Free Megan Chance by A Heart Divided

maybe—"
    "Wait! Stop there. That one." His square hand stopped her ceaseless turning of the pages.
    Sari glanced at the illustration. "Velvet trim? A bustle?" She shook her head firmly. "No."
    "Then this one." Conor said. "I like those silk rosettes."
    She smiled. "Do you like them enough to spend hours making them? Because you might have to."
    The laughter in his blue eyes was hard to resist. "Ah, I'm a farmer now, Sari. I haven't got time for foolish pursuits. Or so your uncle tells me."
    "Then no rosettes."
    He reached over her and flipped the page. His voice lowered, vibrated with seductive tension as he pointed to the illustration. "No arguing with me on this one, I mean it. This dress. There must be someone who can make this dress."
    Sari caught her breath. The gown was beautiful, with tiny off-the-shoulder puffed sleeves that were edged with lace and silk flowers. Ruched trim followed the lines of the bodice to a polonaise caught at the side with wide bows. Yes, the gown was beautiful. It would look perfect on her, there was no doubt in her mind. She knew it because she'd been wearing one almost exactly like it the first night she met Jamie O'Brien.
    "No." Her voice was strangled. "Not that dress."
    The laughter was gone from his eyes, but they burned bright and intense as he turned to look at her. "I'll never forget how you looked that night. You lit up the room."
    "I was with Evan."
    "I remember thinking how lucky he was. There wasn't a woman in Tamaqua who could hold a candle to you that night."
    "Are those just words? Or did you really think that?" She forced the question from a throat that felt too tight to breathe. The lamplight played on his hair, sending golden highlights where before it had been just brown.
    "I really thought that." He smiled softly. The truth of it was in his voice. "Don't you remember? I asked you to dance, and you refused me."
    "You were a murderer. Evan said you'd killed someone in Buffalo." It had been hard to believe. He'd seemed too gentle, too quick to smile and laugh to be a killer. She remembered how he'd looked, polished and clean, standing across the room with his dark hair waving over his forehead. He'd been telling stories in a broad Irish brogue to a group of laughing men, and the evidence of his easy charm compelled her even as it made her instantly wary. Almost as if she'd known, somehow sensed, that he was dangerous to her. She swallowed. "I've been wondering about your brother. Is he still in jail?"
    "My brother?" He looked confused for a moment, his blue eyes clouded.
    A strange distress started in her heart. "Your brother. The one you killed that man for."
    "Oh." He paused—a long time. Then he said gently, "Sari, I have no brother."
    "No brother."
    "No."
    "But—" she struggled against her own sudden understanding. "But you said—you said you killed that man because he hurt your brother—what was his name?—Aaron, wasn't it? Wasn't it Aaron?"
    He said nothing.
    Sari rushed on. "You said you left Buffalo to keep your parents from suffering."
    His gaze was inscrutable. "That wasn't me. It was Jamie."
    The words lodged against her heart like a stone. For a moment Sari couldn't breathe. She'd known Jamie O'Brien was only a role he'd played, but for some reason she hadn't thought that everything had been a lie. Not everything. All those secrets they'd shared while twined in each other's arms. All the stories about his poverty-stricken family, his suffering mother, and the brother who'd gone to jail for a crime he didn't commit.
    How easily he'd told those stories. She remembered listening with tears in her eyes, remembered aching with the poignancy of his pain. She had fallen in love with that man. With that man's life.
    But that life was only a sham, a script written and performed for her benefit. Even though Jamie O'Brien hadn't turned out to be the man she thought he was, she hadn't expected this depth of deceit. Now, suddenly, she realized she didn't know Conor Roarke