Free Ten Things I Love About You by Julia Quinn

reasons why this was a wholly unacceptable scenario.
    One: He had no idea what to say. This might seem repetitive, except that Two: He always knew what to say, and Three: especially with women.
    Which led rather conveniently to Four: A happy by-product of his glibness was Five: he’d never insulted a woman in his life, not unless she truly deserved it, which Six: this woman didn’t. Which meant that Seven: He needed to apologize and Eight: He had no idea how to do so.
    A facility with apologies would depend upon a propensity to behave in a manner requiring them. Which he did not. It was one of the few things in his life of which he was inordinately proud.
    But this brought him back to Nine: He had no idea what to say, and Ten: Something about this girl had turned him absolutely stupid.
    Stupid.
    How did the rest of humanity endure it, this awkward silence in the face of a woman? Sebastian found it intolerable.
    “You asked me to kiss you,” he said. It wasn’t the first thing that came to mind, but it was the second.
    From her gasp—which he suspected was large enough to change the tides—he had a feeling he should have waited for the seventh, at least.
    “Are you accusing me of—” She cut herself off, her lips clamping together in an angry, frustrated line. “Well, whatever it is … that … you’re accusing me …” And then, just when he thought she’d given up, she finished with, “of.”
    “I’m not accusing you of anything,” he said. “I’m merely pointing out that you wanted a kiss, and I obliged and …”
    And what? What
was
he pointing out? And where had his mind gone? He couldn’t think a complete sentence, much less speak one.
    “I could have taken advantage of you,” he said stiffly. Good God, he sounded like a stick.
    “Are you saying you didn’t?”
    Could she
possibly
be that innocent? He leaned down, his eyes boring into hers. “You have no idea how many ways I
didn’t
take advantage of you,” he told her. “How many ways I could have done. How many—”
    “What?” she snapped. “What?”
    He held his tongue, or perhaps more accurately, bit the damned thing off. There was no way he was going to tell her how many ways he’d
wanted
to take advantage of her.
    Her. Miss No Name.
    It was better that way, certainly.
    “Oh for the love of God,” he heard himself say. “What the devil is your name?”
    “I can see that you’re most eager to know it,” she snipped.
    “Your
name,”
he bit off.
    “Before you tell me yours?”
    He exhaled, a long frustrated whoosh of air, then raked his hand over his scalp. “Was it my imagination, or did we have a perfectly civil conversation not ten minutes earlier?”
    She opened her mouth to speak, but he didn’t let her. “No, no,” he continued, perhaps a little too grandly, “it was quite more than civil. I might even dare to call it pleasant.”
    Her eyes softened, not to the point where he might have considered her malleable—oh very well, not even
close
to that, but they softened nonetheless.
    “I shouldn’t have asked you to kiss me,” she said.
    But he noticed that she did not apologize for it. And he noticed that he was very glad that she did not.
    “Surely you understand,” she continued quietly, “that it is much more important that I learn your identity than the other way around.”
    He looked down at her hands. They weren’t balled, or fisted, or frozen into claws. Hands alwaysgave people away. They tensed, or they shook, or they clutched at each other as if they might—through some sort of impossible witchcraft—save themselves from whatever dark fate awaited them.
    This girl was holding the fabric of her skirt. Tightly. She was nervous. Still, she was holding herself with remarkable dignity. And Sebastian knew that she spoke the truth. There was nothing she could do that would ruin him, while he, through one loose or false word, could destroy her forever. It was not the first time he’d been inordinately glad