Free Midsummer Moon by Laura Kinsale Page A

electricity, and there's the speaking box, but who would care about something like that?"
    "I suppose there might be some harebrained fellow who'd take an interest in a speaking box, but I wasn't talking about inventions. There's more to life than mechanics and chemistry."
    "I like mechanics,” she said. Then, in a burst of honesty, she added, “I'm not very partial to chemistry, though."
    "There are children, for instance. Have you never wished for a family?"
    Merlin opened her mouth. She closed it. She thought of the house where she had been brought up—quiet when her great-uncle had been there and quieter still after he had died. Her chest felt hollow, and her lips went quivery and out of her control. “No!” she said defiantly. “Uncle Dorian said children were quite a nuisance. Noisy. And always wanting a sweet when one is trying to concentrate."
    He studied her. “I see."
    "No,” she said more firmly, “I don't care for children in the least."
    "Have you ever actually met one?"
    "Perhaps not, but Uncle Dorian told me all about them. He preferred to keep hedgehogs."
    Ransom glanced at the bound stranger on the opposite seat, making sure the man's injured head still lolled without conscious volition. He took Merlin's hand and leaned near her. “Wiz,” he said, making his voice as gentle as he could, “do you understand that because of what happened between us, there is a possibility that you might bear a child?"
    Her eyes widened. “But I don't want one."
    He found, to his chagrin, that her answer cut him far more deeply than was reasonable. He swallowed the angry retort that rose to his lips. “I'm afraid,” he said carefully, “that it is no longer a matter of what either of us wants. If I—If you carry my child, then—” He broke off, overwhelmed suddenly by a vivid image of the chapel and crypt at Mount Falcon—two small marble memorials and a larger one above them.
    His throat closed on old and familiar emotions: guilt and frustration and grief for things that had never been. He had not married for love. He had never expected to do so. Yet somehow his gay young wife of ten months—his grandfather's choice—had left a space in him that had remained empty for twelve years. He had not really known her. He had not known the twin daughters who lived three hours longer than their mother. And abruptly the thought that Merlin Lambourne did not care to have his child brought a wave of profound and unexpected desolation.
    He glanced away and let the hurt roll over him, waiting for common sense to reassert itself. Outside, a sheep-dog in a nearby pasture bunched its woolly herd and worried them through a gap in the hedgerow. Ransom watched until the little scene dropped out of sight and then said with his best diplomatic neutrality, “I suppose we need not address the problem unless it arises."
    Merlin did not appear to share his complacence. She was frowning at him with her full lower lip set in a pout. He supposed she could have no idea how seductive she looked, sitting there wrapped in a wildly rumpled dressing gown over the night rail she'd had on when he'd stolen her out of her bed.
    That had been rather dashing of him, he thought with a revival of humor. He wished he were carrying Merlin Lambourne off to a desert island where he could spend the next decade or so ravishing her.
    His intense physical attraction to her still surprised him. He had thought that after two days the effect of the aphrodisiac could not possibly still linger. But there it was. Since that triple funeral twelve years before, there had been no pressure for him to remarry. No more important family alliances to be made, no lack of male heirs in the direct line, with his younger brother Shelby and Shelby's son. There had been no reason for Ransom to even contemplate burdening his active and ordered life with marriage—until his baser instincts had entrapped him and he had found to his chagrin that he was not so very sorry to be