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Page 501
inadvertent physical contact, it was best to make a jest, laugh, and forget.
It was best, but Alinor could not laugh at Ian's stony-faced refusal to acknowledge his condition. She rose from her knees and stepped back, and the full impact of his beauty hit her. The black curls that usually tumbled silkily over his forehead were lank and flattened, but that did nothing to reduce the luminous quality of his large, dark eyes. The nose was fine, the lips both sensitive and sensuous. He was very tall for a man, head and shoulders both topped Alinor, and he was surprisingly hairlessjust a shadow of dark down at the end of his breastbone and a narrow line from the navel to the public bush. His skin was very dark, very smooth, where it was not bleached and knotted by scars of battle.
In the year without Simon, Alinor had been too tired and too worried to think of herself as a woman. Now, without warning, she became aware of her long starvation. The blood rushed from her face to her loins. She put a hand on the tub to steady herself and thanked God that Ian was staring past her into nothing.
"Get in."
Had Ian been in any condition to notice, Alinor's voice would have given her away. However, he was having his own problems and was grateful that they would be hidden if not solved so easily. He stepped into the tub and eased himself slowly into the water, which was rather hot. Alinor moved quickly to stand behind him. She wondered whether she could bear to touch him and decided it would be simpler and safer to run away and send a maid to wash him. She could always say she had remembered something overlooked in the excitement of his arrival. Even as Alinor tried to steady her voice to excuse herself, her eyes were drawn back to Ian. They rested briefly on the strong column of his neck, dropped to his broad shoulders.
"Ian! Holy Mother Mary, what befell you?"

 
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