He made a noise. “You should be angry, Miss Fairfield. You should push me away.”

“Mr. Marshall, haven’t you figured it out? I’m too desperate to be angry.”

It sounded bald and terrible in the night. But it didn’t sound pitiful—almost as if giving voice to the truth made her less vulnerable.

“Maybe,” she continued, “if I had a slew of true friends, I could afford to fly into a rage. But as it is, all you’ve confessed is that someone told you to do a cruel thing to me, and you have considered doing it. Most people don’t need to be asked to be cruel to me, and they do it straight away.”

“Damn it, Miss Fairfield. Listen to what I’m saying. I don’t want to do this. I don’t want the damned temptation hanging over my head. I don’t want to be the man who hurts a woman for personal gain. Slap me right now and have done with it.”

Jane shrugged. “Have your temptation, Mr. Marshall, and be welcome to it. I don’t expect anything of you, but at least for the moment I can pretend that I have a friend. That there is one person in the world besides my sister who cares whether I wake up in the morning. If you’ve never been without, you can have no idea what it is like to not have it.” She looked up at him, her eyes wide. “And to have him be a man like you on top of it all…”

Her cheeks flamed as she realized what she’d implied.

“Oh,” she said. “Not that I expect—not that I would think—that is, you’ve already said that I’m the last woman you would marry. And I have no intention of marrying as it is…” She’d lost control of her mouth. She clapped her hands over it and refused to look up at him. “Oh, God,” she said.

He didn’t say anything for a moment, and she wondered if she’d succeeded in frightening him off after all.

“Oh, God,” she repeated, squeezing her eyes shut. “Why do I always do this?”

“What do you always do?”

“I talk. I talk so much. I talk as if my life depended on nothing but words filling the space. I talk and talk and talk and I can’t stop. Not even when I tell myself I must.” She gave a little sobbing laugh. “I do it all the time—tell myself to shut up—but generally, I’m talking too much to listen to my own advice.”

She glanced over at him. He was watching her with a hooded, unreadable look in his eyes.

“Just say it,” she begged. “Shut up, Jane. See? It’s not hard.”

“Keep talking, Jane,” he said softly.

“Stop. Stop humoring me.”

“If you won’t push me away, why should I return the favor? You’re bright and incisive. And as I do not like to talk all of the time, I don’t mind listening to you.”

“What?”

“I think that you’ve been told to shut up so often that you’ve started saying it to yourself.”

“Oh?” She swallowed. “You think…”

“You say things that make other people uncomfortable. Of course they want you to shut up.”

“Don’t I make you uncomfortable?”

He smiled. And then, he reached out and set his thumb on her lips. It was a casually intimate touch—as if her lips were his to caress. Jane’s breath caught. She had the sudden, horrible urge to suck his digit into her mouth.

Instead, she exhaled.

“You make me uncomfortable,” he murmured. “But not, I expect, the way that you mean.”

“It’s because you’re an absolutely lovely man,” she confessed. And then she heard what she’d said aloud and flushed warmly. “Oh, God. Not that I think you’re attractive…”

That was worse. Far worse.

“I mean, of course I think you’re…”

Worst of all.

She screwed her eyes shut. “Shut up, Jane,” she whispered to herself.

“No.” He drew his thumb along her bottom lip. “Keep talking, Jane.”

“That’s a terrible idea.” Her own voice sounded husky. “There’s no way to come out ahead. It doesn’t matter whether I think you’re attractive. You don’t care what I think. Even I don’t care what I think.”

A finger joined his thumb on her lips. “I think you’re very brave,” he whispered. “You’re a fire that should burn itself out in five seconds of brilliant combustion. I know what it’s like to put forth that much energy, and yet you do it night after night. And nobody—not marquesses nor guardians nor physicians, not the whole weight of society’s expectations—can make you stop.”

She let out a sigh, a trembling sigh that had her lips brushing against his thumb. So much like a kiss.

“If people want you to stop talking, or to stop dressing the way you do, or to change who you are, it’s because you hurt their eyes. We’ve all been trained not to stare into the sun.”

Another finger joined his thumb against her lips. “I can’t look, and I can’t look away. But never fear, Miss Fairfield. I care what you think.”

He tilted her chin up. He did it gently, as if he were asking a question. But if his fingers on her face asked a question, his eyes answered it. They were clear and blue and stronger than she’d imagined.

“So which one is it?” he asked softly. “Do you find me attractive, or…”

“There is no or,” she told him.

He leaned close to her. So close that she could feel the heat of his breath against her lips. So close that she imagined that if she breathed in, she’d get a lungful of his essence. She felt an electric sense of expectation, as if she were putting together a jigsaw puzzle. As if she were about to set two pieces together, and she knew in her entire being that they would fit.

Instead, he straightened with a grimace and let his hand fall away.

“Is it something I said?” Jane asked. And if so, which sentence? There had been so many of them, after all.

“Impossible girl,” he said softly.

It stung that he would call her that after all they’d exchanged. “It’s only by choice,” she snapped, but she knew it was more than that. Deep down, she knew that even if she had tried to get everything right, polite society would never have loved her. “I may be impossible, but at least I’m not—I’m not—”

“That’s not what I meant.” He reached out as if to touch her again, and Jane went still. Wishing those few inches between her cheek and his fingers would disappear. Her whole face tingled, and she sucked in her breath.