To Rescue or Ravish?. Barbara Monajem

choice did he have? “Obvious, isn’t it? You’ll have to come with me.”

      * * *

      Go with him? How she wished she could go with him, away from here forever. She shut that impossible dream into the coffin in her mind where she kept her memories of Matthew Worcester. There were so many; they’d been friends throughout childhood in their village in Surrey. Such good friends, but then they’d grown up, and the last memory overwhelmed all the rest, turned pleasure into pain, so she’d shut them all away. She’d never learned how to nail the coffin tight, but it stayed closed most of the time.

      It wouldn’t after tonight. She envisioned months of repeating soliloquies from Shakespeare’s tragedies and passages from the Bible—but not the Song of Solomon—over and over every time she thought of him. Replacing those thoughts with words and more words; banishing those memories, the old and now the new.

      “You needn’t look so appalled,” he said. “I’ll take you to stay with my mother.”

      “You can’t possibly see the expression on my face in this pitchy darkness,” she retorted. “Does your mother live nearby?” Arabella hadn’t seen Mrs. Worcester for a number of years—not since her husband had died and she’d left Surrey to live with a relative.

      “Not too terribly far. It’s not a tonnish address, but entirely respectable. Your reputation will be safe.”

      She should be relieved, but on the contrary, she had to bite her lip hard to avoid bursting into tears. She’d assumed that someday she would have to meet Matt and speak to him again. A few years earlier, she’d seen him on a London street, but she’d been so unprepared that she’d cravenly ignored him. After that, she’d pictured how they might eventually encounter one another, thought out what she would say, planned how calm and composed she would be. After all, he was a thing of the past.