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me."
    "I merely speak the truth. It is odd, is it not?" She turned to him, her brows knitting together in an earnest expression. "But I have felt very close to you from the moment I read your first letter. Do you not find it the most amazing stroke of fate that we discovered each other through the post?"
    "A most amazing stroke." Simon thought about how many weeks he had spent researching the best approach to take with Miss Emily Faringdon. A letter written to her on the pretext of having heard mention of her interest in poetry had finally seemed the quickest, easiest way to get a foot back in the door of St. Clair Hall.
    "I knew from your first letter that you were someone very special, my lord."
    "It was I who was struck by the impression that I was corresponding with a very special female." Gallantly, Simon picked up her hand and kissed it.
    She smiled mistily. "I had dreamed so long of a relationship such as ours," she confessed.
    He slanted her an assessing glance. Easier and easier. The woman was already half in love with him. Once again Simon slammed the door on that niggling sense of guilt that played in some distant corner of his mind. "Tell me, Miss Faringdon, just how do you view our relationship?"
    She blushed, but her eyes were gleaming with enthusiasm. "A very pure sort of relationship, my lord. A relationship formed on a higher plane, if you know what I mean."
    "A higher plane?"
    "Yes. The way I see it, ours is quite clearly an intellectual connection. It is a noble thing of the mind, a relationship that takes place in the metaphysical realm. It is a friendship based on shared sensibilities and mutual understanding. One might say we have a spiritual communion, my lord. A union untainted by baser thoughts and considerations. Our passions are of the highest order."
    "Hell and damnation," Simon said.
    "My lord?"
    She looked up at him with such inquiring innocence, he wanted to shake her. She could not be that naive, in spite of her poetry. She was, after all, twenty-four years old and here was that matter of the Unfortunate Incident Gillingham had mentioned.
    "I fear you have sadly overestimated my noble virtues, Miss Faringdon," he said bluntly. "I did not come down here to Hampshire to foster a shadowy metaphysical connection with you."
    The glow went out of her eyes in an instant. "I beg your pardon, my lord?"
    Simon gritted his teeth and retrieved her hand. "I came down here with a far more mundane goal, Miss Faringdon."
    "What would that be, sir?"
    "I am here to ask your father for your hand in marriage."
    The reaction was not at all what he had expected from a spinster with a clouded past who should have been thrilled to hear an earl was going to speak to her father on the subject of marriage.
    "Bloody hell," Emily squeaked.
    Simon lost his patience with the strange female sitting beside him. "That tears it," he announced. "I think what is needed here, Miss Faringdon, is a means of cutting through all that romantical claptrap about love on a higher plane that you have been feeding yourself all these months."
    "My lord, what are you talking about?"
    "Why, the darker passions, of course, Miss Faringdon." He reached out and jerked her into his arms. "I am suddenly consumed with curiosity to see if you really do enjoy hem."

Chapter 3
     
    Emily was stunned to find herself locked in an unbreakable embrace. It had been five years since a man had held her in this intimate fashion. And that it should be Simon, of all people, who was holding her this way now was almost beyond comprehension. Simon was her companion of the metaphysical realm, her noble, high-minded, sensitive friend, her intellectual soul mate.
    Only in the darkest hours of the night and in her most secret dreams had she allowed herself to fantasize about him as a flesh and blood lover.
    "Oh, Simon," she breathed, gazing up at him with a sense of wonder and longing that was so fierce it made her tremble in his arms.
    He did not answer. His golden eyes