Redeeming the Reclusive Earl - Virginia Heath Page 0,57

disbelief before his big hands spanned her waist and he effortlessly lifted her into the trench. Which once again put her eyes level with his distracting buff-clad thighs and reminded her of the hard muscles which pleasingly upholstered his strong arms and broad shoulders.

I am a cynic! A weak-willed and easily waylaid one.

‘I told you—it wasn’t a love match. It was more a marriage of convenience. He wanted a wife...’

‘What for? To bring his slippers? To polish his ear trumpet? To keep him company in his dotage?’

‘And I wanted...’ To feel part of something. To feel like a woman first rather than an oddity. Feel a baby grow in her empty womb. Watch it grow. Love it with all her heart and never be lonely again. She shrugged, not wanting him to see how depressing it was to know her one chance at having what every other woman of her acquaintance took for granted had passed her by and she would never know what any of those longed-for things felt like ‘...more than what I have now.’

‘I know—you wanted the security of marriage because life is so difficult for a woman on her own. I understand that—’ He didn’t look like he did. ‘But those same securities would also come with a younger man. Could still come with a younger man. Preferably one still with all his own teeth. You were selling yourself short, Effie, and that is so sad.’

‘One cannot sell oneself short if there is only one bidder, Max.’

He scoffed as he rummaged in the wheelbarrow. ‘Do you seriously expect me to believe you were Miss Never-been-kissed before you met my uncle’s decrepit friend? Because I won’t have it. Oddness aside, you scrub up well.’

She decided to take that as another compliment because his tone had sounded flatteringly incredulous and despite being a little back-handed, it still made her tummy go all fluttery. ‘Hardly never. In fact, as long as I disguise my natural self from the first moment I meet a gentleman and talk about superficial things like the weather, they have always seemed rather eager to kiss me initially.’

‘So why the blazes didn’t you marry one of them?’

‘Getting them to kiss me has never been the problem. It’s getting them to want to continue kissing me after they discover the truth about me that’s always been the struggle. They seem to forget I am a woman the moment the real me slips out of my mouth...’ She paused, waiting pathetically for another compliment which never came while he continued to rifle noisily in the wheelbarrow with more concentration than she felt it warranted in view of the gravitas of what they were discussing. Then, in a moment of pathetic weakness and to her abject horror, she accidentally said what she was thinking out loud into the void.

‘I think I emasculate them.’

She saw his body stiffen before he turned, lips parted, and she realised she had shocked him. She found her hand slicing backwards and forward. ‘I didn’t mean by actual castration, Max.’ Another poor choice of word when his groin was mere inches away and she was now thinking about it. The size, the shape, the form... ‘I meant that their desire for me withers...’ Good grief, the inappropriate words were coming thick and fast now! ‘I mean it deflates...’ It was like a disease of the jaws! It was his fault. His shaving soap, his arms, his thighs and the intimate proximity of his masculine parts were scrambling her wits. ‘What I mean is...his desire, not his...um...desire.’ To compound her misery she found her finger was pointing south and felt her face combust.

Laughter rumbled in his chest. ‘You are blushing! Like a beetroot.’

‘Only because you have the wrong end of the stick!’ Suddenly every word coming out of her mouth sounded hugely inappropriate to him as well as her if the second bark of laughter was any gauge. ‘And by stick I meant stick and not...’

She could see the amusement dancing in his dark eyes. ‘And not?’

‘Sometimes I loathe you!’

‘Only sometimes? I must be slipping.’ He passed her a trowel and when she snatched it out of his hand couldn’t stop himself from grinning

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