The Most to Lose by Laura Landon

upcoming event a wounded war hero as well as a most eligible bachelor.”
    She lifted her gaze, and Jonah found himself looking into the warmest, yet saddest, smile he’d ever seen on anyone’s face.
    “And the second lie?” he asked, unable to argue with anything she’d said thus far.
    “The second lie you told just a few moments ago when you told Lady Cushman and Charlene that they had nothing to worry over. That you were completely healed.”
    Her expression filled with compassion, and Jonah felt his blood turn warm.
    “You’re not healed. In fact, you’re in a great deal of pain right now. The way your breath caught and you pressed your arm to your side earlier evidenced it.”
    “You’re very observant,” he commented, leaning back against the leather cushion to relax.
    “Hadleigh tells me the same,” she said with a smile on her face, “but he never means it as a compliment.”
    “What makes you say that?”
    “Surely you know that no man is impressed with a woman who proves that there’s something more than air between her ears.”
    Jonah laughed again. “I’ve never considered that. I’ve always admired women who could think for themselves.”
    She looked surprised. “Do you know how progressive that makes you sound?”
    “Is that a point in my favor or against?”
    “That, Lord Haywood, de—”
    “Jonah,” he corrected her.
    “Jonah. Yes, well, that depends on whom you ask.”
    Jonah studied her for a moment and was struck by her thoughtfulness. She was not at all shallow, like most of society’s other females. Like Melisande had been.
    The moment she noticed him watching her, she changed.
    “Perhaps we should continue on our way,” she said. “Or do you need a moment more to rest?”
    “I’m fine.”
    A glimpse of doubt clouded her eyes.
    “Truly, I am. It’s only every once in a while that my wound refuses to be forgotten.”
    “How did it happen?” she asked after he’d flicked the reins against the horses’ rumps and turned them around to continue through the park.
    “Not very heroically, I’m afraid. I didn’t move fast enough when an enemy charged.”
    “But you moved fast enough to put yourself between the enemy and Lady Plimpton’s nephew.”
    Jonah saw the concern on her face and prayed he did an adequate job of hiding the terror that still engulfed him when he relived that event. “We were both fortunate that day.”
    “Does it bother you to talk about it?”
    Jonah was stunned by her question. No one asked him that. No one cared. They only wanted to hear every bloody, gruesome detail concerning the war.
    The problem was, no one who had experienced war’s horrors ever wanted to relive one moment of them.
    If the other men fortunate enough to return from the war were like him, they did enough remembering every night when the nightmares started; enough remembering when their screams woke them and they bolted upright in bed, soaked in perspiration; enough remembering when, even in the depths of an alcohol-induced sleep, they could hear their comrades’ screams of agony and pain. Along with their own.
    For Jonah, the earth still trembled beneath him as the enemy’s mammoth horse bore down on him, its rider brandishing a once-gleaming deadly saber, now stained with the blood of an untold number of dead and dying.
    Jonah closed his eyes for the briefest of seconds but could not afford to keep them closed. If he did, he’d hear the swishing sound of the saber as it sliced through the air, feel the steel as it separated his sinewy flesh, sense the lifeblood flowing from his veins as the strength drained from his body.
    Jonah pressed his hand to his side as he’d done that day in a vain attempt to keep the blood from rushing out, then dropped his hand beside him on the seat.
    He hoped Celie hadn’t noticed.
    “The war was a lifetime ago,” he said as flippantly as he could manage. “It’s easy to forget the worst of it once you return to the peaceful