Simply Love

“My life will be what I make it,” he told her. “That is true for all of us all the time. We ca

“What were your dreams?” she asked him.

He turned his head then until he could see her. She was sitting slightly sideways on the seat, facing toward him, and she was gazing at him with large eyes made smoky by her long lashes and the shade of her bo

“They were reasonably humble ones,” he said. “I wanted to paint. I wanted a home of my own and a wife and children. No, let me be perfectly honest, since you have asked. I wanted to be a great painter. I wanted to be displayed at the Royal Academy. But there were choices, you see-there are always choices. I also wanted other people to see that I was as brave and as manly as my brothers. And so I talked my father into purchasing a commission for me. And the more my family protested that it was not the life for me, the more stubbornly I insisted that it was. Now I must live with the consequences of the choice I made. And I will not call it the wrong choice. That would be foolish and pointless. That choice led me to everything that has happened since, including this very moment, and the choices I make today or tomorrow or next week will lead me to the next and the next present moments in my life. It is all a journey, Miss Jewell. I have come to understand that that is what life is all about-a journey and the courage and energy always to take the next step and the next without judgment about what was right and what was wrong.”

“Were you as wise before your injuries?” she asked him.

“Of course not,” he said. “And if I am alive ten, twenty years from now, the words I have just spoken will seem foolish to me or at least shallow. Wisdom comes from experience, and so far I have had only twenty-eight years of it.”

“One fewer than me,” she said. “You are younger than I.”

“What were your dreams?” he asked her.

“Marriage to someone for whom I could feel an affection,” she said. “Children. A modest home of my own in the country. I did achieve at least a part of my dream. I have David.”

“And did you have a potential husband picked out?” he asked her.

“Yes.”

He would not ask the next question. The answer was all too obvious. The man, whoever he was, had abandoned her after discovering that she was with child by someone else.

Was he someone from Cornwall?

“But you are right,” she told him. “We have to continue with the journey of life. The alternative is too terrible to contemplate.”

He was uncomfortable with the silence that ensued. He could tell that she had not moved. She must still be sitting sideways beside him, then. He could simply have got up, of course. He still had not taken her inside the house. But some stubborn part of himself kept him where he was. Let her look her fill. It was not as if she had not seen him before.

“It is not a pretty sight, is it?” he said abruptly at last-and then could have bitten his tongue out. What could she possibly say in response to such self-pitying words except to rush into uttering foolish lies to console him?

“No,” she said. “It is not.”

The words amused more than they hurt him. He turned his head about again and smiled at her.

“But it is part of who you are to those who know you now,” she said. “That ca

He laughed, his face still turned toward her. Truth to tell, though, he was deeply touched. She was not, he sensed, speaking just to console him.

“Thank you, Miss Jewell,” he said. “In all the years since this happened, I have never found anyone, even my family-especially my family-willing to speak so frankly about my looks.”

She got to her feet suddenly and went to stand by one of the trellises over which roses grew. She bent her head to smell one particularly perfect red bloom.

“I am sorry,” she said, “for what happened earlier.”

A number of things had happened earlier. He knew to what she referred, though.

“It was my fault,” he said. “I ought not even to have thought of kissing you.”

But he had not thought about it. That was the whole trouble. If he had, he would not have come so close to doing it. He would have released her hand as soon as she regained her balance and moved away from her.

She turned her head to look at him.

“But it was I,” she said, “who almost kissed you.”

Her cheeks suddenly flamed.

Ah. He had not realized that. But she had stopped herself-and now felt that she owed him an apology. He looked down and brushed a speck of dirt from his breeches.

Once, three weeks or so ago, she had set her fingertips against his cheek-and then removed them as if she had scalded her hand.

Today she had almost kissed him-and then moved jerkily away.

He was aware suddenly that she was standing in front of him. He looked up at her, prepared to smile and suggest that they go and look at the house. But her eyes were huge and deep, giving him the curious impression that he could see right through to her soul. And she set her fingertips again just where they had been that other time.

“You are not ugly, Mr. Butler,” she said. “You are not. Truly you are not.”

And she bent her head and set her lips against the left side of his mouth. They trembled quite noticeably, and he felt her breath being released in awkward little jerks against his cheek. But she did not give him just a token little peck of a kiss to prove that she had the courage to do it. She kept her lips where they were long enough for him to taste her, to want her with a yearning so intense that he gripped the arm of the seat almost hard enough to put a dent in the wood.

When she lifted her head, she looked down at him again in that peculiar way she had of focusing on both sides of his face. Her eyes were swimming with tears, he noticed.

“You are not ugly,” she said again almost fiercely, as if, perhaps, to convince herself.

“Thank you.” He forced himself to smile, even to chuckle. “Thank you, Miss Jewell. You are very kind.”

He understood fully what it must have cost her to touch him thus. But she was a woman of some compassion. It was not her fault that he felt bleaker than he had felt in a long, long while.