Since the Surrender by Julie Anne Long Read Free Book Online Page B

reached between them. And as he was her husband’s closest confidant, they were ever thrown together
    —at balls, and dinners both large and private—and détente evolved into a friendship.
    If one could call careful politeness stretched over a hum of sensual awareness friendship, that is.
    Chase found himself cataloguing the minutest things about her. The head tilt, the shoulder roll—she did that when she thought no one was watching; he knew it was her way of shifting the mantle of grace and gravity thrown over her the moment she became a colonel’s wife. She wore it willingly but it had never fit comfortably, and Chase was certain he was the only one who noticed the strain. The faint birthmark on her collarbone, roughly the shape of a fan. The quickly disguised flint in her green eyes whenever someone made a foolish remark, betraying a surprisingly impatient mind. The affectionate deference with which she always addressed her husband. The myriad subtle colors in her hair, from…well, flaxen, for lack of a less dramatic word, to a shining honey-brown, the bitten down nail of the little finger on her left hand, a sign of worries Rosalind March never betrayed in any other way, and—thanks to a conspiracy between candlelight, a chilly room, a dropped shawl, a silk bodice, and a strategically timed glance—the precise outline of her nipples.
    her nipples.
    He knew that she generally smelled faintly of rosewater. One night Chase had danced with her and discovered she smelled both very faintly of rosewater and her husband’s shaving soap, much the way a woman who had just been kissed—or considerably more—by her husband might before she’d gone down to the soiree. Jealousy had been a shocking machete swipe through his torso. He’d been unable to speak or even, for an instant, breathe. He’d given her saturnine silence for the duration of the dance. He’d taken perverse pleasure in deflecting her conversation the way a window deflects pebbles hurled by a lover at midnight. He knew it was childish. He knew it was unforgivably rude. Perhaps even cowardly, a word he would have called anyone out over should they have had the grave stupidity to direct it at him, and not even his brothers were quite that stupid.
    He’d read La Morte D’Artur when he was a child, for God’s sake. And though he’d enjoyed the questing and the battles, he always found the Arthur and Lancelot and Guinevere business—the drama! The anguish! Good God—impractical and surely avoidable. In truth, he didn’t know what to do.
    He was at the mercy of something he didn’t understand. And in that moment, he’d felt like a child, not like a battle-hardened soldier. He’d watched hurt darken her pale green eyes.
    Then anger.
    Then wounded pride.
    When the last gave way to comprehension, he knew he was in trouble. The girl was cleverer than he preferred. Than she, for reasons of her own, preferred anyone to know.
    And after this, any easiness between them was gone as if it had never been.
    She began to watch him, too, in just the same way. And for the same reasons. Silence separated them. Fascination bound them. Entirely his fault.
    He knew himself, and he knew her, which meant he should have known how it all would end.
    He shook himself back to the present urgency: his search for the Mumford Arms.
    “Rosewater,” he muttered darkly and kept walking. He might as well blame the rosewater as anything else.
    “Wot’s rosewater? Can ye drink it?” Damned urchin was still behind him.
    Chase shot him a dark look. “You’d have to be foxed to drink it. It’s
    …something girls wear. To smell like girls. To smell like…flowers.”
    The boy’s face crinkled in incredulity. “I ken no girls what smell like flowers.”
    “I don’t doubt it for a moment.”
    “I dinna like girls at all.”
    “That makes you a clever lad, indeed.”
    The urchin glowed in male solidarity, not at all discouraged by Chase’s discouraging tone. “D’yer ever