“I will marry you,” Annabel whispered. And then she turned and walked from the room and up the stairs, quickly. Her hand was clenched so hard on the railing that she couldn’t fall down, even though her knees were liquid. But she had to ask. So halfway up the stairs she turned and looked down at Ewan. He stood below her, and for a second she thought she caught a look of desolation in his eyes, but she must have been wrong.

“Don’t you want me to—” She broke off. And started again. There had been so much honesty between them, and at the end it came down to one last question.

“Do you love me?”

Her question hung in the damp night air as if it were shouted. And yet she’d only whispered it, from the despair in her heart.

He stared up at her. “I told you the same, in the Kettles’ cottage. I think we would make a strong marriage. You desire me, and I feel the same for you.”

“You’re confusing desire and love,” she said, watching him. “They are not the same.”

“I do love you. I feel near to murder at the idea of you marrying another man, and that’s the truth of the matter.”

Annabel said the first words that came to mind. “Desire is bloody, perjured, full of blame.”

Ewan walked up the steps to her. “Is that poetry?” he asked, when he was next to her.

“Yes.”

“I don’t like the sound of it. There’s something nasty about that poet.”

“It’s Shakespeare,” Annabel said.

Ewan obviously dismissed Shakespeare as a lost cause. “We would be happy together,” he said. “I will never be poor,” he said. “That is important to you.”

True, all true.

“We will have an excellent marriage.”

Annabel forced a smile to her lips. She walked to the top of the stairs and turned left, going to the master bedchamber. She fell onto the bed without washing, in her chemise, without even summoning her maid.

The room was whirling around her. She’d known inside that she, Annabel Essex, was not the sort of woman with whom men fell in love. She was the sort with whom men fell into desire, and that’s what Ewan felt for her: desire.

She should be happy. Freedom lay before her: freedom to return to London and find a rich Englishman, a sleek, practical man who would understand the limitations of their obligations to each other. Who wouldn’t confuse her with talk of his soul or—worse—her soul.

Except she couldn’t leave Ewan. She wanted his kisses, the way he kissed her as if he were starving, as if they hadn’t already kissed so much that her lips were bruised. All those times when he had rocked against her gently, just a reminder. And she had melted against him and relished the rasp of his breathing, and the way he was about to pull his mouth away—because she knew before he did it.

Perhaps it would be enough…he thought it was enough.

But even though her heart beat quickly at the memories of his kisses, Annabel didn’t agree with Ewan. All those years when she thought it would be enough to trade a man’s desire for marriage, for security and for money…

Now she found it wasn’t. Not at all.

She wanted something quite different.

She fell asleep in the middle of a sob.

Thirty-one

Annabel woke to the sound of her door handle turning. Her eyes felt as if they were glued to her eyelids, but she opened them to find that Josie was scrambling onto the bottom of the bed and chattering to Imogen, who had just slipped under the covers.

“When I get married,” Josie was saying, “I want to marry a man just like Ardmore. I want a castle and a hundred servants.” She turned to Annabel. “I know you don’t like Scotland, Annabel, but I love it. I can’t imagine wanting to stay in England. Do you think that perhaps Ardmore could wait to find a wife until next season, when I come out?”“Don’t be ridiculous,” Annabel said, pushing up in the bed. Her head was pounding.

“You look awful,” Josie said. “Didn’t you sleep well? I was listening for footsteps outside my room all night long.” She gave a delicious shiver.

“I told you that you’ve been reading too many novels,” Imogen observed, propping herself up on the pillows next to Annabel.

“And I told you that there’s a great deal of helpful guidance in them,” Josie told her. “If this were a novel, Ardmore would turn out to be evil to the core. I know all the signs.”

“And those are?” Imogen asked.

Annabel couldn’t bring herself to even wish her sisters good morning. She just wished they’d leave. She had to talk to Ewan. She had to convince him of—

Of something important.

“Well, for one thing,” Josie said, “villains all have black hair. And they stalk about, tossing their hair in the wind.”

“Ardmore has reddish hair,” Imogen put in. “But it’s long enough to toss.”

“If he were French, we would know for certain,” Josie said.

“He’s not perfidious!” Annabel couldn’t help it; she snapped at Josie.

“That’s what you’re bound to think,” Josie replied, “because you haven’t married him. If Ardmore has a guilty secret, he’d talk about it only in his sleep. That’s why heroines never find out what their husbands are like until it’s too late. They wake up in the middle of the night and hear their husband talking like this.” Josie put her hands up to her hair and rolled her eyes to the ceiling. “Oooooo…Marguerite…I cannot forget her cries as she fell over the cliff…Oooooooo!”

She put down her hands and turned to Annabel. “I don’t suppose you know whether Ardmore talks in his sleep?”

“I have no idea,” Annabel lied.

“You must admit that this castle has all the elements of a novel, complete with a mad wife in the attic.”

“Making a joke of poor Rosy is a graceless thing to do, Josie.”

“All right,” Josie sighed. “I don’t mean to be cruel. I would love to live here, and I wouldn’t even mind Rosy, although her manners would certainly cut down on visitors.”

“We should all take this as a lesson,” Imogen said with a slightly pompous tone. “Just because a man has a title and a castle doesn’t mean he’s a tenable choice for matrimony.”

Josie nudged Annabel’s foot. “This is your cue to lecture us on appropriate reasons for marriage.”

But Annabel was imagining Ewan marrying someone else and her heart was pounding miserably.

“You can’t have forgotten all those lectures you gave us last year about marrying for practical reasons and not for love.” Josie raised her voice to a hectoring level and said: “The best marriages are those between levelheaded persons, entered into for levelheaded reasons and with a reasonable degree of confidence in compatibility.”

“Yes, of course,” Annabel said, twisting the sheet around her finger.

“You know,” Imogen said, “we haven’t even asked what your journey here was like, Annabel. How was it?”

“Fine. Quite—quite pleasant, really.”

Annabel could feel Imogen staring at her.

“Annabel?”

“Yes?”