Little Love Affair (Southern Romance Series, #1) by Lexy Timms Page B

feel his hardness through the layers of her dress.
    Their legs twined together as they moved, her hands tracing over his back and down the rippling muscles in his arms, then rising to cup his face as she drew him back up for a kiss. One of his hands cupped her breast gently, thumb rubbing over the nipple, separated from her skin only by a layer of fine linen; Clara heard herself gasp again, and her hips moved up to meet his.
    “Don’t stop,” she whispered when he slowed.
    It was the wrong thing to say. His eyes closed and he bent his head. One hand clenched against the ground before he rolled away, onto his back.
    “Jasper?”
    “Don’t say my name,” he whispered again. “We can’t do this.”
    “Why not?” She knew the reasons and asked it anyway, daring him to speak it.
    “Because your family would never allow you to marry me. Because I would never dishonor you.” Trembling, he reached out to lay his palm against her face, and his thumb brushed against her bottom lip. When she turned her face to kiss his hand, he drew it away quickly. “Clara, if I stay here with you now, I will dishonor you.”
    “It’s not dishonor,” Clara whispered, and he looked at her gravely.
    “You know that not a single person in this town would call it anything else. I would be killed, Clara, and you would live the rest of your life shamed for it. I could never allow that.”
    “I’m not a child,” Clara said passionately. “I’m a woman, Jasper, and I’m choosing this.”
    “What of the future? What if...” His breath caught. “What if you were to bear my child?”
    He was right, damn him. She turned her face away, eyes squeezed shut against tears. She could see the boy in her mind’s eye: Jasper’s dark eyes and her fair hair, toddling unsteadily between them in the fields. She thought she had not known love until Jasper kissed her, and it was true—but she had not known, either, the wave of protectiveness she felt to think of her child. Whatever consequences she could face for herself, she could not bear that a child might face them as well.
    She bent her head in acceptance, loss swirling in her chest.
    “You should go,” she whispered, wanting to be kind and knowing that any moment of weakness would lead her back into his arms.
    He nodded, his face never flickering.
    “You’ll never see me again.”
    “No,” Clara whispered. She turned away, trying to compose her face, fingers working on the bodice of her gown. “Stay until your friend can travel. I would never be the reason a man dies. But you and I...”
    “I shall not speak to you,” he promised her. “I won’t even look at you. Clara...I would kiss you goodbye, but I swear I cannot. It would be too much.”
    Clara bent her head. She could not look back at him, not when she was biting her lip so hard she thought it might bleed.
    “Go,” she whispered. She heard the branches rustle and she buried her face in her hands and counted to one hundred. When she looked around, Jasper was gone—and she rested her face on her knees and sobbed.

Chapter 9
    A ll he could think of was her skin and her lips and the arch of her back, and it drove him mad. Jasper growled, low in his throat and clenched his hands. He needed to focus.
    There were more important things to worry about than kisses, he knew that. The fever was not improving. Horace’s skin was an unhealthy shade of grey, a sheen of sweat clinging to his forehead, and he was so far gone that he did not even protest when Jasper lifted him to pour the willow bark and yarrow tea down his throat.
    When he peeled away the bandages, it was all Jasper could do not to show his horror. In one short year, he had seen enough to know what despair could do to a man. He knew that Horace must believe he could recover. When he was lucid, no matter how weak, Jasper would be as confident as any priest. It had become difficult to know when Horace might emerge from his fevered dreams.
    The wound was growing puffy, flushed