“Don’t feel guilty about it.”
“But to do that to you after you came to see if I was all right . . . and it was no accident that I seduced you, Cin—it was deliberate—and you didn’t even know what you were doing—”
“I knew what I was doing,” she said calmly, surprising him into silence. “No one forced me to go out there alone to see you. And as for what happened after that . . . I wasn’t fighting you. I wanted you. If it hadn’t happened then, it would have happened some other time.”
“You’re making me regret not having compromised you during those two days after we first met. I would have, with any encouragement at all.”
“Rascal. I never knew when you were going to sneak around the corner and surprise me in my pantalets.”
“I thought about how you looked in those pantalets and my shirt every time I saw you after that.”
“I could tell.” Lucy smiled in the darkness. “Afterwards you always looked at me in a way that made me blush, and I couldn’t help remembering the time we’d spent alone together. But even if I’d never seen you again, I would never have forgotten those two days. And I think I would have always wondered what it might have been like with you. Would you have wondered, too?”
“It would have haunted me for the rest of my life.”
Lucy slid her arms around his neck and whispered against his mouth. “Isn’t it strange, how fate brought us together?”
“Don’t give fate too much credit for us being together, honey. I wanted you from the beginning. And some men always find a way to get what they want—even if fate doesn’t lend them a hand.”
She believed him. Heath Rayne was that kind of man.
Author’s Note
The burning of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s home occurred in 1872, three years after the date used in Love, Come to Me. By Emerson’s own accounting, all of his books and manuscripts were saved by the men of Concord, who ran into the smoke-filled house to retrieve his work, despite the danger of falling timbers. After taking a trip abroad with his daughter, Emerson returned to Concord to find that his friends had rebuilt the house for him exactly as it had once been.
Although the Boston Examiner is a fictitious newspaper, a Boston newspaper was created in 1872 that eventually did challenge the long-established supremacy of the Boston Herald. Under the innovative direction of the young Chas. H. Taylor, the Boston Globe became a paper noted for its progressiveness and the contributions it made to the development of modern journalism.
The Era of Reconstruction was largely considered to be closed with the election of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876 and the withdrawal of the last federal troops from the South.
Lisa Kleypas, Love, Come to Me
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