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Bronwyn stiffened but didn’t move. She might refuse to tell him her secrets, but she wouldn’t argue the logic of staying alive. For long moments, he pondered the puzzle that was his beautiful, mysterious companion until her even breaths of sleep finally filled the air. He drew his dried shirt from the wall and placed it over her.
Whatever trouble she was in—and he didn’t doubt for one second that she was in way over her head—he would get to the bottom of it.
Whatever it took.
Nine
“What the infernalfuck, Bronwyn!”
The bellow was enough to wake the dead. Bronwyn’s eyes flew open and she sat straight up in complete confusion, eyes squinting in the stark light of day. Every muscle in her back and posterior hurt from the hours spent asleep on the unforgiving ground. Blinking, she focused her blurry vision on the fully dressed man standing in front of her holding up a square of linen, one she sluggishly recognized as his handkerchief.
“What’s the matter?”
“You were a virgin?”
Bronwyn narrowed her gaze on the unfolded swatch of fabric, reality chasing the fog of sleep from her brain when the pink stain on its snowy-white surface came into focus. She wrinkled her nose as understanding hit. A blush filled her cheeks. Oh, the cloth must have been what he’d used to clean them both up after their frenzied interlude the evening before.
“Nothing gets past you, does it,” she muttered and when he kept glaring, she shrugged. “Clearly, the evidence suggests that a minuscule amount of blood was involved during the, er…deflowering process.”
“Deflowering?” A muscle throbbed in his cheek as she took in the fact that he was already dressed. “Then it’s true. What have you done, Bronwyn?”
She lifted a brow. “Are you going to go all histrionic on me?”
“I amnothistrionic.”
Her brows went higher. “You sound histrionic to me.”
“You have been compromised and we shall have to marry. There’s no other course of action.” He scrubbed a hand through his hair and then over his face, which was covered in a delicious layer of bronze scruff. Then again, he wasn’t so delicious when he was behaving like an overbearing jackanapes who thought he had the right to tell her what to do.
Bronwyn frowned. She had a foul taste in her mouth, she felt dirty from the smoke and ash of the fire, and she was exhausted. But not too exhausted to take offense. “No one is marrying anyone, Thornbury.”
“We are.”
She glared and rose, fists at her side. “No, we are not.Iwill not. I fail to see how it was well and good for us to do what we did when you thought I had done the act before. What is the difference?”
“You were untried. And I took you like a beast up against a tree—” He broke off in horror, the normally implacable duke clearly worked up into a lather. “Like an animal.”
“And I liked it. We both needed that.”
“Bronwyn,” he began. “I took advantage of you.”
Before he could continue, she raised a hand and stalked toward him. “Enough. You give me little credit, Your Grace, to think that I don’t have my own willpower or control over my thoughts and my person. I wanted the outlet as much as you did. I took as much advantage of you as you did of me. We are equally responsible. Stop trying to assume blame formyactions.”
The muscle in his cheek flexed. “Then we must take responsibility and do the right thing here.”
“The right thing by whom?”
A scowl split his face. “Byyou.”
“For the love of God, no.” She scowled fiercely back at him. “I will marry someday, and it will be with a man I choose and can grow old with. As much as I desire love and a true courtship by a man who might esteem me someday, I am also a realist. What happened between us was sex, Your Grace, and that isallit was. Please do not make it into this grand catastrophe with an ending that will ruin two lives. We were two people seeking comfort in the moment, that’s all.” She exhaled, watching him fight with his own sense of honor even as his pride felt the sting of her rejection. “Don’t escalate this into more than it is.”
Chest heaving, he raked a hand through his hair and exhaled on an irritated sigh. “This isn’t right. I should have known better. Idoknow better.”
“Perhaps, but a convenient marriage to placate denizens of society who are not here isn’t your decision to make. I offered, you accepted. Regardless of my state of chastity, the desire was mutual. Leave it be.”
Well awake now, Bronwyn attempted to make some sense of the tangle of her hair. The pins were somewhere about. There! She cringed at the dirty condition of her favorite hairpins with the jeweled lilies and butterflies but had little choice. When they got back to the hotel or the ship, she intended to take the longest, hottest, soapiest bath known to man. She reached for the pins, cleaned them on her shift as best she could, and twisted her locks up into a bun that she secured in place.
“Will you hand me my shirt and trousers?” she asked a still frowning Thornbury.
