Page 59 of Hold Me Fast
The unexpected memory made him chuckle. “I learned my best curse words from him,” he said.
Her smile faded. “Jowan, why are you upset? Do you not wish to be my friend?”
Exasperated all over again, he snapped back, “I wish to be your husband and your lover.”
Tamsyn gaped at him. “You do? Still?”
He couldn’t believe she said that. “What did you think I was about? I’ve been courting you for months!”
“But you have never even tried to kiss me,” she replied.
It was the mystified tone that shredded the last of his self-control. If it was a kiss she wanted, then a kiss is what she would have. He grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her to him, but all his indignation eased as his lips touched hers, and he gentled the kiss, his lips firm but tender.
She opened beneath him, her tongue darting out to taste him, and his hands left her shoulders and pulled her closer. Her arms went around his waist, and she plastered her body to his, and an endless moment passed as their tongues explored one another and so did their hands.
It wasn’t until he felt her hands pulling his shirt from his trousers that he remembered they were standing on a lookout above the village, where anyone could see them. Reluctantly, his lips attempting to cling, he pulled back.
“The village,” he panted.
“Oh! I forgot.” Tamsyn cast a glance in that direction, and Jowan’s ego celebrated the fact that his kiss had made her forget their surroundings.
“I was waiting to be invited,” he told her.
“I beg your pardon?”
“The kiss. You said I never even tried to kiss you, but I was waiting to be invited. Tamsyn, you couldn’t control what has happened to you over the years, and you didn’t need another male forcing their desires on you. If my decision to let you take the lead on anything physical gave you the impression I had stopped wanting you to be my wife, then I am sorry. But I am not sorry you were upset I didn’t kiss you.” Jowan was, in fact, decidedly smug about that last fact, and about how enthusiastically she had responded when he did kiss her.
“I never said I was upset,” she pointed out. She had taken the hand he had offered her and was walking with him along the path into the downs. There was a spot just a few minutes’ walk away that would be perfect to continue that kiss.
“You implied it,” he told her.
She punched him, chuckling, and he mimed injury, pleased to clown to defuse the sensitive emotional fireworks he’d suddenly stumbled into. Tamsyn, though, tugged him directly back into the line of fire.
“Surely, Jowan, you do not still want me as your wife. Not after the hearing. The things you must have learned! I can bring only scandal to the Trethewey name.”
They were there. He tugged her hand and led her onto a poorly marked and little trod path, around a small grove of trees, and into a hollow where the ruin of a cottage stood, with no roof and only two walls.
There, hidden from the path and sheltered from the wind, he took her back into his arms. “What do I care for what they say in London? Here in St Tetha, you are the villagers’ darling—their Cornish Lark. There’s not a man or a woman with a word to say against you. As for the gentlefolk, Lady Trentwood accepts you, and she sets the example for everyone within a range of thirty miles.”
He kissed her nose. “Your scandal, as you call it, though I say it was Coombe’s scandal… Be that as it may, the scandal has nothing to do with us. I love you, Tamsyn, and if you will not have me for your husband, I shall wait until you change your mind. And yes, I know that is putting pressure on you, but what am I to do? Your claim of scandal as a bar to our match is unfair.”
“But I am thinking of you!” Tamsyn objected.
He kissed her again, a quick peck on the lips. “You are thinkingforme, which is quite a different thing. I am perfectly capable of thinking for myself, my love. Have you any other objections to the match?”
She frowned. “You do not mind about the scandal?” she asked.
“Haven’t I just said so?”
“I might be barren,” Tamsyn blurted. “I quickened only once in five years, and I did not carry that baby past the early stages.”
Objection number two. That one was no harder than the first.“I am sorry for your loss, Tamsyn, but I will not allow that to come between us. I want you for my lover, my partner, my friend, my wife. If God sends us children, I will welcome them, but I am not looking for a broodmare.”
“You are a baronet,” she pointed out. “You need an heir.”
“Iama baronet,” Jowan agreed and bent to kiss her neck, just under her ear. “I undoubtedly have an heir. In fact, I do. A distant cousin over Truro way. And if he or one of his children inherit, it won’t matter to me. I will have made provision for you as I have already made provision for Bran and his family. That’s the only thing I care about.”
She leaned back out of his reach just as he was going to see whether the other side of her neck was as delectable.
