How To Bed A Baron Read Free

said.
                  She had repeated those words, or some very like them, so often since she had lost him that they had almost become commonplace. She explained her situation to everyone she met who found it odd that a woman would be traveling alone, that a woman of her class and rank had not even a maid to look after her. She never explained to these judgmental, if well meaning, people that she had cared for her father and run his dig for almost a decade, and that she had no need of a maid, or of anyone else. Often she said nothing at all. The black armband she wore usually said enough. But it was hidden beneath her cloak. She shrugged off her black wool, so that Arthur might see it.
                  “I am sorry for your loss,” Arthur said.
                  He did not speak again, but took her hand in his. The heat of his palm and fingertips filtered through her cotton gloves, giving her a feeling of warmth, and of coming home. She looked into his eyes and wished for a moment that she might go back home once more, indeed, that she had never left. Such wishes were foolish, however. One could not step twice into the same river.
                  Serena took her hand back, drew off her gloves, and applied herself with vigor to her stew and bread. Arthur leaned against the wall behind him and watched her eat, meditatively munching on his own bread and butter. He finally remembered his beer, which had been refilled, and drank some of it. Serena drank a bit of her own, grateful for the hundredth time in two days that she was home in England, with good plain food that anyone of sense might eat.
                  “Do you need help in settling your father’s estate?” Arthur asked.
                  For all his ingrained politeness, Arthur had always come straight to the point.
                  “No,” she answered. “Well, yes. In a way. I need to get onto the grounds of Oxford. I need to see Professor Gillingham at Magdalen College.”
                  “Of course,” Arthur said. “I took a first in literature at Queens College. It would be my honor to escort you.”
                  Serena finished her stew, not quite able to believe that she had come so far, and was so close to her goal. She blinked away tears again, for they had begun to form like threatening rain. She chastised herself for weakness, when she felt his hand on hers. This time, the warmth of his palm was not buffered by the cotton of her glove. This time, she felt the heat of his touch all the way down to her toes, and she shivered.
                  She wondered, and not for the first time, what her life might have been like if she had stayed in England instead of traipsing off to parts unknown with her father. She might have four children by now. She might have married this man.
                  The oddness of the thought kept pace only with the oddness of the moment, for once again it seemed as if Arthur, her old friend and one time confidant could read her mind.
                  “I have a favor to ask of you as well,” he said.
                  Serena did not blink but raised one brow, waiting for his request, wondering if he wanted her to pass the salt cellar, perhaps, which was close to her elbow on the table.
                  When it came, his request was not for the salt. Nor was it even in the form of a question. His blue eyes did not turn from hers, which was the only way she was certain that he was not having a go at her, that indeed, Arthur, Baron Farleigh, was quite serious, as he so often was.
                  “I need you to marry me.”
                 
                 
                 
                 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Chapter 3
    Arthur knew with absolute certainty that he had made an ass of