Free For Love of the Earl by Jessie Clever Page B

  The lightning flashed across her face, highlighting her slightly squat nose and too rounded cheeks.  
    Alec perched himself on the cabinets.  
    "I can't make her laugh," he said.
    Lady Cavanaugh tilted her head.  
    "I beg your pardon?   I don't see how your ability at humor is a problem here."
    Alec shook his head.
    "She seems to have an issue with me being an earl, but I don't understand what it means."  
    "Mmm.   She's an orphan, correct?"  
    "Yes."   Alec ran his fingers through his hair thinking it may relieve some of the ache that was suddenly beating the back of his forehead.  
    "Not everyone is comfortable in money and nobility.   Especially those who have never had it.   They may come to despise it."  
    Alec nodded.   "Sarah definitely despises it.   But I'm not sure it's the money she has a problem with.   I think it's just me."  
    "How do you figure?"  
    Alec laughed hesitantly.   "I don't think I'm what she wants."  
    "The Earl of Stryden is something a warm blooded woman doesn't want?"  
    "Not this woman."  
    Lady Cavanaugh slid off the desk and adjusted her skirts.   She came up to him and raised one hand to rest it against his cheek.   Thunder rattled the windowpanes as Alec looked into her startling golden eyes.   Lady Cavanaugh was tall for a woman.   Nearly six feet, and her eyes were level with his as he sat on the cabinet.  
    "I think you should check again, Alec."   She dropped her hand and made her way back through the maze of books.   "And in the meantime, I think it best that people believe your brother tried to ravish me tonight.   No one is going to believe that you tried."   She smiled softly, a world of empathy in the curve of her lips.  
    Alec nodded.  
    Lady Cavanaugh slipped through the doors as lightning lit up the room.  
    ~
    On a ship bound for France
    April 1815

    Sarah picked her head up from Alec's chest.
    "That's really what you did with Lady Cavanaugh?"  
    "That's really what we did."  
    Sarah laid her head back down.  
    "How did she know?" she whispered.  
    "Mmm?" Alec murmured.  
    "How did she know that it wasn't you that was the problem?"
    Alec stilled.
    "What do you mean?"
    Sarah did not answer right away.   Alec would have normally prodded her into talking with some childish remark, but there was something about the moment that made him refrain.   Something made him hold himself in check, and he felt the unwanted weight of self control.  
    Finally, Sarah spoke, shrugging her shoulders against his arm.
    "I'm not sure how to say it.   To say how I felt that day.   There was a lot going on in my head.   It was not as if I was only marrying a person I had never met before, but I was also voluntarily joining a profession in which I could very well end up dead."
    A small twinge of guilt tripped across his spine, but he did not say anything.   He waited for her to continue.
    "It was all a bit much, and I will admit that perhaps I acted rather out of character."
    Now Alec laughed.  
    "It was not out of character, love, but it certainly was rather impolite.   You yelled.   In God's church."
    He felt her try to shake her head against his chest.
    "It was not as if anyone in that church had never heard a woman yell before."
    Alec had to agree with her on that, but-
    "They may have heard yelling from a woman, but it was not expected of a lady."
    He felt it the instant she withdrew at his words.   She didn't physically move away, but she did not need to.   He felt it in the way her breath paused ever so slightly, and she adjusted her head just the barest of spaces.   And he knew that he had said the wrong thing.   He should have known his attempts to make her laugh would fail once again.   It was not as if this situation were any different.   It did not matter if their lives were in peril as they bobbed in the English Channel aboard a vessel bound to take them to their doom.   She was still Sarah.   And Sarah disliked him.