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Her green eyes snapped wide open as theAt least that explained the aches in places she hadn’t known she had

She pressed a hand to her left breast where her heart was trying to batter its way through her ribcage The rush of blood in her ears was a deafening roar as she turned her head slowlyvery, very slowly What if she’d been drearitted her teeth, prepared for an anticlimax that never came

A fractured sigh left her parted lips It was real, not a dream; he wasn’t a dream

She blinked, bringing the face on the pillow next to hers into focus A stab of sizzling longing lanced through Lily’s body as she greedily absorbed the details of his syle to ht!

He had a face that inspired a second glance and inevitably a third The sleeping ent forehead, high carved cheekbones, square chin with a sexy cleft, thick darkly defined brows, an aquiline nose and wide, expressive mouth If pushed to select an individual feature that set him apart, Lily decided it would have been his eyes

Beneath heavy lids and fra, his eyes were the deepest,blue she had ever seen

Looking at his sleeping face now, there was so different about him It took her a few seconds to work out that the subtle difference was so that wasn’t there It was an absence of the restless energy that hung about him like an invisible force field when he ake

It would have been an overstatement to say it er Even with the dusting of stubble in the hollows of his cheeks and across his jaw there were enough rehts slip back Meia that had been absent that first time she’d seen him

She’d known about hiardener, and the village had been buzzing with gossip about Benedict, the boy born with the silver spoon, the boy doted on by his proud grandfather While everyone else had got excited about the fact that he had justresentment

Warren Court, one of the most important houses still in private hands in the country, was just five hundred yards froe where Lily lived She had known, even then, that in all other ways it was a planet, a whole universe, away She had been totally prepared—actually determined—to dislike the rich boy

And then her dad had died and she’d forgotten about Benedict, not even seeing hirandfather at the funeral She had thought no one had seen her slip ahen she’d escaped from the churchyard and headed for the pond where her dad had skipped stones from one side to the other