Leo reclined on the blanket, deliberately lazy, and shrugged. “My elder brother will inherit the earldom and all of its responsibilities. All that’s left to me is to enjoy life and stay out of any terribly public trouble.”
“Huh.” Serena hid her expression by pulling on her shirt. “I don’t mean to sound judgmental about your life choices, but that sounds a little…empty.”
You have no idea
, Leo thought bleakly, but when her tousled head popped out of the collar of her shirt, he made sure his expression reflected the sardonic amusement he used as armor. “Not at all. Life without expectations is very freeing.”
“No one ever expected anything of you?” Serena’s curious question was delivered gently, more of a tickle than a slap, but somehow it still stung Leo into sitting up and reaching for his pants.
“Perhaps, when I was quite young.” He shrugged into his shirt and did up the buttons, idly noting the creases in the fine linen fabric. “But our mother died when I was only a little chap, and soon after that, my father gave up on me completely in favor of devoting all his time and attention to my elder brother, William.”
Serena frowned sympathetically. “That’s awful!”
“Not at all.” Leo shook out his trousers and stepped into them, hitching the charcoal gray up his thighs. “Father was no fool. His every hope for the future of the family rests on William—it’s only sensible that he should spend his parental efforts there, rather than wasting them on…”
A blinking idiot of a boy, too stupid even to learn to read
.
Swallowing down the bitter memories, Leo flashed his most rakish grin and bowed from the waist with a flourish. “On a scoundrel and wastrel like me.”
And that was true as well, because once Leo had gotten over being angry with his father, the world, and himself, he’d dedicated his life to not caring about anything. Which was harder than it sounded. Without meaning to, he’d made friends—Miles Harrington, Zane Bishop, and Cooper Haynes chief among them—and they had opened a tiny crack in the wall encircling Leo’s heart.
Serena grinned, although there was a searching light in her black coffee eyes that made him nervous. “Come on, scoundrel. Let’s get back to work. I’m determined to find the very best reading possible for Sanctuary Island’s wedding of the century.”
She curled up in the center of the blanket and immediately became absorbed in stacking her books in some sort of order that made sense only to her. When Leo sat next to her, though, she reached out at once to pull him closer.
Hooking his chin over her shoulder and curving his arms around her waist, Leo breathed in her scent of ink, paper, and book dust. Serena plucked the top book from her stack and started to read aloud, the gentle cadence of her voice washing over him like a song he could only hope would get stuck in his head.
And as they enjoyed the fading warmth of a bright winter’s day and the freshness of a salty ocean breeze, Leo started to fear that the crack his friends had made in his armor was splitting open wider and wider…wide enough for pixie-like Serena Lightfoot and her passion for books to slip through.
Over the next weeks, Leo spent his days exploring the island with Cooper, discussing the reception plans with Zane, and reassuring Miles and Greta that said reception wouldn’t break any laws of God or man. And he spent his evenings, after the library closed, with Serena.
Not for the first time, he was glad he’d insisted on staying on at the Fireside Inn even when Cooper and Zane had succumbed to Greta’s request that they move their things to the Harrington family home on Sanctuary Island.
After that first day up on Honeysuckle Ridge, Leo was determined to keep this affair dabbling happily in shallow waters. Leave the deep stuff to his friends; let them lose Miles’s bet along with their hearts and their freedom. Leo had a good thing going with Serena, the perfect woman, who asked nothing of Leo except his desire.
Desire was something he could give her, freely and without hesitation. In fact, he was honest enough with himself to admit that he couldn’t stop it now if he wanted to. His desire for Serena was almost a physical need. It was difficult to wait through the long hours of her work day at the library for the moment when she would emerge from the brick building and lock the heavy door behind her.
Leo made sure he was waiting at the foot of the library’s front steps for her every day, with a smile and a kiss that communicated the hunger he’d stored up over their hours apart. And he was equally sure to resist her invitations back to her small cottage overlooking the beach.
Even though it meant a long, cold ferry ride back to Winter Harbor on the mainland, Leo preferred to conduct their liaisons at the picturesque Fireside Inn. Not only because it was shockingly romantic, with its comfortably appointed rooms and friendly, yet polished service, but because he had the sense that going to Serena’s house would be too intimate. More like a real relationship—and that was a step he couldn’t allow himself to take.
Besides, he reasoned as he stretched his long legs out toward the grate, Serena’s beach cottage probably didn’t have a rollicking huge fireplace like the one that dominated the Fireside Inn’s main sitting room.
“Sitting here makes me glad the weather finally started turning wintry,” Serena murmured drowsily, smudging the words against his shoulder as he cuddled her closer to his side. “A little chill in the air makes a roaring fire feel so good.”
Pressing his lips to the golden curls crowning Serena’s head, Leo darted a glance at the darkened front hallway. The innkeeper had gone up to bed an hour ago, dimming the lights with a knowing smile and silently leaving her guests to enjoy each other by the flickering firelight.
“What books did you bring for us tonight?” Leo asked, curious as ever about the bulging knapsack at Serena’s feet. In between bouts of very pleasant distraction over the past days, they’d explored wedding benedictions, sonnets, quotes from defunct space cowboy TV shows, and nineteenth-century gothic romances.
“More poetry.” Serena straightened, perking up at the mention of her beloved books.
Leo let her go without protest, even though the absence of her lithe, warm body against his side left him chilled. As much as he enjoyed discovering the abundant joys of Serena’s sensually responsive body, he’d come to treasure these moments almost as much. Fully clothed, in no way improper—after all, reading aloud was a favorite drawing room activity of the staid Victorians—and yet he knew Serena more intimately through the passages and pieces she’d chosen to read him than he did through the careful removal of each article of clothing.
Serena Lightfoot was unlike any woman he’d ever known—unabashedly romantic, but in a quirky, offbeat way that made him smile rather than roll his eyes at the sentiment.
“More poetry, hmm? It’s going to have to be quite something to compete with that one about how falling in love is like owning a dog.”
Her eyes lit up, sparkling in the firelight. “I knew you’d like that poem! See, you always think I’m crazy at first, but I’ve got the goods. Admit it.”
“Freely and unreservedly.” Leo stretched his arms along the back of the sofa and crossed one ankle over the opposite knee. “I honestly never knew that expressions of sentiment—love—could be so…”
“What?”
He struggled to find the word he wanted. “Humorous. Playful?”
“Joyful,” Serena suggested, voice low and happy.
Leo nodded, and Serena clasped the book in her hands to her chest in a paroxysm of unselfconscious pleasure. “You totally get it. I love that you get it!”
You get me
, she didn’t say. But Leo heard it all the same, and a pang shot through his chest like an arrow.
Uncomfortably aware that he hadn’t been nearly as open with Serena as she’d been with him, Leo felt a deep-seated need to redress that imbalance in some small way. “In my house, growing up, ‘love’ was not a word one heard. Or spoke. I suppose I learned to think of it as a weakness.”
“Your parents never told you they loved you?” Serena was aghast, eyes wide and dark.
Deeply uncomfortable, Leo stared into the glowing embers of the fire and shrugged. “Please. There’s no need for the Oxfam eyes and trembling lips. I was hardly abused. In fact, I was given every advantage, everything I could possibly ask for.”
“Exactly,” Serena pointed out, pulling one leg up onto the sofa so she could face him directly. “Your parents gave you every
thing
you wanted—but not what you truly needed.”
Leo pulled his well-worn mask of sardonic amusement over his face. “I assure you, what you call ‘love’ is not necessary for survival.”
“Yes, it is.”
The intensity in Serena’s voice forced Leo to meet her laser-focused gaze. Still dazzled from staring into the fire for so long, Leo blinked away the dark stars exploding around Serena’s head. She almost seemed to glow in the dimly lit room, a lantern to light his way.
Leo shook off the fanciful thought. “I don’t even know what that means. How can you say that? How can you even believe in love, after everything that’s happened to you?”
“First of all, because I’ve felt it.”
Leo felt his upper lip curl into a snarl at the thought of Serena having real feelings of love for any of the men who’d used and discarded her, but she shook her head.
“There are lots of different kinds of love,” she reminded him. “I love my parents, and they love me back—almost too much, sometimes! But I’d take my mother’s nosiness into every aspect of my life and my father’s constant offers to pay for plane tickets home over the alternative. At least I grew up knowing I was loved. Oh, I hope I never meet your parents. I’d want to slap them silly for not telling you, every single day, how amazing and special and loveable you are.”
Leo stared at the passion lighting Serena’s elfin features. “I’ve only seen you like this when talking about your library and how important it is to the community. And your books.”
A hot pink blush stained her cheeks, but Serena didn’t back down. If anything, she became more impassioned. “And that’s another thing! I know love is real because all those writers and poets can’t be wrong. When I read about two people falling love, the truth of that resonates inside me—even if I haven’t experienced that kind of romantic love personally. I know it exists. You have to know it, too. Haven’t you been listening to the things we’ve read this week?”
Serena brandished the book she’d been holding, and it fell open. She scanned a couple of lines quickly, her breath fast and light. “I mean, come on. Look at this.”
Hooking her finger into the spine to hold the place, she turned the spread pages to face Leo. His gaze snapped from the incomprehensible jumble of black letters floating around the page to Serena’s pleading expression. His heart jumped into his throat and expanded, choking him.
It was his worst nightmare, come to life. He couldn’t move, couldn’t make a sound. The silence stretched horribly.
“I’m serious,” Serena insisted, shoving the book closer to him. “Read this line! Right here. How can you read this and not believe in love?”
***
Serena waited impatiently for Leo’s silvery gray eyes to dart across the immortal e.e. cummings poem, already savoring the sound of his deep cultured tones smoothly telling her he carried her heart within his heart.
After knowing Leo for only a handful of days, it was ridiculous how much she longed to hear him say those words to her, even if he were only speaking the words of a long-dead poet, not making a declaration of his own. Everything inside Serena rebelled at the way Leo was dismissing the entire concept of love. She had to hear him take it back.
But he didn’t. He didn’t say anything. After a single, agonized glance, he didn’t even look at the book in her hands. Frustrated, Serena shook the book until the pages rustled. “Hello? Anyone in there?”
When he finally spoke, his voice was as rusty as the inside of an antique watering can. “I don’t know what you want from me.”
I want to know I’m not alone with all these feelings and desires
, Serena wanted to cry.
I want to know you’re falling, too
.
Gathering her composure, she gently laid the open book in Leo’s lap. “I want to hear you read that poem. Not even the whole thing, just the last stanza—and then tell me you don’t have a clue what the poet is talking about.”
If Leo could do that, if he could honestly look her in the eye and deny the existence of love when it stared him in the face, Serena might stand a chance at being cured of this doomed infatuation.
Leo flexed one strong, long-fingered hand before resting it on the open page. She heard the dry harsh rasp of his breath, even over the crackle and whoosh of the flames in the hearth. Bending over the book, Leo stared down at the poem for an endless moment, lips moving silently. Serena waited, pulse fluttering, for Leo to start reading.
Suspended in breathless anticipation, Serena wasn’t prepared for the shock of Leo standing up from the couch in a rush of contained power. The book slid from his lap to the floor with a bang that made Serena wince for the state of the cover, but she couldn’t take her eyes off Leo to check it.
He strode stiff-legged to the mantel and gripped it with white-knuckled hands. Every line of Leo’s body thrummed with tension like a plucked violin string as he leaned forward to stare into the roaring fire. “I can’t do what you want,” he rasped, low and halting.
Disappointment lanced through her. “What? You can’t tell me love exists because you still don’t believe in it? Even after all the things we’ve read together, all the time we’ve spent together…”
Even after making me fall for you?
“No.” Leo straightened and faced her with the posture of a man facing down a firing squad. “I mean, I can’t read the poem aloud.”
Still battling her own disappointment, Serena arched a mocking brow. “If you have such bad stage fright you can’t read aloud to me in an empty room, how are you going to get up in front of a church full of people and do a wedding reading?”
“For God’s sake,” Leo burst out, stroking a hand through his hair and clenching until the muscles stood out in his forearm. “I don’t have a problem with stage fright. I have a problem with reading. As in, I never learnt.”