Free Megan Frampton by Baring It All

Chapter 1
    “Would you like some lemonade?”
    No, I’d rather that you kissed me
. “Lemonade would be lovely, thank you.”
    Violet watched him stride off in pursuit of her beverage, and she heaved a sigh she hoped wouldn’t shake the chandeliers hanging overhead. She and Christian had been betrothed for a month now, and besides ensuring he danced with her at least twice when they were at the same social events, nothing was different than before he’d proposed.
    Even at the moment he’d proposed, he’d had a distant look in his eye. A distant look that in any other man would have meant he was thinking about someone else, but Violet knew he wasn’t. Unless the someone else was some dead philosopher, and she hardly thought Christian would rather marry, much less kiss, one of them.
    She’d have thought they would at least have kissed on the occasion of their betrothal. But despite standing at what she presumed was in the correct attitude, all he’d done was mutter, “Well, that’s settled, then,” and strode off to somewhere. Somewhere she—not to mention her lips—was not.
    Did he just not want to kiss anyone? No, since his sister—her best friend—had shared some of Christian’s exploits with the female gender over the years, she knew he had an interest in women. He just seemed not to have realized yet that
she
was a woman.
    Despite having proposed.
    Why did she have to fall in love with someone so clueless? Someone who didn’t realize that when one asked a female to marry him, that implied some sort of … activity on one’s part?
    Clueless Christian.
    That had to be it. Their families had known each other for so long, and Christian wasn’t used to seeing Violet as anything more than the girl who was always with his sister. Whom he took for granted as much as he did his sister. That Violet had developed an abiding passion for Christian at the age of ten was something she had been determined just to live with. Until he asked her to marry him.
    And all of her hopes had been realized. All of her hopes, that is, except that he would kiss her. Which was when she figured out almost nothing had changed between them after all, despite his having asked her to spend the rest of her life with him. Other than that, nothing.
    His family had prodded him into it. Probably by promising they would leave him alone once his marital future was settled.
    She could almost hear the conversation: his father pronouncing at the breakfast table, “Son, you have to be married sometime, and it might as well be someone you know. Lady Violet is an excellent choice.”
    To which Christian probably mumbled through his toast, “Fine, excellent. Can you pass me that notebook? I think I’ve discovered a shortcut for Pythagoras’s
tetractys
. Oh, and I’ll take care of that other thing next week.” That “other thing” being asking Violet to marry him.
    She was going to have to do
something
about the situation. She just had no clue what that something was; she did know, however, that she would not marry Christian, no matter how much she loved him, if she hadn’t at least been assured he knew who she was, and how her relative femininity would work with his masculinity.
    “Here you are,” Christian said, handing her a glass of lemonade. Already he was squinting off into the distance, as though calculating the circumference of the room, the number of people, and how many more could reasonably fit, allowing for trays of lobster patties.
    As always, her breath caught when she looked at him. He was tall, remarkably tall, so tall that when they did kiss, they would probably have to be lying down—a thought that made Violet’s heart flutter—with thick brown hair she longed to run her fingers through. His body was lean, and though he’d gone through a gawky period as he was growing into his limbs, he now possessed an unconscious feline grace. He was an excellent dancer, which was surprising given how little he’d cared to practice