She gave him a quick smile. “In my own defense, and looking back in time, there was no pleasing Papa.” A wistful expression passed briefly across her face. “No matter what I did, I was never good enough.”
“Why not?”
She grimaced. “I should have been born a boy.”
He thought of the way she’d looked in those breeches, the beauty of her naked on the bed, the eagerness with which she’d made love to him, and said firmly, “Now there I have to disagree.”
She gave him a half smile. “Very gallant, sir. But Papa preferred Perlita. She is very pretty, very feminine.” She spoke lightly, but there was real pain underneath.
Luke frowned. Again, that comment that she wasn’t pretty. It was partly true—she wasn’t what the world called pretty—but that was far from the whole story. Her features were too bold, too unconventional for mere prettiness, but she had the kind of looks that compelled a man to stare. Luke could hardly drag his eyes away from her.
“As for prettiness,” he began.
She cut him off. “Please don’t offer me empty compliments,” she said briskly. “I know what I look like, and I cannot change it.”
“But—”
“No.” She gave him a fierce look.
A defensive look, he saw. It was a touchy subject. Why, he didn’t understand, but he could appreciate touchy subjects. He had a few himself. But there was more than one way to storm a battlement. Though now was not the moment.
“So as a child you were very naughty?”
She gave a gurgle of laughter. “Oh, I like the ‘as a child.’ For that I thank you, even if you have probably perjured your soul. But the truth is, as a child I was painfully good. I was so hungry for Papa’s approval. But it never did me any good. He could not see me, I think. Only the Mama in me, and he did not love Mama.” Again that wistful expression, then she shook her head, as if to clear it of unhappy memories, and went on, “And in the convent, everyone there was trying to please God in every way, and He never showed any approval, either. So in the end I decided not to try to please anyone, but to do what I thought was right, myself.”She added with a mischievous look, “That’s what you get for leaving me there for eight years.”
Luke laughed. “Minx. So if you run me ragged, it’s my own fault?”
“Exactly.” She smiled. “It’s lovely to hear you laugh, Luke. For a while there I thought you’d forgotten how.”
Eleven
They rode in silence for some miles, then stopped beside a stream for lunch. The landlady had loaded them up with food for their journey: wine, bread, ham, thick wedges of pepper and potato omelette, half a chicken, and some oranges. They attacked the feast with zeal and, afterward, lay in the sun, soaking it up.
Luke had decreed they’d move on in half an hour. Now he regretted saying so.
Isabella lay on her back in the grass, one knee bent, the other leg resting across it in a boyish pose. Her breeches and boots were clearly visible, but since there was nobody else to see, Luke didn’t mind.
In fact, he wouldn’t mind baring a little more of her. He got up, stretched, and sat down beside her.
“If you were any kind of civilized man, we could have a proper siesta,” Isabella murmured sleepily.
“No rest for the wicked,” he murmured, watching her leg rock slowly back and forth. He remembered the way she’d trembled at his touch.
He rolled over onto his front, ending up lying thigh to thigh with her. “I know something better than a siesta,” he murmured and stretched a lazy hand toward the buttons of her jerkin.
She pushed his hand off and moved a little farther away.
Shy, Luke thought. Perhaps it was too soon in the marriage to think about making love in the open air. “Tell me about the breeches.”
“What about them?”
“You said Reverend Mother let you outside the convent dressed as a boy. Why?”
She let out a huff of amusement. “She didn’t precisely let me, not at first.” She wriggled around so they were facing each other and regarded him with a look of rueful mischief he was beginning to recognize. “I used to sneak out.”
His lips twitched. “Why do I find myself strangely unsurprised?”
She wrinkled her nose. “Well, I hate the feeling of being shut in. And the convent was built to keep people out, not keep them in—the nunswantto be there. And some of the girls who are educated there would make valuable hostages. So it’s not a prison. But it was for me.”
