“No?”
“Not in the slightest. As for the rest, however…”
“My face and…the rest of me?”
He nodded. “Those definitely have appeal.”
She huffed out a laugh.
After a moment, she turned her head and looked upward as well. “Is it normal to feel so relaxed?”
Speak for yourself. “For you—the female in this pairing—yes.”
“Hmm. I wish to put on the record that the circumstance of you not feeling equally relaxed is due to your own decision.”
He grunted.
“Still…” With a sinuous movement, she wriggled in the grass. “I suppose that explains this…languid feeling.” She spread her arms, holding them up to either side, wrists limp, one hanging over him. “Boneless. I feel boneless.”
She was killing him. He shut his lips on several revealing retorts and clung to silence. Waiting; when it came to her, he’d discovered that he needed an abundance of patience.
Sure enough, eventually, she murmured, “‘Consider marrying you.’ What, precisely, do you mean by that?”
His heart leapt. He couldn’t remember it ever doing so before.Good Lord! I need to be careful.
“I mean,” he replied, “that given who we are—you a Sommerville, me a Cynster—becoming lovers is not an option. A short-lived dalliance—or even a long-lived one—is not in our cards.”
She turned her head his way, and he felt her frowning gaze.
After a moment of studying his unrevealing profile, Addie clarified, “So it’s marriage or nothing?”
Several seconds passed before he replied, “It’s going forward as friends or becoming lovers with the understanding that marriage is our ultimate destination.” He turned his head and met her gaze. “Your choice.”
