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existence would suit me admirably. I would not be forever begging you to take me to town and all its entertainments.”
    The hair was an illusion, he thought. She was as cold a fish as he had ever encountered.
    Marry
her?
    But being married to her would be the next best thing to remaining single. He could not remain single,however. He must marry. She was twenty-seven years old, older than he. She had grown past both youth and innocence. She had loved once. Did that mean . . . ?
    “Are you a virgin, Miss Muirhead?” he asked. Again it was a brutal question. It was also an unnecessarily impertinent one. He was not seriously considering her outrageous proposal, after all. Was he?
    “Yes,” she said, “I am.”
    They stood and stared at each other.
    “Are you related to Graham Muirhead?” he asked her abruptly.
    “He is my brother,” she told him.
    Ah. His eyes strayed to her hair and back to her green eyes. Graham was dark haired and dark eyed, but he was her brother. It was hardly a recommendation in her favor.
    She must have read his thoughts.
    “I am suggesting that you marry
me
, Lord Berwick,” she said, “not my brother.”

3
    T here was an uncomfortably long silence during which the Earl of Berwick stood where he was, his shoulder propped against the ancient oak, his arms folded over his chest, his booted feet crossed at the ankles. He looked rather menacingly large and . . . dark. He looked dark, of course, because he was in the shadow of the tree, but rather than muting the effect of the scar across his cheek, the dimness accentuated it—and it was the cheek turned more fully toward her.
    There was not a glimmering of humor or any other emotion on his face or in his blank eyes.
    Whatever had made her think she could marry him? Or that he would marry her? He was all brooding, dark emptiness. Even dangerous, though she had not thought
that
until this moment. For one did not know, would probably never know, what emotions were buried deep inside him, ready to erupt at any moment.
    She wondered what she would do if the silence stretched much longer. Perhaps he had no intention of moving or saying anything. Should she turn and walk away, then? From her last chance? But chance for what?Perhaps marrying him would not after all be more desirable than living the rest of her life as she was, in dreary but independent spinsterhood.
    He spoke at last.
    “Tell me something, Miss Muirhead,” he said. “If marriage is of such importance to you, even the poor apology for a marriage into which you are proposing to enter with me, why are you still unwed at the age of twenty-seven?”
    Ah.
    Because no one has asked me?
It was true. But the answer was not nearly as simple as that.
    “I am ineligible,” she told him, lifting her chin. An understatement if ever she had spoken one.
    “Yet you expect me to marry you?” His eyebrows soared again and he looked more the way she had expected him to look from the start—arrogant and supercilious. “In what way are you ineligible, pray? You have just told me your father is a baronet with a solid lineage and that your mother was the daughter of a viscount. Birth surely counts for something in the marriage mart. And you do not exactly look like a gargoyle.”
    Was that a compliment?
    She drew a slow breath.
    “My sister ran off with a married man six years ago,” she told him. “He married her a year later, a scant three months after his wife died and one month before her confinement, but their marriage restored only a very limited degree of respectability to what had been a very public scandal. She will never be received by any of the highest sticklers in polite society, and we have not been entirely forgiven either, for my father refused to cast heroff even when for a few months her seducer abandoned her to return to his dying wife.”
    “We,”
he said. “Why, pray, did the scandalous behavior of your sister and the socially unwise reaction of your father make you a