An Improper Situation (Sanborn-Malloy Historical Romance Series, Book One) by Sydney Jane Baily

look at it, then looked at him to see his own gaze riveted to the throbbing pulse point she’d exposed on her slender neck.
    “Mr. Malloy.” Neither query nor statement, her whispery voice sounded strange to her ears. It was more a plea for mercy, she thought. It brought his eyes up to lock on hers.
    He was silent a moment. She could almost see the struggle waging within him. She had the feeling then, as she’d had before, that he wanted to kiss her, but he was torn by something, something just powerful enough to restrain him.
    He raised his hand to her neck, and stroked down the side of its white column with a slightly callused thumb, before lightly caressing her unyielding jawline. Once, twice.
    “ Miss Sanborn,” he said at last, his voice a deep timbrous sound that vibrated with the rhythm of her heartbeat. “I believe it’s time we went to bed.”
    “ Bed,” she repeated, her eyes widening as the porch floor seemed to slip out from under her.

     

Chapter Six
     
     
    Charlotte lay awake far into the night. She burned over the blamed ninny she must have appeared to Reed, blurting out the word bed , just as he had dropped his hand from the post and moved to let her pass by. Clearly, he had meant nothing untoward by his statement.
    She’d bid him good night hurriedly and gone inside, but she plainly heard through the door his deep voice, “We’ll see, lady writer, we’ll see.”
    About the children, she’d assured herself, was all he meant, but in her gut she knew they were now dancing around another subject altogether and that he was as affected by her as she by him.
    It was more difficult that night to accept being a twenty-four-year-old virgin than it ever had before. She felt hot and prickly, as she thought of Reed’s face and his hands and those muscles in his rear end, perfectly displayed when he wore his jeans. It was a long night, indeed.
    The next morning, Charlotte not only acknowledged that her visitors were all staying through another week, but that they were all going to a dance. And she was looking forward to it, until the questions started popping into her mind: Was Reed her escort or was he going to dance with every woman there, including Eliza Prentice? And what was Charlotte going to wear?
    True, it was only a barn dance, but all her clothes were hopelessly outdated; she couldn’t remember the last time she’d gone to Miss Finney’s in Denver or even to their own small “house of fashion” located in one corner of Jeremiah Webster’s piece goods store.
    Occasionally, Mr. Webster had some factory-made clothes that were, if a little plain and pragmatic, at least decently priced; she’d bought a few blouses there over the years. However, most of the women in Spring City relied on their Sears Roebuck or their Montgomery Ward catalogues, or made their own creations.
    From what Charlotte had seen, they were quite adept at dressmaking.
    For her part, she could barely sew on a button, let alone create a dress appropriate for an evening dance, even if there was time. Regina Sanborn knew only the art of needlepoint and found that too tedious to teach her daughter. Her mother’s dresses had always been made by seamstresses when she lived in Boston, and Charlotte remembered overnight outings to Denver when her mother needed something new.
    Charlotte’s own dresses had been bought at Miss Finney’s until she was fourteen, and then . . . Charlotte frowned.
    She had probably bought two plain dresses in the past ten years—everything else was recycled from her mother’s wardrobe. She did not mind in the least wearing her mother’s clothing, but had worn out most of her dresses, not to mention finishing her growth at about three inches taller than Regina.
    Her eyes refocused on the work at hand. The article in front of her was supposed to be on the problems between the farmers who were cordoning off more and more land with barbed wire and the cattlemen who were running out of places to drive