This Perfect Kiss by Melody Thomas Page A

moved as his gaze lowered to her mouth and the whole world faded to the storm in his eyes and to the one possibility that he would kiss her, the way he had so many years ago when he had not known who she was.
    Swallowing was hard. The frigid cold had finally found its way beneath her cloak and settled against her flesh. “If Lieutenant Ross told you to whom I was wed, you understand why I was reluctant to share. There are probably some in England who would gladly make a criminal of his wife. As the Etherton family’s bastard daughter, I already have a controversial pedigree without adding this notch.” Her chin lifted. “Not that I am ashamed.”
    His eyes narrowed slightly, but he looked out across the water before she could read his thoughts. “How long were you married?”
    She swallowed with sudden difficulty. “Daniel and I were t-together for less than a year,” she said, turning her head. “He was a g-good and d-decent man. He didn’t deserve what happened to him. I had a fever a week prior . . . typhoid and dysentery ran rampant in the hospitals and among the troops. I became ill and he had stayed with me.”
    â€œThat is why I never saw you at the hospital in Yorktown those last few weeks.”
    She nodded. “Daniel came home because of m-me and became ill himself. If he had not been so weak . . . ”
    His expression told her nothing, while hers must have surely revealed everything. He pulled the hood back over her head. “Look at you. You should not be on this deck as ill-dressed as you are.”
    The wind pushed strands of her hair into her face. She didn’t bother to repair them as she looked down to adjust the cloak around her and once again inhaled the faint scent of expensive French perfume.
    â€œI am f-fine. I want to be here when we see the cliffs.”
    â€œThen turn around,” he said, handing her the telescope.
    She did as he told her, her gaze fervently glimpsing the magnificent windswept cliffs in the far distance. She raised the gold telescope to her eye and looked at a world encapsulated in ice, as if frozen in time, and naked fields made barren by winter’s frigid kiss. The shoreline was as familiar as the back of her hand. She had forgotten nothing.
    â€œWe will be anchoring outside Blackthorn Cove near nightfall. At this pace, we should be on shore by nightfall.”
    She watched as he was called back to the wheelhouse.
    Her pulse racing, she swung back around and raised the perspective glass back to her eye. She smiled pure joy.
    Home.
    For the first time since she’d left Virginia, she finally believed this was real. She could not see Seastone Cottage yet, but knowing it was out there, so close, quickened the blood in her veins and made her nearly dizzy with happiness.
    Wrapping a palm around the gold coin warm against her breast, Christel shut her eyes.
    It no longer mattered that she had traveled five thousand miles only to end up pleading for Lord Carrick’s charity. Or that she was not the girl he remembered her to be.
    When Christel had first received the coin a year and a half ago, Saundra’s letter had merely read, “Come home now. Please. I am in desperate need of a friend. S.” It was all the letter had said. The coin had been inside to pay her expenses home. But she had not gone back to Scotland, and then it had been too late. She had worn the coin around her neck, always hidden, but knowing it was there against her heart. Her link to home.
    Daniel was gone. Her uncle was now dead. His death last year had severed her last reason to remain. She’d forced her grief into expectation—grief that there was no family left alive in Virginia to mourn her, expectation that she was returning to the place of her birth with a clean slate to begin her life afresh.
    Someone had wanted her home in Scotland. Enough to send Saundra’s letter three months after her death.
    Wanted her