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Her problem was, she had no idea where it was going to go.
“I’ve never actually had sex,” she announced.
Which summed up everything and nothing. It was just awkward and embarrassing. When inside her, what she’d wanted to say was all elegance and lyricism.
She instantly wanted to snatch those words back, particularly when they seemed to land with such a loudthunkin the middle of the brightly tiled mosaic table.
But then again, perhaps not, because the heat in Cayetano’s mythic gaze...shifted.
And Delaney felt a different sort of warmth move through her, almost as if this bizarre night had turned...affectionate.
Don’t kid yourself, she lectured herself sternly.You know exactly what this man’s interest is in you.
“You have my condolences,” Cayetano said after a long moment that felt breathless to her. “That seems an unfortunate oversight.”
“If I had a boyfriend at all, it was the farm,” Delaney told him, still trying to find her feet beneath her. She was glad she was sitting down. “And besides, I never understood how my friends from high school were suddenly able to overlook the fact that the boys in our class when we were seventeen were the same boys in our class from when we were six. With much the same issues in the way of personal hygiene and questionable behavior.” She wrinkled up her nose. “It seemed like everyone had amnesia, but I didn’t.”
Cayetano did not comment on the dearth of acceptable suitors back home. Instead, he filled her wineglass with something rich and red, that smelled to her of currants and honey. The one other time she’d tried wine it had been from an illicit box at a high school friend’s bachelorette party, and it had been notable for its grittiness and sour taste. But when she pressed this glass to her lips, the kiss of his wine warmed her almost the way he did, leaving a kind of yearning on her tongue.
“I don’t drink much, either,” she said very solemnly over the rim of her glass. “So if this is an attempt to loosen me up, well... It’s going to work.”
“Excellent.”
His intense eyes crinkled in the corners and that made her feel as if she was turning cartwheels when she knew she was sitting still. He reached across the corner of the table that separated them and pulled on one of the tendrils that had fallen free from the rest of her hair, tied back in such a complicated arrangement it had taken all of her servants to make it work.
And she probably shouldn’t have allowed him to toy with her hair. Or with her. But she was still hot and molten between her legs. There were still all those sensations charging around inside of her. Her breasts were so oversensitized that she felt shooting streaks of electricity every time she breathed. So all she did was cup her wineglass between her hands, take another, deeper sip, and carry on talking.
“I expected to get married someday,” she told him. He was curling that strand of hair around and around his finger, tugging it slightly, and somehow that made everything between them just that little bit dizzy. “But all I cared about was the farm, you see. So it couldn’t be just anyone. It had to be another farmer, and how do you find a farmer who’s willing to farm your land, not his?”
Again, that lift at the corners of his eyes. As good as a belly laugh from another man. “I am afraid, little one, that I am not conversant on the intricacies of farmland dating in the American heartland.”
She registered his dry tone, and for some reason that made her laugh. “But don’t you see? I grant you, the scope is different. But at the end of the day, both you and I want to marry for land. You just think yours matters more.”
Cayetano stilled. This close, she could see an arrested sort of light dawn in his eyes. And it was so strange how actually reading him made all these various sensations inside her seem to pull tighter and tighter.
As if this was what she’d wanted from the start.
To know the impossibly beautiful man, sculpted to perfection, who never should have set foot on the farm. Toknowhim in every way a person could know another.
He stared back at her for a long while. Then his gaze shuttered, and he shifted to pull one of her hands into his. It felt new and almost sacred to sit there, hushed like this. Hot. To watch as he bent his head, his gaze on their linked hands while his thumb made slow, sweet sweeps against her skin.
“You’re quite right,” he said, and when she felt a jolt deep inside her she realized that this was a surprise, too. That she’d expected him to argue. To rant and rave about history and Montaignes and false queens.
“I beg your pardon?”
He looked up then, his expression rueful. “I said you were right. You are. It is not for me to decide the importance of the things that matter to you. My understanding is that this farm of yours is being sold.”
Her throat was much too dry, suddenly. “It seems my mother found it a burden.”
“And you did not?”
Delaney sighed. She hadn’t been gone from Kansas long, she knew that. And yet still, the fact that she was gone at all made everything different. That was the thing about perspective, she supposed. You only recognized how little you’d had when you happened upon some.
“I would never have called it a burden,” she told him, and she was aware that she had never been this honest before. Not with anyone. Not even with herself, because it would have felt like a betrayal. “It’s just... That’s what love is, isn’t it? You put in the work because it’s worth it, because you love it. Not because it will ever love you back. You work the land because that’s what you do. Because you’re a farmer who lives on a farm. And nothing could ever change that, or so I thought, so it never occurred to me to think in terms of whether or not it made me happy. How can you know that you’re carrying a burden until you put it down and see how much it’s weighed all this time?”
Again, that arrested look. And she could see something, there on his face of stone, but it was gone in the next instant.
But she knew what she’d seen. For a moment he’d almost looked...raw.
