The Blacksheep's Arranged Marriage

He didn’t offer much in the way of conversation, just asked if the wind was too much, if she felt chilly, if she didn’t think this was one of those nights when the earth and the sky were in perfect accord.

To which she answered, respectively, with two separate shakes of her head and a singular nod. She didn’t say that the wind felt glorious on her face and in its wild fling with her hair. She didn’t say that she loved the faint nip of autumn in the air and the brewing fragrance of a distant storm. She didn’t confess that she, too, thought this was one of those perfect nights, which, in some mysterious alignment of nature, occasionally happened in a New England autumn. And she especially didn’t say that ensconced in the deep leather seat, her head resting against the headrest, her feet flat on the floor, sitting as close as she ever sat to another person and riding through the dark with the night rushing over her in an endless sensual wave, felt daring and somehow, extraordinarily brave.

Thea didn’t want to spoil the moment with words for fear Peter would remember who he was with, turn the car around and take her straight home. So she just closed her eyes and let the sensations weave their way through her with all their myriad pleasures.

When he stopped the car and shut off the engine, she heard the Atlantic chanting its rhythmic poetry to the rocky shores around Point Judith. She kept her eyes shut, recognized their location from the road they’d traveled and from the pulsating blink of the lighthouse which crept beneath her lashes and lightened the darkness every few seconds. The scent of the ocean surrounded them, more ancient than the forest primeval, its song as familiar and as soothing as a heartbeat.

“Thea?” Peter’s voice was soft as the night, almost as if he thought she really might be asleep.

“Peter,” she replied to let him know she was awake and aware, even if her eyes were still closed. There, in a darkness of her own making, she could drink in the fantasy of being alone with him, imagining for the space of a single breath that he wanted to be here with her, that he planned to kiss her senseless in full view of a million stars, that he had brought her here on this special night to make love to her with the eternal ocean as witness.

“We’re at Point Judith Lighthouse,” he said.

“I know. Did you get lost?”

“No.”

“Point Judith isn’t exactly on the way to Grace Place.”

“No, it isn’t.”

She nodded and the thought flitted through her mind that she might have read Peter wrong, that it was possible he hid a lecherous soul beneath his handsome face and gentlemanly manners. No matter how she dressed, or acted, or how hard she tried to make herself invisible, there were still men who thought they could take advantage. But Peter could have any woman he wanted. He was Hollywood handsome, deathly charming and rich as Croesus. He could have no design on her fortune or her figure. He probably didn’t even realize she had a figure beneath the shapeless clothes she wore.

But she trusted Peter, for no particular reason other than he had always been nicer to her than he had to be. He was being polite, stopping here, pretending in his gentlemanly way that he was in no rush to take her home. The idea he could want anything more was without substance and evaporated like so much wistful thinking into the cool night air.

“I’ll take you home, if you prefer.”

She opened her eyes then, to see the moonlight as it flared across the water and played tag with the surf. They were parked in an open area just off the narrow road, the only car in sight, so the night and the ocean were theirs for the moment. Thea rather liked the idea of that. She liked being with Peter and feeling, if not completely relaxed in his company, at least, at ease with him. She’d been to this particular place on Point Judith before—always in daylight and always alone—but here, on this same road. The rocks below were a good place to sketch, a good place to daydream. It felt right, somehow, to be here with him now, although her grandmother would have a fit if she knew.

“Bryce taught me to surf right out there,” Peter said into the quiet. “The first real wave I caught took me straight into the rocks and smashed up my board pretty good. I had scrapes and bruises from top to bottom, but I was hooked.” A moment ticked past and then another. “Have you ever been surfing, Thea?”

She smiled, a soft rush of humor curving through her at the thought of being in the water, straddling a surfboard, waiting for the perfect wave. “I don’t even own a swimsuit,” she said.

He turned in the seat, brushing her hand with his thigh in the process, and sending pinpoints of heat scattering like naughty desires across her nerve endings. She pulled her hand back too quickly, making something out of nothing and feeling foolish in the process.

“Please tell me you’re kidding,” he said, sounding equally earnest and appalled at the possibility.

She shook her head, embarrassed. “A lady doesn’t kid.”

“Ladies do, however, swim.”

“Well, I don’t.”

He considered that in silence while she wished she’d never opened her mouth. She didn’t want to talk about herself. He surely didn’t want to talk about her, either. Why hadn’t she asked him about surfing, or architecture, or what he thought about the space program, or any topic at all other than swimsuits?

“May I ask why?”

Now it was personal and a subject her grandmother had said was restricted to family. A lady didn’t discuss the tragedies of her life, nor did she open herself to questions about her past. Those things were private. But Thea was torn between her grandmother’s doctrines and her own—suddenly very strong—desire to explain to Peter why she was so different, why she had never once in her life put on a swimsuit. “My mother drowned.”

The words hung there. Then with an urgency she couldn’t suppress, more words came out, as if she’d breached the dam and could no longer hold them in. “Grandmother said it was her own fault. I was only a baby and don’t really know what happened, except that Mother was wild and reckless and she drank. A lot. She did other things, too. Grandmother won’t talk about them. She just says my mother went out on the yacht with some people she shouldn’t have and did very unladylike things, and that sometime during the party, she fell overboard and drowned. Nobody on the deck could remember how it happened or even exactly when.” Thea bit her lip, horrified at what she’d told, and amazed at how good it felt to have finally said the forbidden thing aloud. “It was a long time ago,” she added, as if that explained away her relief. “Grandmother doesn’t like for me to talk about it, but that’s why I don’t swim.”

She could feel his eyes on her in the dark and she was ashamed for blabbering like an idiot about something he couldn’t possibly be interested in knowing.

“I’m sorry, Thea,” he said. “It’s tough to lose your mother, no matter how old you are when it happens.”

His sympathetic tone washed over her, but the only response she seemed able to make was a half-hearted shrug, as if it didn’t matter.

“I know when my mother died, no one wanted to talk to me about it, either. At the time, I thought it wasn’t polite or something, but now I realize that the adults in my life simply didn’t know what to say, so basically they didn’t say anything at all.” He paused. “My grandmother was the only one who encouraged me to talk and to remember my mother as she was.”

“My grandmother was ashamed,” Thea said, hardly realizing it as the truth until the words were out. “She still is.”

There wasn’t anything he could say to refute the claim and Thea was glad he didn’t try. He was leaning against the driver’s side door with his right hand extended along the back of the seat and, with just a slight stretch, his fingers brushed a tumbled strand of her hair. It was a gesture of understanding and simple kindness, catching her unprepared and vulnerable; leaving her breathless and bereft in its wake. “Your hair got all windblown,” he said softly.

Self-consciously, she lifted a hand to fuss with the mousy tendrils, defeated by the fine, limp strands and a serious lack of style before she even made the effort. “I must look awful,” she said, aware as she had never been before of her unkempt and ugly appearance.

“Moonlight becomes you, Thea.”

He was a gallant liar, a thief of hearts. She knew that, yet the thrill went deep inside her and spread its warmth like melting butter. “It’s getting late,” she said. “You probably ought to take me home.”

“It’s still early, barely eleven.” His smile teased her in the dusky moonlight. “And you have yet to make a wish on one of those stars.”

She looked up into the canopy of distant suns, with all their accompanying celestial bodies, and wished someday, somehow, in a perfect universe, that a man like Peter Braddock might fall in love with her. “If I did make a wish, I couldn’t tell you.”

“Why not?”

“Because wishes are private and personal and a gentleman really shouldn’t ask a lady to tell her secrets.”

“You know, Thea, between all the things a lady isn’t supposed to do and all the things a gentleman isn’t supposed to ask, it’s a wonder the human race is still in existence.”

Smiling, she let her head drop back against the headrest, the better to see the stars. “It’s always been a mystery to me why anyone would want to be a lady. Or a gentleman for that matter.”

He laughed gently in the dark. “I’m not sure there are that many of us left in the world.”

She liked that he considered himself a gentleman. Too few men did these days. But right now, she wished with all her heart he’d make a pass at her. Just one. Just so she’d know what it was like for one instant to be the object of his desire. A sigh slipped past her lips, dreary with reality. “Why did you bring me here, Peter?”