Deceived by Jess Michaels

he had everything he wanted outside those doors. But she held it back. If she were rude to him, it would only drive home the point that she gave a damn. Her best course here was to be calmly polite and hope that would put the distance between them that she so desperately wanted.
    “How do you find the weather this summer, my lord?” she asked.
    He tilted his head at her question. “The—the weather?” he repeated.
    She forced a smile. “Yes. I’ve found it quite fair. Hardly any rain. Such a refreshing change from last year’s torrents all through the summer months.”
    He was silent for a moment, opening and shutting his mouth like a fish. “Are you—are you making small talk with me? Being polite?”
    Josie felt heat flood her cheeks and not just from the effect of the greenhouse. “Yes,” she said through gritted teeth. “But you aren’t supposed to point it out, you know!”
    For a moment, he seemed stunned into silence, but then he surprised her by tilting his head back and laughing. She stared, for he wasn’t mocking her. This was real laughter, brought on by their odd situation. And he was so handsome while he did it, the sound of it was so infectious that she found herself doing the same.
    He smiled as their shared mirth faded. “I’m sorry, Josie. I didn’t mean to so rudely point out your politeness. Will you ever forgive me?”
    “This time,” she teased back.
    But now his expression grew more serious. “Well, that is a start. If you have a small bit of forgiveness in your heart for me, perhaps that means that someday you will have more.”
    She caught her breath. “I—oh—Evan—” She turned away, ready to bolt, but he reached out and caught her forearm gently.
    “Oh, please don’t run away. Josie, I don’t want us to be enemies.”
    She swallowed as years of pain came rushing back in a flash. Memories of cruelty, both his unintentional kind and the very intentional kind that had followed.
    “Please don’t,” she whispered.
    “Why have you hated me all these years?” he asked, suddenly very close to her. “Was it only that day? I know I was rather silly toward you, but I’ve seen you be a friend to many. Why can’t you forgive me?”
    “Silly toward me?” Josie repeated, pulling her arm away from him as she stared up into his handsome and utterly clueless face. “Is that what you think that was? That you were silly to me to impress a girl?”
    His lips parted. “Yes.”
    “It was more than that.” Her jaw clenched at his utter cluelessness. “You hurt my feelings so very badly. But I could have forgiven that. You threw out a nasty name for me. Horsey.”
    “It wasn’t intentional,” he began. “A slip of the tongue!”
    “I don’t care,” she said back, far more passionately than she meant to. “Don’t you understand? That is what everyone called me for years afterward! It has stuck all the way up to now. I was already awkward, I was already plump and unpretty. And you made it all worse because you gave them a slur to use when they saw me. And what’s worse is that you are staring at me as if I am crazy. You are staring at me as if you hardly remember what was one of the worst days of my life.” She turned away from him. “And that is why I have hated you, Evan. That is why your half-hearted apologies have never meant a thing to me.”
     
     

Chapter Five

     
     
    Evan stared at Josie’s trembling back, her sharp words like knives in his chest.
    “I didn’t realize they carried the name forward,” he said with a shake of his head. “Why didn’t Claire say something?”
    “I told her not to,” Josie said softly, not turning toward him. “I didn’t want to talk to you, to listen to you tell me how sorry you were, to hear the pity in your voice that I hear now. What good would it have done? They still would have called me names—it wouldn’t have changed a thing.”
    “I don’t have pity in my voice,” he said, moving toward her, wishing she