And that was why she wouldn’t give in to Daren, and to what he was offering. The love he was offering came with restrictions, restrictions on what made her unique. If he truly loved what she was, rather than what he thought he saw, he would never have placed those restrictions on her.

And last of all, I don’t love him, she thought soberly. I like him, but that’s not enough.

If she took him up on his offer of marriage, she would be offering him considerably less than true coin. She didn’t love him, she didn’t think she could ever learn to love him. In time, she might even come to hate him for the lie he was making her live.

What if one day he outgrew this infatuation, and found someone he really did love? That would be a tragedy as horrible as anything in any of the romantic ballads. Worse, really; there they’d be, living double lies, and trapped in the agreements they’d made when neither of them was thinking particularly clearly.

What if she found someone?

But that notion made her grin, sardonically. Right. Me in love. About as likely as having my horse decide to talk to me. I may not be she‘chorne, but I don’t think there’s been a man born that could be my partner, and I won’t settle for anything less than that.

No, liking Daren was entirely the wrong reason to go through with this charade of his. It would be just as false as putting on a dress and pretending to be something she wasn’t for the sake of appearances.

And it was ironic that the things that made her so different—and that he now deplored—were the things that had attracted him to her in the first place.

If he wants a woman to be different, why does he want her to be the same as every other woman? she asked herself, as she stood just inside the stable door, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the dimness inside. Men. Why can’t they ever learn to think logically?

Daren found himself caught between anger and bewilderment. First Kero stormed off and left him standing in the middle of her room, torn between frustration and feeling foolish. He couldn’t understand what was wrong with her; why couldn’t she see that she was going to have to adjust herself to what people expected of her? The world wasn’t going to change just because she was different! He’d offered her something any woman in her right mind—and certainly every single woman at Court—would have pledged her soul to have, and she stormed off because he’d told her the truth of the matter, and how she would have to change.