Free Scandal on Rincon Hill by Shirley Tallman Page B

Were my feelings so easy to read? I wondered. Was I deluding myself into believing that I was immune to Pierce's considerable charm?
    No! I could not credit the notion. Irritably, I pushed up my sleeves and stabbed my pen rather too vigorously into the inkwell, causing a trail of blue spots to dribble across the top of my desk. I blotted them with my handkerchief, then looked over what little I had managed to write over the past hour. Just as I feared, it was complete gibberish. I crumpled up the page and flung it into the wastebasket to join several other failed attempts.
    Rising from my desk, I moved to the small back room of my office, where I brewed a cup of strong tea. Carrying it to thearmchair I'd situated in front of the window overlooking Sutter Street, I sat down, determined to examine my muddled emotions.
    It was no use, I thought. I could not go on lying to myself like this. It was time to admit that I had found Pierce Godfrey intriguing since our first meeting at his brother's charity dinner on Russian Hill earlier that year. I had to smile. It was no mystery why it had happened—the man was handsome and self-assured enough to turn any woman's head. It just shouldn't have been my head. I was supposed to be immune to such girlish flights of fancy!
    My attention was caught by a black and white dog rushing headlong into Sutter Street, and nearly being hit by a fishmonger's cart. The startled horse reared onto its hind legs and it required all the driver's strength—and a barrage of swear words—to bring him under control. Oblivious to the commotion it had created, the canine culprit completed its sprint across the street and into the alley that cut between the butcher's shop and Millie Thomas's flower store.
    From my perch above the fray, I watched as the drivers caught in the gridlock behind the cart grew angry and strident. It struck me that the congestion below my window provided an apt analogy for my disordered thoughts. Just like the carriages and wagons piled one upon the other on the street, my feelings seemed to be caught in a traffic jam of their own: bunched together, making a great deal of racket, and not one of them getting me anywhere.
    It was ironic, really, and not a little humbling. I had long prided myself on my ability to control my emotions, and boldly forge ahead on the path I had chosen for my life. Now, it appeared I was caught on the horns of a dilemma I had never expected to encounter. Sarah Woolson, I told myself wearily, it seems that you are a fallible human being after all!
    My mind traveled back to the night several months ago, when Pierce arrived at my house to propose that we marry and travel to Hong Kong together. It was embarrassing to admit that I could still remember how he had kissed me. It had been totally unlike any kiss I had experienced before or since.
    Once again, I had to smile. In truth, I had kissed less than half a dozen men in my entire twenty-eight years. Before Pierce, only one man had left any lasting impression on my heart: the handsome and entirely too dashing Benjamin Forest.
    Just remembering his name caused my cheeks to burn. Benjamin had been my first love, the man I had never thought, nor intended, to meet. By nineteen, I had already vowed to dedicate my life to the law. If spinsterhood was the price I must pay for achieving this goal, so be it.
    This obsession with my future left me woefully unprepared to meet a man like Benjamin. He'd been twenty-two, one of Samuel's university friends, who spent considerable time at our house. Like me, he planned a future as an attorney, and to my delight we shared the same vision of how everyone, women as well as men, poor and rich alike, might one day be entitled to equal representation under the law. My error was in imagining that he would want an idealistic female attorney to take her place at his side.
    In hindsight, I understood how he had so effortlessly swept a naïve girl off her feet. Benjamin was charm itself,