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doesn’t mean I can’t worry about you—donkey stubborn and as wilful as a three-month-old puppy as you clearly are. You need someone by who isn’t blinded by charm and physical perfection to the heart of a vixen that lies underneath it all.’
    ‘I could be just like you, then,’ she said unsympathetically, trying to fight a ridiculous feeling inside her that something astonishingly promising had just fallen empty at her feet like a deflated hot air balloon.
    ‘Hah!’ he raged on, resuming his pacing again, except now it was more of a wild-catlope than a wolfish fury as he worked himself up about her shortcomings instead of Rich’s plight. ‘We’re not in the least alike, you and I, not in the least similar in any way,’ he accused as he kicked a skewed edging tile, then had to pretend it didn’t hurt as it proved to be a lot more fixed in place than it looked.
    ‘Well,’ she said sarcastically and folded her arms to stop herself going up to him and holding on to halt his frustrated activity, ‘we certainly have a foul temper in common, if nothing else.’
    ‘I’ve enough to make me foul tempered; you could infuriate a whole regiment without even pausing for breath.’
    ‘No, I couldn’t,’ she argued for the sake of arguing as much as to prove a point now. ‘Even I can’t shout loudly enough to make that many bone-headed, born-stupid, stubborn-as-rock men hear me all at once.’
    ‘Ah, but they’d hush long enough to listen to the likes of you, Persephone,’ he told her, as if saying her name softly like that ought to cancel out his unflattering opinion of her up until now.
    ‘Why?’ she demanded, uncrossing herarms so she could fist her hands and pretend he was wrong.
    ‘Because you’re as lovely as half-a-dozen goddesses put together,’ he told her with a wry grin that acknowledged it was a silly thing to say and almost made her long to melt into the sort of weak-kneed female he obviously admired.
    ‘With a dozen fists to hit you with and as many feet to kick you, I think I could support being that lovely,’ she said and tried not to laugh at the very idea of it.
    ‘You’d fall over,’ he informed her solemnly. Oh, the temptation of him as he stood there, suddenly as light-hearted and heart-breakingly handsome as Mother Nature had intended him to be.
    ‘True, but at least I’d do it happily, knowing you were sure to be hurting far more than I was,’ she said, determined not to be charmed into a quieter, more accepting frame of mind.
    ‘I bet you were a devilish little girl, ready to lash out at anyone who told you not to do something merely because you were born a girl,’ he said reflectively.
    If he but knew it, he was in danger of succeeding by using his acute mind to readher true character where all his raging and charming and unreasonableness had failed to persuade her. Mainly because he was right, she told herself. His knowing all her frustrations at being born a girl in a world dominated by men, when every time they met they quarrelled and struck sparks off each other, felt oddly disarming.
    ‘Please don’t think me so changed I won’t do it again, Lord Calvercombe,’ she told him rather half-heartedly.
    ‘Yet it would have been such a shame if you had been born one of us unsatisfactory males instead of a goddess-like female, Miss Seaborne, for then I would be denied the sheer pleasure of looking at you,’ he told her as if it were no more than passing the time of day.
    ‘I’m not a cold collection of limbs and good enough features to be gawped at like yonder statue, my lord. I am a human being with all the faults and failures and hopes and dreams we earthly creatures are subject to.’
    ‘But it doesn’t hurt the rest of us fallible beings that you’re a sheer pleasure to look upon, Miss Persephone Seaborne,’ he informed her quietly and strode dangerously close again, to look down at her as if he’dfind out all the secrets of her inner soul she’d managed to