Dominic swore under his breath and stalked away. What the devil was he thinking!
Marguerite Kay’s new romance about a scarred heroine who finds love, The Earl Who Sees Her Beauty, is out in October. Here’s an extract.
Prudence had fallen asleep in her deckchair, still clutching the remnants of her champagne. Dominic leaned over and carefully removed the glass. The carriage would be arriving in about half an hour to take them from the private beach back to their train. He wished, absurdly, that they could remain here for ever.
What was wrong with him! He set the glass down, and got up to adjust the parasol to keep Prudence’s face in the shade. Her nose and cheeks were flushed with the sun.
How often did she have the opportunity to expose her skin to
the elements? Every day since he was a young man and the weather had begun to shape his day, first as a soldier and more recently on his Greek smallholding, he had surveyed the sky, turned his face towards the sun, gauging the weather and planning his day accordingly.
This simple act, the small pleasures of the wind on her face or now, the sun warming her skin, were denied Prudence on a daily basis because of her scars. A nun in a cloister led a less sheltered existence, in some ways, than she did. She must resent the restraints placed upon her, but she accepted them. It wasn’t fair!
Her hair, usually so carefully arranged, was a tangle of wispy tendrils gently ruffled by the breeze which had got up with the changing of the tide. One little pale foot peeped out from below her gown. It was covered in sand. He wanted to kneel down and brush it clean.
Dominic swore under his breath. What the devil was he thinking! He stalked down to the water’s edge. The problem with Prudence was that there came a point in her company when he stopped thinking, and gave in to the feelings that were beginning to plague him. He had not planned today with the expectation of being rewarded with kisses. He had simply wanted to give Prudence something no one else had, or would think of, simply because he could.
His reward was her ecstatic expression when she boarded the train, when she saw the beach for the first time, when she dipped her toes in the water for the first time, and when she surrendered to the pleasure of floating in the sea. He’d been responsible for that excitement in her eyes, the triumph when she’d overcome her fears, and the bliss of surrendering to the ocean, that feeling he shared, that he’d wanted to share with her
– and that he’d never even tried to put into words before either. That was part of her allure, the way she managed to extract his feelings and thoughts from him, because he’d been so alone with them for so long.