Karen Whittenburg - The Blacksheep's Arranged Marriage

“Bryce taught me to surf right out there,” Peter said into the quiet. “The first real wave I caught took me straight into the rocks and smashed up my board pretty good. I had scrapes and bruises from top to bottom, but I was hooked.” A moment ticked past and then another. “Have you ever been surfing, Thea?”

She smiled, a soft rush of humor curving through her at the thought of being in the water, straddling a surfboard, waiting for the perfect wave. “I don’t even own a swimsuit,” she said.

He turned in the seat, brushing her hand with his thigh in the process, and sending pinpoints of heat scattering like naughty desires across her nerve endings. She pulled her hand back too quickly, making something out of nothing and feeling foolish in the process.

“Please tell me you’re kidding,” he said, sounding equally earnest and appalled at the possibility.

She shook her head, embarrassed. “A lady doesn’t kid.”

“Ladies do, however, swim.”

“Well, I don’t.”

He considered that in silence while she wished she’d never opened her mouth. She didn’t want to talk about herself. He surely didn’t want to talk about her, either. Why hadn’t she asked him about surfing, or architecture, or what he thought about the space program, or any topic at all other than swimsuits?

“May I ask why?”

Now it was personal and a subject her grandmother had said was restricted to family. A lady didn’t discuss the tragedies of her life, nor did she open herself to questions about her past. Those things were private. But Thea was torn between her grandmother’s doctrines and her own—suddenly very strong—desire to explain to Peter why she was so different, why she had never once in her life put on a swimsuit. “My mother drowned.”

The words hung there. Then with an urgency she couldn’t suppress, more words came out, as if she’d breached the dam and could no longer hold them in. “Grandmother said it was her own fault. I was only a baby and don’t really know what happened, except that Mother was wild and reckless and she drank. A lot. She did other things, too. Grandmother won’t talk about them. She just says my mother went out on the yacht with some people she shouldn’t have and did very unladylike things, and that sometime during the party, she fell overboard and drowned. Nobody on the deck could remember how it happened or even exactly when.” Thea bit her lip, horrified at what she’d told, and amazed at how good it felt to have finally said the forbidden thing aloud. “It was a long time ago,” she added, as if that explained away her relief. “Grandmother doesn’t like for me to talk about it, but that’s why I don’t swim.”

She could feel his eyes on her in the dark and she was ashamed for blabbering like an idiot about something he couldn’t possibly be interested in knowing.

“I’m sorry, Thea,” he said. “It’s tough to lose your mother, no matter how old you are when it happens.”

His sympathetic tone washed over her, but the only response she seemed able to make was a half-hearted shrug, as if it didn’t matter.

“I know when my mother died, no one wanted to talk to me about it, either. At the time, I thought it wasn’t polite or something, but now I realize that the adults in my life simply didn’t know what to say, so basically they didn’t say anything at all.” He paused. “My grandmother was the only one who encouraged me to talk and to remember my mother as she was.”

“My grandmother was ashamed,” Thea said, hardly realizing it as the truth until the words were out. “She still is.”

There wasn’t anything he could say to refute the claim and Thea was glad he didn’t try. He was leaning against the driver’s side door with his right hand extended along the back of the seat and, with just a slight stretch, his fingers brushed a tumbled strand of her hair. It was a gesture of understanding and simple kindness, catching her unprepared and vulnerable; leaving her breathless and bereft in its wake. “Your hair got all windblown,” he said softly.

Self-consciously, she lifted a hand to fuss with the mousy tendrils, defeated by the fine, limp strands and a serious lack of style before she even made the effort. “I must look awful,” she said, aware as she had never been before of her unkempt and ugly appearance.

“Moonlight becomes you, Thea.”

He was a gallant liar, a thief of hearts. She knew that, yet the thrill went deep inside her and spread its warmth like melting butter. “It’s getting late,” she said. “You probably ought to take me home.”

“It’s still early, barely eleven.” His smile teased her in the dusky moonlight. “And you have yet to make a wish on one of those stars.”

She looked up into the canopy of distant suns, with all their accompanying celestial bodies, and wished someday, somehow, in a perfect universe, that a man like Peter Braddock might fall in love with her. “If I did make a wish, I couldn’t tell you.”

“Why not?”

“Because wishes are private and personal and a gentleman really shouldn’t ask a lady to tell her secrets.”

“You know, Thea, between all the things a lady isn’t supposed to do and all the things a gentleman isn’t supposed to ask, it’s a wonder the human race is still in existence.”

Smiling, she let her head drop back against the headrest, the better to see the stars. “It’s always been a mystery to me why anyone would want to be a lady. Or a gentleman for that matter.”

He laughed gently in the dark. “I’m not sure there are that many of us left in the world.”

She liked that he considered himself a gentleman. Too few men did these days. But right now, she wished with all her heart he’d make a pass at her. Just one. Just so she’d know what it was like for one instant to be the object of his desire. A sigh slipped past her lips, dreary with reality. “Why did you bring me here, Peter?”

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