He didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t an impulse designed to make her more likely to climb into his bed. It was the truth. He wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake sense into her. He wanted to tell her again and again, until she believed him. Until she saw it herself. But it wasn’t what she wanted.
And he wanted her to have everything she wanted. Forever.
Good God. Forever.
The word curled around him, settling strangely in his chest as he watched her, and he reached for her hand, taking it once more. She allowed it. “Look at me, Sophie.”
She did, and he could see the wariness in her eyes.
One day, he’d have the head of the person who made her feel anything less than the beauty she was. “I’m not going to tell you you’re beautiful.”
Wariness turned to relief and something else that looked like sadness; there, then gone so quickly that he couldn’t be sure.
He lifted her hand to his lips, pressing a kiss to her knuckles. “Let me be clear. That doesn’t mean that I don’t fully intend for you to leave Lyne Castle believing that you are quite beautiful.”
She blushed and looked away.
“There will come a day when I tell you that and you don’t look away.”
She looked back. “You plan to do quick work, then?”
“Why quick?”
“I am leaving when my father arrives,” she replied, and the words had more impact than he would have imagined. “You should be happy with that, frankly, as they’d have you at the altar faster than you could imagine if they knew our arrangement.”
He didn’t want her leaving. He wanted her here.
Forever.
Not forever. Forever was impossible. Forever with Sophie would mean love. She wouldn’t be happy without it. Without all its bits and pieces. And love was not in his cards.
Not ever.
Not even with this woman, who somehow grew more perfect each day with her smart mouth and her smarter mind and her laugh that made him want to spend the rest of his life hearing it. More perfect, despite his being an utter ass around her.
“I’ve treated you abominably,” he said.
She shook her head, and he pulled her back to his lap. “You saved my life,” she said softly, letting him gather her close.
“I made you sad,” he whispered at her temple, to the wisps of brown hair that had come loose there. Sad was such a simple, damaging word. It meant so much more than its elaborate cousins. He’d hurt her, and she’d soldiered through.
“I have been sad before, my lord. I will be sad again.”
He hated that. “I wish I could take it all back.”
She smiled. “You cannot. We are here. Your father and the staff believe we are betrothed, as does the entire population of Mossband. And that does not include the people strewn about the countryside who believe we are married. And named Matthew.”
He’d made a hash of it, hadn’t he?
“If you think on it,” she continued, “if I were attempting to land you in the parson’s noose, I’ve done a remarkable job of it.”
He laughed at the old-fashioned phrase. “The parson’s noose?”
“Very ominous.”
“Not ominous,” he said. “Simply not for me.”
His words shifted the mood, and they both grew serious. He could see the question in her eyes, unspoken. Why?
Show me, she’d asked him earlier, when he’d told her she was too good for this place. And he ached to do just that. To tell someone why he was the man he was. To share his past.
He could tell her.
He could show her.
He tangled his fingers in hers, his thumb stroking across her soft skin, his gaze on a collection of little brown freckles that marked the base of her hand. “I left when I was eighteen.”
She stilled in his lap, but did not speak. Did not rush him for fear that he would change his mind, and there was nothing in the world she wanted more in that moment than for him to continue.
He did. “I was home from school for the summer. Like any boy of my age, I hated being here in the quiet. I wanted to spend the summer drinking and—”
She smiled. “You don’t need to hide what eighteen-year-old boys wish they were doing.”
The dimple in his right cheek flashed. “What do you know about eighteen-year-old boys?”
“Enough to know that drinking isn’t the worst thing you wished to do that summer.”
“I was too old to fish in the river and while away the days.”
She imagined him younger, leaner, his long body not quite what it was now, his face freer of the character it held now. Handsome, but nothing like he was now. The bones of the man he would become. Her smile widened as she settled into his arms. “I should like to have fished with you.”
He looked at her, surprised. “I’ll take you.”
“Aren’t you too old for it, now?” she teased.
He shook his head. “Now I’m old enough to know that whiling away the days is not such a horrible way to spend one’s time.” He paused. “Particularly with the right companion.”
Did he refer to her? She’d like to fish with him. She’d like him to build a fire on the banks of the river and spend the evening telling her about his life as it grew dark around them.
She warmed at the impossible thought.
“She was a milkmaid,” he said with a little disbelieving laugh, lost in thought. “A milkmaid. As though we all lived in a painting by a Dutch master. Her father ran the dairy on the estate to the east, and she worked with the cows.”