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and Nat prevailed upon me to find him a spouse while I was here. I told him he was off his fool head."
    Delia felt a knot of sick disappointment forming in her stomach. She should have known such a man as Tyler Savitch —so handsome and fairly oozing masculine charm—wouldn't need to stoop so low, nor would he ever be so desperate that he would advertise for a wife. What a wooden-headed fool she'd made of herself, first spying on him in that awful, shameful way, and now this... She imagined herself as he must see her in this moment, standing before him in all her ignorance and dirt, and she wanted to die.
    She forced herself to meet his eyes. "What happened t' her, yer friend's wife?" She thought it probably behooved her to ask, for if she were to go gallivanting off to The Maine and marry a perfect stranger, it would be nice to know how the man's first wife had died. What if he had done the poor woman in?
    Ty hitched his hip onto the edge of the desk. He looked down at the hands he had clasped in his lap. Delia looked at them as well. They were a gentleman's hands, long and fine-boned. There was no dirt under those nails.
    He swung one long, booted leg back and forth restlessly. "She died of throat distemper."
    "Oh." She swallowed, breathed, and wondered how things now stood between them. Did he mean to bring her with him into The Maine wilderness to be wife to his friend? Did she want him to? Nothing really had changed. She still yearned with an ache that was almost physical to get away from the misery of her life in Boston, to be given a fresh start somewhere, a chance to become respectable, to become a lady...
    "An' how old are these motherless children?"
    "One is nine. The other's three, I think."
    "Oh." At least they weren't babies. Delia knew nothing about taking care of children, though she wasn't going to tell him that.
    "What's he like then, this friend of yers?"
    "Nathaniel Parkes is more in the nature of a neighbor than a close friend, but he's a good man, Delia. You needn't fear that. He owns over two hundred acres of timberland and farms another hundred and twenty acres, although he's only got about half of that cleared as yet. He's built himself a good-sized house. You'll have to work hard, but the Sagadahoc is a bountiful land and you won't lack for much."
    "I'm not afraid of workin' hard."
    "From what I've seen there doesn't appear to be much you are afraid of." He looked up at her and now his mouth twisted crookedly. She loved the way his smile transformed his face. His lips, she decided, did not go with the rest of his sharp, hawkish features. They were full and sensual, especially the lower lip. She wondered how it would feel to run her finger along it—
    God, Delia, ye wooden-headed fool! D' ye think he'd ever let the likes of ye get close enough t'feel his lips, stinkin' as ye do of a distillery?
    "Do ye live there yersel' then, at this Merrymeeting Settlement?"
    "Most of the time."
    She wet her mouth, her eyes shifting away from his. "An' are ye... are ye married?"
    He said nothing at first and Delia cursed her flapping tongue. Then he pushed himself off the desk. It brought him right next to her, so close she imagined she could feel the heat of him. And smell him as well—leather and tobacco and something else that she couldn't really describe except as a certain manliness. Yes, that was it, a manly smell.
    "I'm not married," he said abruptly. "But Nat Parkes does need a wife... if you're still willing."
    For some strange reason his physical nearness had brought a rush of blood thrumming through her body, causing a rushing sound in her ears like breakers on a beach. She lifted her head to answer him and her eyes fell on his mouth, and the words died unspoken in her throat.
    "I see you've changed your mind. I can't say that I blame you," he said. "It was a damn-fool idea anyway, and I told Nat as much on the day he hatched it. Still, I won't let you go away empty-handed." He thrust a pair of long,