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to the consistency of butter.
    Emmeline closed her eyes and let her head fall back, feeling the sun on her face. Gil proceeded to caress her right instep, her arch, the protruding bone on the inside of her ankle. However innocent and undemanding his touch, Gil was seducing her, and she wasn’t sure she would resist him. She was a tactile creature, shameless as a house cat, and it had been seven long years since she’d felt those light, leisurely strokes on her flesh.
    She sagged backward into the deep, fragrant grass, expecting him to undress her, as he had done so many times beforetheir parting, and make love to her on the creek bank, in the warm light of the sun.
    Instead, Gil shoved her slippers back on, first one, then the other.
    Emmeline sat up, stunned, disappointed, and more than a little insulted.
    Gil’s expression was grim. “I want you more than I ever have before,” he said, “but I won’t have you saying I seduced you. If you want my lovemaking, you’ll have to ask for it.”
    Emmeline opened her mouth, then closed it again. She wasn’t ready to ask, though she most certainly desired him, and the dichotomy was nearly overwhelming. Feeling spurned, she clambered awkwardly to her feet, her sodden hem and petticoats clinging to her legs and ankles. She shook a finger at him, but when she tried to speak, all that came out of her mouth was an indignant squeak.
    Gil chuckled and stood up with considerably more grace than Emmeline had exhibited. “Take a breath,” he said. “You look as though you’re strangling.”
    Emmeline complied, and sucked in one outraged gasp. The mirth dancing in Gil’s eyes incensed her, even as a part of her celebrated the easy ingenuousness of his laughter.
    “The devil take you, Gil Hartwell,” she managed to blurt, and then slogged off toward the waiting surrey.
    Gil stopped her, taking a light hold on her shoulder and turning her to face him. “I’m not scorning you, Emmeline,” he said, wearing a diplomatic expression now, made partly of amusement and partly of tenderness. “Please understand that. If I’d taken you just now—and God knows, I wanted to—you’d have hated me for it within the hour.”
    Emmeline sagged a little, for she could see the truth in his words. “How will I know,” she asked in a small voice, “when I’m ready?”
    Gil reached out, traced her lips with his fingertip. “You’ll know,” he assured her.
    She searched his face and saw some of the old Gil there, and more of the new. In many ways, he was a stranger, this husband of hers. The man she remembered would have had her beside the stream, and gloried in her pleasure as well as his own. The old Gil wouldn’t have thought beyond the moment, and in some ways, Emmeline missed that side of him.
    “If someone had told me you were going to come back someday,” she said softly, “I wouldn’t have believed things could be so complicated. Did you know it would be like this?”
    Gil’s smile was infinitely tender and unspeakably sad. “I’ve learned to take life as it comes,” he replied. “Six and a half years as a virtual slave makes a man patient, Emmeline, when it doesn’t kill him.”
    She wanted then to put her arms around Gil, to give comfort instead of taking it. For the first time, it struck her that she’d been selfish, thinking merely of her own grievances, never really considering what might have happened to him. “Will you come for supper?” she asked, keeping her distance because she sensed he wanted that. “Tonight, I mean, at seven o’clock?”
    Gil executed a stately bow. “I would be honored, Miss Emmeline,” he replied. “Not to mention relieved to be spared my own cooking, if only for one night. Now, get yourself into that surrey and drive away before chivalry gives way to lust and I take you where you stand.”
    Although Emmeline did not find the latter idea entirely unappealing, she turned and hurried toward the surrey all the same, scrambling up into