Beauty Tempts the Beast (Sins for All Seasons #6) - Lorraine Heath Page 0,118

hat, and gloves. “I don’t know if I’ll ever feel completely comfortable with it all.”

“You will.”

What he did know was that it would all be easier with her at his side. He skimmed his fingers up and down her arm. “They want me to go back to Scotland with them. For a few weeks, so they can show me around and introduce me to my other family.” He still wasn’t accustomed to the fact that he had another family. Uncles, aunts, and cousins who were anxious to meet him. “You need to tell me when and where you want that second proposal because I want us to be officially betrothed when you go with me.”

She went still, so very still. It was uncanny, the way he could detect the smallest of changes in her, especially when something was amiss. “Thea?”

She unfurled herself from around him and pushed herself up, bringing the sheet with her so the most delectable parts of her were covered. “I can’t marry you now.”

As his heart slammed almost painfully against his ribs, he shoved himself up to a sitting position. “What do you mean you can’t marry me now?”

“You are part of the aristocracy.”

“Which you wanted to return to. You will return to it with me.”

Tears welled in her eyes. She gave her head a small shake. “I can’t. It wouldn’t be fair to you. It wouldn’t be fair to your parents.”

He slapped his hand against the headboard. The sting assured him that he was awake, hadn’t fallen asleep and succumbed to some nightmare. “Explain how marrying the woman I love—more than life—would be unfair to me.”

She dashed at the tears that rolled onto her cheeks. Blinked, blinked, blinked. Cleared her throat. When she once again looked at him, not a tear was to be found. “You’re going to have a difficult enough time being accepted because people know you as a Trewlove, not a Campbell. Ben, I’d just be a liability. No one would look favorably on you if you married the daughter of a traitor.”

“I don’t give a bloody damn. I love you, Thea.”

“I love you. And that’s the reason I can’t marry you.”

He shot out of the bed, crossed over to where his trousers rested on the floor, and jerked them on. He couldn’t have this conversation in the nude. Grabbing his shirt, he tossed it at her. “Put that on.”

Because neither could he have this conversation with her in the nude or in that bloody corset.

Pacing, he fought to gather his thoughts. He heard the bed creak. Glancing over, he saw her sitting on the edge of it and refused to acknowledge how adorable she looked with his shirt swallowing her. “We can make this work.”

“We can’t. You don’t know Society. I do.”

“I’m not going to have a bunch of bloody nobs determine whom I marry.”

She stood up and the hem of his shirt fell to her knees. “What of our children?”

“What of them?” Other than the fact he wanted every one of them to look like her.

“Did you not hear what Chadbourne said the night we bested him? How our children would have suffered because their grandfather was a traitor? As much as I’m loath to admit it, he was correct. I hated him for turning his back on me, but I would have hated him all the more if he hadn’t, if we’d had children and they had to grow up with taunts and unkind barbs. You know what that’s like. You experienced it. You know how much it hurts. I can’t do that to my children. Our children.”

He squeezed his eyes shut. With an almost unbearable ache, he wanted those blonde, blue-eyed girls and those black-haired, dark-eyed boys. He wanted to put them on his shoulders so they could place the star on top of the Christmas tree. He wanted them to have adventures with his nieces and nephew. And any others that came along. He wanted to see his mum cradling one of them in her arms. He wanted them to hear the stories his father had told him tonight. He wanted them to sit on his strong and protective mother’s lap.

Swallowing hard, he opened his eyes, held her gaze, and forced out the words through the knot in his throat. “Then we won’t have children.”

“You’re breaking my heart, Ben.”

“It’s only fair. You’re breaking mine.”

She turned away from him. He heard her release a shaky breath. When she again faced him, he saw standing before him the haughty,