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“Do you miss London? Your life?”
His sudden question had her eyes jerking from his lips to his face. The amusement dancing in his eyes indicated he saw how she had been looking at him. She flushed and busied herself by pouring water into a cup. “No. How can I miss loneliness?”
“What about your family?”
She shrugged, feigning disinterest in the topic. This is not what she had lured him here for. “I am not overly interested in them.”
“Liar.”
The gentleness in his tone made her lift her head and met his stare.
“Tell me,” he encouraged softly.
She swallowed, hating the lump in her throat. “There are times I miss my father so much I cry,” she confessed. “I write every so often but I have received no reply.”
“What about the letters from Lady Ashton?”
Her heart lurched. “How did you know about her?”
“They were in the top drawer of the chest in the Library. I found them when I was searching for receipts to match with purchases in the sale ledger.”
She shifted away pressing her back into the tree trunk. She stared at him with narrowed eyes. “You did not have to read my personal correspondence.”
He gave her a lazy smile and bit deep into a piece of chicken. “You have family you can return to.”
“No I don’t. My family is my father, my brother, and when the mood suits, my stepmother. Lady Ashton is simply a distant cousin on my mother’s side.”
“She is an option.”
“No she isn’t, Elijah. London is a distant dream. More of a memory because I have no wish to return. Maybe one day to visit…but never to live.”
He went silent. “Was it that bad? That you would choose to remain here…where a man like Sullivan hunts you? Where you will have to work hard and fight to hold onto all you value? You are the only woman I know who would fight to stay in the West. Our men are enticing the ladies to travel west, and we have had a slew of mail order brides, but many are leaving.”
She knew the truth of his words. “For a man that has been holed up in his mountain cabin for months, you are well informed.”
She liked the sensual quirk of his lips. His dark blonde hair shone under the light and she fancied she could see four different hues, like that of a lion. He laughed the sound rough and masculine. It warmed something deep inside of her. When was the last time she had heard his laughter?
“Everyone knows Mr. Dickens’s mail ordered bride returned to Virginia, and Mr. Clarke’s missus changed her mind the minute she arrived in Blue Lagoon.”
Sheridan grinned, happy with the normality of their conversation.
“But you Sheridan….why?”
“Maybe I am just disreputable,” she teased.
His direct stare unnerved her. She picked up a cloth napkin, and settled it across her lap. She placed her barely nibbled food in her lap frowning. How could she explain to him how the land called to her? The wildness, the sheer beauty that laid in the savagery?
“My father remarried when I was eight years old. My stepmother hated me. She thought I was wild and uncontrollable and that two years was sufficient time for me to heal from my mother’s passing. I was sent away to boarding school for years. Even for the holidays I was not allowed home. My father simply forgot about me.
“The loneliness was so painful. Nine years of prim and proper imprisonment in a boarding school, nine years deprived of even written contact with my family. Years of wondering why I meant so little to my father, when I loved him with my whole heart.”
“I remembered,” he said softly.
“I could not stay beyond eighteen and I was collected. Very reluctantly too. I had a season and I should have fallen in love with at least one of the gentleman from the haute monde. I had been too restless, hungry for something more. When Thomas came it was easy for me to be swept away by his promises of a simpler life, and my father was only too happy to give us his blessings. I’d foolishly thought my father and I would have at least corresponded through letters. But it is as if I am still at boarding school.” She bit into a chicken leg, chewing thoughtfully. “The moment I stepped onto the Whispering Creek with its vastness of the land, open air, beauty, and mountains, I fell in love. Here I was free…and I had purpose in the land.”
She licked the grease from her fingers and her stomach fluttered at the desire that flared in his eyes. “I wanted a family…Thomas didn’t want me. And then I met you…and you were…” She shrugged, unable to hold his scrutiny any longer.
“You used me to ease your loneliness.”
