He shoved his cold hands into the pockets of the farm coat and stood there, paralyzed between the house and the stable. Leave or stay? London or the Dales?

What would Dade do? Lysander's eldest brother took care of them all, a fatherly role that Archie Worthington was constitutionally unsuited to perform. Yet Dade had a rather medieval code of nobility. He might well feel honor-bound to stay and rescue the damsel he had endangered.

It was no good trying to predict what his brother would do. This time Lysander could not allow his family to direct his course. He must decide for himself.

The past, or a shining possible future?

Gemma.

Lysander cursed his own wooden tongue. He remembered that there had been a time where he'd swiftly dismantled a woman's resistance with glib charm and easy familiarity. He simply hadn't a clue how he done it.

Furthermore, Gemma was no Society widow looking for a dalliance with a handsome young ne'er-do-well. Gemma was ….

She was Gemma. She was so much more than any woman he'd ever known. He understood now how his twin brothers Castor and Pollux had come to blows over the delicate Miranda. He would pummel Daedalus himself for Gemma if he must. Yet how could he battle her own common sense? She was so right about him — and yet she'd got it all wrong.

She thought his soul was in hiding from what had been done to him. She thought him sunken, besieged.

Broken. Well, there was no denying something had snapped inside him. But Lysander did not live in fear, unless it was of what lurked within him. He was not fragile. He was pent, trapped, stuck behind the wall of his own halting speech, dragged down by the shackles of the darkness inside him. There was a thing in a locked room, that scratched on the door, patiently and pitilessly. A wolf who had eternity on its hands.

Gemma thought him inappropriately attached, that he'd imprinted upon her. As if he was one of the chicks in the pen, swirling in a yellow flood around her ankles as she cast the morning seed.

A dependent. A tragic, leechlike well of need.

He stopped and closed his eyes, his fists clenched tightly in his pockets, and asked himself that question.

What is she to me? Was Gemma merely a line thrown to save a drowning man? Was she shelter from the storm? Benevolent mother to a broken child?

No. No it wasn't so, it wasn't! Gemma was fine and beautiful, kind, brave and clever. She astonished him. Her strength and independence impressed him. But he had changed. For her.

Gemma did not make him feel dependent or needful.