make the man I see before me. A good, strong, intelligent, and honorable man.”
He jerked forward, face hard as granite. “I am nothing but what my past has made me. A bastard. The son of a soldier and a whore. I was born in that festering brothel in Chablis. The same one that tended my wounds is the one I swore to tear down with my bare hands if I ever found it.”
Kat’s hand flew to her mouth to smother the soul-wrenching cry. Selfish to her own struggles, she’d never seen the anguish drowning him. She reached a hand out to him. “Oh, Barrett.”
Jerking away, he turned to stare across the overgrown fields around them. Beyond a split-rail fence, the hazy fingers of a dull sun poked over the horizon. When he spoke again, his tone was heavy with disillusion. “My father died a drunk because he couldn’t be with the woman he loved, the same woman who’s buried out in a pile of weeds behind a brothel. So much for your honorable man.”
“Honor doesn’t restrict us to our past, only what we do now.” Kat’s heart broke for him. He carried the unbearable weight of unworthiness, thrust on him by circumstances beyond his control. But the greatest sin of all was that he believed it. “My family, its history, and its standing have been an exclusive identity for me since birth, much to my own detriment, while you have lived with no family or history to center yourself upon. We deserve to break free of those bindings.”
“I think many in your social ring would balk at that.”
“Those stuffed shirts wouldn’t know a real man of worth if he kicked them in the money bags.” She reached out and lay her hand on his cheek. Compassion, longing, and hope trembled through her fingertips. “They could never hope to amount to you.”
Sneering, he twisted his head away. “You live in a fantasy world, one you need to return to and forget all of this.”
The bobbing fear swelled to unsurpassed pain in her chest as his words pushed her further and further away. “I’ll never return to that world, not anywhere without you.”
“I have nothing to offer you but dirty hands and empty pockets.”
“Don’t care about those things. This is what concerns me.” She tapped her heart. “This is what I’m after.”
“I’m afraid you’re to live a life of disappointment, then. Go back inside, Kat.”
In the dim morning air, she could make out no flicker of light in his eyes, as if he stared out at her from a bottomless black pit. Shoulders slumping, he turned away. Each step hit like a hammer of defeat to her heart.
“Don’t you want me anymore?”
She couldn’t stop the last word from cracking any more than she could stop the world from spinning out beneath her feet. Helpless, she held her arms out and waited to see where she fell.
His feet faltered. Staring across the field in front of him, his shoulders dropped even more on a heavy sigh. “Yes.” He turned to face her. Desperation creased his face. “God help me, yes.”
Closing the distance between them, she wrapped her arms around him until the air gasped from his lungs. His erratic heartbeat thumped against her ear as he stood stiffly in her embrace. She rubbed her hands along his back, across his shoulders, up his neck, and pressed her mouth to his, pouring every ounce of love she had into him.
Tentatively, his arms circled her as if afraid to trust himself. He didn’t kiss her back, but he didn’t pull away either. His hand cupped the back of her neck and gently pressed her head to his shoulder.
“You shouldn’t do that.” His hoarse voice rasped in her ear.
“But you wanted me to.”
He nodded, knotting his fingers in her hair. “Yes.”
Leaning back, she looked into his face. “Then that’s all that matters. Your family, mine, they have no rightful say in our happiness.”
He snorted, ruffling the hair from her face. “Spoken like an upper-class blue blood.”
“Blue blood or base-born, it makes no difference. This war has changed everything. Boundaries like that don’t exist, not anymore, not when people are fighting for the right to simply live in peace.”
His hands dropped from her waist to ball into fists on his hips. A deep V creased between his dark eyebrows. “We go back to England, and that’s all that will matter. War or not, some lines will never be broken.”