I’ve got an excerpt of Autumn Sage today—Isabel and Sebastian have already met for the first time (you can read that scene here) and are encountering each other for the second time at supper.
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He was talking only to her.
Oh, he was looking at her sister, with that practiced smile pasted on her face, but he was talking to her. Somehow he managed to bend his voice, to have his words arc straight for her.
For a man of his size, Isabel would have expected his voice to be deep enough to make the earth tremble, but it wasn’t. It was golden, mellow, the kind of voice that slipped along and insinuated itself into the small spaces of a person. A pleasant surprise, that voice.
All of him was proving to be a surprise. Now that her headache had faded to a dull throb—and he wasn’t interrogating her—she could notice details she’d overlooked earlier.
He was as tailored as a dandy in a novel, his cheeks and upper lip smooth, without a hint of a shadow, in stark contrast to the rest of the men at the table. Every aspect of him seemed specially designed to offset his brutish size.
“Where do you live?” she asked, keeping her gaze lowered. When she’d glanced at him in gratitude after Catarina’s comments about Joaquin, that cool gray gaze had held something electric.
She didn’t want to be shocked again.
“Just north of downtown, near Rancho Los Feliz.”
Ah, that voice.
She couldn’t let it cozen her. He was sitting in Joaquin Obregon’s place, sent by a man who’d harm her mother if he could—the marshal wanted nothing more from her than the most painful details of her attack.
This trick with his voice, speaking so about Los Angeles—it was all to soften her, to weaken her so that he might breach her defenses.
She wanted Marshal Spencer and his insinuating voice out of Joaquin’s chair, and Joaquin in it instead, the two of them still set on their course to leave Cabrillo. She wanted her teaching position back, her privacy returned to her.
She wanted everything to be as it had been before, when her future had been bright, assured—not murkily uncertain.
But that wasn’t going to happen. The marshal was here and Joaquin was in the sanatorium. The chances of them switching places were about as high as that of her engagement to Joaquin being restored.
Her and Joaquin’s last discussion of the matter made it clear that would never happen. The engagement was over. He’d been insistent, despite her protests. And his condition had prevented her from giving full vent to her objections.
That had been another storm from the gossips to weather, the ending of the engagement and who had severed what. She’d kept the details vague and shouldered most of the blame, given that Joaquin could not answer.
“Do your cousins still live near the city center?” Marshal Spencer asked. He was cutting his meat with the precision of a watchmaker. Such large hands, yet he wielded them with such delicacy.
Then she looked again.
The backs of his hands were netted with scars, the knuckles themselves misshapen from long-healed fractures. He shouldn’t be able to use such hands with such grace.
Yet he did.
Was all this practiced? The suit, the smooth-shaven cheek, the voice, the unsettling grace of his movements? His features were unassailably brutish—broad forehead, scarred face, thick neck—yet the rest of him was decidedly not.
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