With This Kiss: Part One by Eloisa James

life was caught up in those pages. Or rather, it was the life he missed because he was in the navy.
    That would have been the only life worth living, though he usually didn’t admit it to himself.
    The packet—for a packet did finally arrive—was larger than the usual letter. He didn’t let himself open it for two days. It had to be the final one.
    Of course, he had always known that the end would come. Grace would marry someone, and what would her husband think about her sending letters to another man?
    It was enough to make Colin consider marrying her himself, but it was stupid to marry a woman merely so that she would continue to write him letters.
    Even if those letters were the only thing standing between him and madness.
    When he finally opened the package and saw that the enclosed note held only three sentences, he clenched his jaw so hard that it hurt for a day.
    Then he read it, the cool, precise letters that shaped her words, such unwelcome words, over and over. She always signed her letters, Your friend, Lady Grace . But this one just said, From London… Lady Grace . Finally, he unwrapped the portrait and looked at it, numbly.
    It was a portrait of Lily, which was nice. She was a pretty girl, Lily. She glowed like a naughty angel, and Grace had caught that quality perfectly.
    He put it to the side and read the letter again, along with the accompanying note from the duke. Her father thought it was inappropriate for them to correspond? Her father? The duke? The duke thought…
    He remembered, suddenly, the rash way that he had said to the duke that he would like to marry Lily someday, if she thought it was a good idea.
    Of course the duke didn’t want Grace to correspond with a man in love with her sister.
    He had been an ass, worse than an ass.
    A young midshipman skidded to a halt and snapped to attention before him. “Orders are in, Captain,” he said, managing not to pant.
    Colin nodded. He folded up the portrait and put it in his breast pocket. He would take it out later. He always looked at Grace’s work over and over, to see if he could distinguish all those tiny brushstrokes that came together into such clever portraits, and this was the best portrait she’d ever sent him.
    It wasn’t until they were well out to sea, the wind pushing them over the waves on the way to intercept another slaver ship, that he understood what that portrait meant.
    Grace had given him what she thought he most wanted.
    Lily .
    The thought made him almost lose his breakfast over the rail. It had all gone wrong, that visit. He didn’t want Lily. He didn’t even want to look at her portrait, no matter how fresh and pretty she was.
    Grace’s letters had kept him alive for these last few years: kept him from madness, even from suicide. He had friends like Philip who weathered battles with equanimity, who saluted without blinking an eye as their friends’ bodies were consigned to the ocean. He wasn’t like them. He didn’t sleep well for days after an engagement. The splash of a body being buried at sea echoed in his ears for hours after it happened.
    But he had had Grace’s letters, those lovely songs about life in a different place, in a different key, where blood and death weren’t the only reality.
    He should have told her that. Written more often. But so often when he took up his pen to write, all that came to him were images of men dying, and how could he tell her about something so horrible? So he wouldn’t write, and he told himself that, obviously, she didn’t care, because she kept writing.
    One problem was that he was an unmitigated idiot.
    The other was that he was sailing toward Freetown, in Sierra Leone, and they wouldn’t be back on English shores for nine months.
    A few days later he pulled out the portrait again, but when he looked at it he suddenly felt as if it were painted in tears. Lily smiled, but the brush of the artist had wept. He clung to the railing, a pain gripping his heart that made his