Heat crept up her face as she envisioned the scene she had just suggested: herself tossed over Sinclair’s knee with her skirts hiked up . . . with his big hand on her bare bottom, making contact, touching, stroking her . . .

She tried to swallow, but her throat suddenly felt impossibly tight. The urge to fidget pumped though her . . . especially as his gaze continued its thorough examination of her, seeing too much. Seeing beyond the exterior. It felt like he was looking past everything, past skin and bones to the essence of her.

Certainly this look was different.

No man had ever taken measure of her in such a way before. No gentlemen in Brambledon, of course. Definitely not.

While not unattractive, she was not the beauty either one of her sisters were regarded to be.

She was the peculiar sister, the individual people called to attend their ague. No gentleman ever viewed her in a romantic fashion and she suspected that lancing festering boils might have something to do with that. And yet she had never cared enough to stop being who she was and change into someone else to be more likeable. She preferred being herself even if no gentleman liked her that way.

She snapped her gaze forward again, wondering at the strange look in his eyes.

Walking down the gallery with her hand on his arm, she could still feel those eyes of his trained on her—and something else. Something more. A subtle energy radiated from him, reaching her, enveloping her.

Why did I mention him spanking my bottom?

As the mortifying memory of that—and the vision of him actually doing so—ran over and over in her mind, the heat in her face intensified to scorching levels.

Certainly her words had not . . . titillated him?

The rigid former colonel was not that manner of man. He did not surrender to base desires and wickedness. She had not—did not—affect him. He was much too upright for that.

The walk outside was a blur as her mind whirled and her face burned and her nostrils flared, full of the scent of him: soap, man and something else that was inherently him.

Somehow they reached the carriage and Sinclair assisted her up into the Birchwood family coach. He rapped on the ceiling and the conveyance gave a small lurch as they started for home. Home? Well, not her home.

Birchwood House was not her home.

When she was a little girl, she had played dress up in Marian’s clothes, always wanting to be older, wanting to be like her big sister, pretending to be what she was not—a proper grown-up. The clothes had never fit, of course. They’d swallowed her, but still she had played. Still, she had pretended.

That was what Birchwood House felt like to her. Ill-fitting clothes.