Rake Most Likely To Sin. Bronwyn Scott

look younger, freer. She wasn’t old, she shouldn’t dress as if she was. Certainly any mourning obligations to her husband had been satisfied years ago.

      Her long chestnut hair hung in a thick skein over one shoulder as she sewed, humming a Greek tune. The domesticity of the scene caught him unawares like a sucker punch to the gut: Patra sewing, the freshly washed house behind her, the olive groves beyond that. They were a tangled mess right now, but they wouldn’t be when he’d finished. Come October, they would be healthy again.

      He had to stop himself. Would he even be here in October? That was six months away. If he wanted the fantasy he painted in his mind, all he had to do was reach out and claim it with Katerina. It was there for the taking, but he didn’t want it with Katerina. That particular fantasy was lacking something.

      Did he even want a wife? Last night he had been doing everything he could to avoid such a fate. He wasn’t the marrying kind. Marriage was for ever and he could barely manage to do anything for a month. At Oxford, he’d jumped from subject to subject. He’d been fascinated by Aramaic for five weeks and then he’d been fascinated by a merchant’s pretty daughter and that had been the end of Aramaic studies. If he’d managed to stay with a subject long enough, he would have been an expert at something instead of a jack of all trades, master of the only one that mattered—sex. Brennan knew how he operated. He had no staying power. Kardamyli was something of an anomaly in that regard. He’d never stayed anywhere this long. He was just infatuated with the moment, with the challenge Patra presented.

      Patra looked up, biting off a length of thread. ‘Do you need something?’

      Brennan grinned, covering up the moment of inner turmoil with nonchalance. ‘Yes, I do. I need an answer to my proposition last night.’ She gave him a quizzical look, unsure what to say. He stretched out in the grass beside her. ‘You know, the one I made right before I kissed you.’