Out of habit, she raised her fingers to her birthmark, but at the last moment she used them to sweep locks of hair behind her ear.

“You can see for yourself, can’t you? It’s ironic because I’m no legendary beauty. No men are fighting battles over me.” She gave a self-effacing smile. “That would require at least two men to be interested. I’m three-and-twenty years old, and so far there hasn’t even been one.”

“You live in a village of women.”

“Spindle Cove’s not entirely women. There are some men. There’s the blacksmith. And the vicar.”

He dismissed these examples with a gruff sound.

“Well . . . there’s you,” she said.

He went stone still.

So. Now they came to it. She probably shouldn’t have put him on the spot, but then again—he was the one pressing the topic.

“There’s you,” she repeated. “And you can scarcely bear to share the same air I breathe. I tried to be friendly, when you first arrived in Spindle Cove. That didn’t go over well.”

“Miss Taylor—”

“And it’s not that you’re uninterested in women. I know you’ve had others.”

He blinked, and the small motion made her uneasy in her skin. Amazing. His blink had the same effect as another man pounding his palm with his fist.

“Well, it’s common knowledge,” she said, quietly grinding her toe in the dirt. Digging for courage. “In the village, your . . . arrangements . . . are the subject of far too much speculation. Even if I don’t want to hear about them, I do.”

He rose to his feet and began walking toward the road. His massive shoulders were squared, his heavy paces measured. There he went again, walking away. She’d had enough of this. She was tired of shrugging off his rejections, dismissing the wounded feelings with a good-natured laugh.

“Don’t you see?” She rose and waded through the heather, hurrying to catch the border of his long, monumental shadow. “This is exactly what I mean. If I smile in your direction, you turn the other way. If I find a seat toward your end of the room, you decide you’d rather stand. Do I make you itch, Corporal Thorne? Does the scent of my dusting powder make you sneeze? Or is there something in my demeanor that you find loathsome or terrifying?”

“Don’t be absurd.”

“Then admit it. You avoid me.”

“Very well.” He drew to a stop. “I avoid you.”

“Now tell me why.”

He turned to face her, and his ice-blue eyes burned into hers. But he didn’t say a word.

Kate’s breath left her lungs in a sigh, and her shoulders fell. “Come along,” she coaxed. “Say it. It’s all right. After all these years, I think it would be a mercy to hear someone speak the truth. Just be honest.”

In an impulsive move, she reached for his hand and brought it to her face, touching his fingertips to her birthmark. He tried pull back, but she wouldn’t let him escape. If she had to live with this mark every day, he could bear to touch it just this once.

She stepped closer, pressing her pigment-stained temple to his palm. His hand was cool.

She said, “This is the reason. Isn’t it? The reason you don’t take an interest. The reason no men take an interest.”

“Miss Taylor, I—” His jaw tensed. “No. It isn’t like that.”

“Then what is it?”

No reply.

Her face burned. She wanted to beat at his chest, crack him open. “What is it? For God’s sake, what is it about me you find so intolerable? So wretchedly unbearable you can’t even stand to be in the same room?”

He muttered an oath. “Stop provoking me. You won’t like the answer.”

“I want to hear it anyhow.”

He plunged one hand into her hair, startling a gasp from her lips. Strong fingers curled to cup the back of her head. His eyes searched her face, and every nerve ending in her body crackled with tension. The sinking sun threw a last flare of red-orange light between them, setting the moment ablaze.

“It’s this.”

With a flex of his arm, he pulled her into a kiss.

And he kissed her the way he did everything. Intensely, and with quiet force. His lips pressed firm against hers, demanding a response.

Acting out of pure instinct, Kate shoved at his chest. “Release me.”

“I will. But not yet.”

His grip kept her immobile. She had no escape.

Nevertheless, she didn’t fear him. No, she feared whatever was rapidly filling the space between them. The raw hunger in his eyes. This heat welling between their bodies. The sudden heaviness in her limbs, her abdomen, her breasts. The mad acceleration of her pulse. The air around them seemed charged with intent. And not all of it was on his side.

He bent to kiss her again, and this time her instincts were different.

She stretched to meet him halfway.

When his strong lips touched hers, she went soft everywhere. He pulled her close, wrapping his other arm about her waist. She didn’t even try to resist. The voice of her conscience went mute, and her eyelids fluttered in exquisite surrender. She sighed into the kiss. A shameless confession of longing.

His lips were so warm. And for all his cool, stony appearance, he tasted delicious and comforting. Like freshly baked bread, mixed with some faint memory of bitters by the pint. She had a vision of him earlier that day, drinking in a dimly lit tavern. Alone. The poignant solitude of that image made her want to hold him. She had to settle for clutching his coat lapels, nestling close to his chest.

She let her lips fall apart, the better to breathe him in. He caught her top lip between his, then sipped at the lower. As though he craved the taste of her, too.

He brushed firm kisses to the corner of her mouth, her jaw, the pounding pulse in her throat. Each press of his lips was swift and strong. She could feel each kiss’s imprint linger like a fiery brand on her skin. He was marking her with stamps of his approval.

Her passion-swelled mouth . . . Wanted.

Her softly arching neck . . . Desired.

The sweep of her cheekbone . . . Lovely.

And last—the wine-splashed mark at her temple . . . Sweet.

His kiss lingered there for several moments. His breath moved in and out, stirring her hair. Standing like this, pressed so close to him, she could feel the barely restrained power coursing through his body. His whole being shuddered with palpable desire.

Then he pulled away.

She clung to his coat, dizzied. “I—”

“Don’t be concerned. That won’t happen again.”

“It won’t?”

“No.”

“Then why did it happen in the first place?”

He put a single fingertip under her chin, tilting her face to his. “Don’t ever—ever—think no man wants you. That’s all.”

That’s all?

She stared up at the hardened, handsome, impossible man. He would kiss her at sunset in a field of heather, make her feel beautiful and desired, set her whole body throbbing with sensation . . . only to set her back on her feet and say, “That’s all”?

His weight shifted, as though he would retreat.

“Wait.” She tightened her grip and held him in place. “What if I want more?”

Chapter Four

More.

Thorne braced himself. That word shook the ground beneath him. He could have sworn the hillside rolled and swayed.

More. What did it mean to her, that word? Certainly something different from the visions his own mind supplied. He saw the two of them, tangled in the heather and the rucked-up muslin of her skirts. This was why he sought out experienced women who shared his definition of “more”—and had no qualms about telling him exactly when and where and how often they’d like it.

But Miss Taylor was a lady, no matter how she denied it. She was innocent, young, given to foolish dreaming. He cringed to imagine what “more” meant in her mind. Sweet words? Courting? A vinegar jar had more sweetness in it than he did. His experience with courting had been limited to courting danger.

That wrongheaded kiss had been just one more example.

Stupid, stupid. His own mother had said it best. Your head’s as thick as it is ugly, boy. You never will learn.

“You can’t just walk away from me,” she said. “Not after a kiss like that. We need to talk.”

Brilliant. This was worse than sweetness, more fraught with danger than courting. She wanted talking.

Why couldn’t a woman let an action speak for itself? If he’d wanted to use words, he would have used them.

“We have nothing to discuss,” he said.

“Oh, I beg to differ.”

Thorne stared at her, considering. He’d spent the better part of a decade on campaign with the British infantry. He knew when his best option was retreat.

He turned and whistled for the dog. The pup bounded to his side. Thorne was pleased. He’d been divided as to whether to leave him with the breeder so long, but the extra weeks of training seemed to have paid off.

He walked toward the place where he’d left the horse grazing, near a wooden stile that served as the only gap in the field’s waist-high stone border.

Miss Taylor followed him. “Corporal Thorne . . .”

He vaulted the stile, putting the fence between them. “We need to get back to Spindle Cove. You’ve missed lessons with the Youngfield sisters this evening. They’ll be wondering where you are.”

“You know my schedule of lessons?” Her voice carried an interested lilt.

He cursed under his breath. “Not all of them. Just the irritating ones.”

“Oh. The irritating ones.”

He tossed the pup a scrap of rabbit hide from his pocket, then began checking over the horse’s tack.

She placed both hands on the evenly mortared top of the stone fence and boosted herself to sit atop it. “So my lessons and your drinking sessions just happen to coincide. At the same times and on the same days, to the point that you know my schedule. By heart.”

For God’s sake. What heart?

He shook his head. “Don’t tell yourself some sentimental story of how I’ve been pining for you. You’re a fetching enough woman, and I’m a man with eyes. I’ve noticed. That’s all.”

She gathered her skirts in one hand, lifted her legs, and swung them to his side of the fence. “And yet you’ve never said a word.”

With her sitting on the stone wall, they were almost equal in height. She crooked one finger and swept a curling lock of hair behind her ear—in that graceful, unthinking way women had of pushing men to the brink of desperation.

“I’m not a smoothly spoken man. If I put my wants into words, I’d have you blushing so hard your frock would turn a deeper shade of pink.”

There. That ought to scare her off.

She colored slightly. But she didn’t back down.

“Do you know what I think?” she said. “I think that maybe—just maybe—all your stern, forbidding behavior is some strange, male form of modesty. A way to deflect notice. I’m almost ashamed to say it worked on me for the better part of a year, but—”

“Really, Miss Taylor—”

She met his gaze. “But I’m paying close attention now.”

Damn. So she was.

He’d been avoiding precisely this for a year now—the possibility that she’d someday catch sight of him in church or the tavern, hold that glance a beat longer than usual, and then . . . remember everything. He couldn’t let that happen. If Miss Kate Taylor, as she existed now, were ever connected with the den of squalor and sin that had served as her cradle, it could destroy everything for her. Her reputation, her livelihood, her happiness.

So he’d stayed away. Not an easy task, when the village was so small and this girl—who wasn’t a girl anymore, but an alluring woman—had her toes in every corner of it.