Belle of the ball by Donna Lea Simpson Read Free Book Online

what he was saying, relaxing a little now that she knew he did not censure her for her ignorance. The information he was giving her was new, and required some thought. "Why were you in the Canadas? What did you do?"

    "First," Westhaven said, setting her champagne glass aside with his own glass, and taking her hands in his, "I want to apologize for putting you in a sticky spot in the Emporium the other day. My excuse must be that I have been away so long, I have become rusty with my manners."
    Arabella gazed into his gray eyes and felt all her anger melt away. "I—there is much there that you do not understand, and that I do not wish to discuss, but thank you. I accept your apology."
    He smiled. "And—?"
    "And what?"
    "Do you not have something to say back?"
    She thought. She had accepted his apology and thanked him very prettily, she believed. What more was there? Oh, she could not think while he caressed her hands in that intimate manner! "No. What more would I have to say?"
    "I thought you might want to apologize to me for biting my head off when I was only trying to do you a service."
    "Apologize?" she cried. "Apologize? I do not think I have anything to apologize for! If you had not stuck your big nose in where it was not wanted—" At that moment Arabella saw his grin. Infuriating man! "Oh! You are roasting me. Very well, I will do this handsomely." She sat up straight, looked him in the eye, and said, "I apologize for biting your head off when you only thought—great, hulking simpleton that you are— that you were doing me a service." She felt a light-hearted desire to laugh, something she had not felt yet this Season.
    "Well, how can I argue with that! What a handsome apology, indeed!" He rolled his eyes.
    "Now tell me what you were doing in Canada." She was very conscious that he retained her hands in his firm grip. His hands were large and strong and very, very warm. A strange, foreign trill of something like happiness trickled down her spine and fluttered in her stomach.
    "Your wish is my command. Let's see, where to start. The beginning I guess. That is always safe." He relaxed back and crossed one leg over the other, keeping her hand in one of his and laying his other arm over the back of the bench again. "I am a civilian, but I have always been fascinated by maps and mapping and have some experience as a cartographer, so about eleven years ago I went over independently to see some more of the world and ended up attached to an army regiment as a hydrographer—that is a mapper of waterways. I don't know how familiar you are with the geography of North America, but there is a collection of lakes in about the center of the continent that is enormous! Breathtakingly large, like inland oceans, and beautiful, silvery in the morning, and like glass when calm. We started mapping them, their shorelines and tributaries, and then a few years ago the war started, and they found a use for my knowledge of the area and my unique, uh, skills."
    "Did you like it?"
    "Like it? I loved it." His eyes became misty, like an early morning fog rolling in off a lake. "Canada is like no other place you have ever seen. Everything is so big there! The trees, the forests, the lakes, the rivers—everything is on a grand scale, and fresh and clean, as God must have meant the earth to be. You know, we believe that Ck>d gave us the earth to look after, to superintend, as if we are masters of all we survey, but the native inhabitants of North America believe that the Great Spirit created the earth and all on it to coexist. They feel that the relationship is more like kinship than mastery. That difference of opinion has led to some of the major disagreements between European and native." He paused and looked down at their joined hands. His rough fingers caught the delicate silk of her glove.
    "Kinship—that is fascinating. Tell me more," Arabella said, breathless and eager. His voice was deep, and he conveyed all the grandeur of the New World