" When you said our engagement is subject to your family’s approval,” he ventured, “I hope you don’t expect it to be unanimous.”
“I would like it to be. But it’s not a requirement.”
“Good,” he said. “Because even if I manage to talk Trenear into it, debating with West will be like tilting at windmills.”
She looked up at him alertly. “Was Don Quixote one of the books you read?”
“To my regret, yes.”
“You didn’t like it?”
Tom gave her a sardonic glance. “A story about a middle-aged lunatic who vandalizes private property? Hardly. Although I agree with Cervantes’ point that chivalry is no different from insanity.”
“That’s not at all what he was saying.” Cassandra regarded him ruefully. “I’m beginning to suspect you’ve missed the point of every novel you’ve read so far.”
“Most of them are pointless. Like the one about the French bread thief who violated his parole—”
“Les Misérables?”
“Yes. It took Victor Hugo fourteen hundred pages to say, ‘Never let your daughter marry a radical French law student.’ Which everyone already knows.”
Her brows lifted. “Is that the lesson you took from the novel?”
“No, of course not,” he said promptly, reading her expression. “The lesson of Les Misérables is …” Tom paused cagily before taking his best guess. “… ‘It’s usually a mistake to forgive your enemies.’”
“Not even close.” Amusement lurked at the corners of her mouth. “I have my work cut out for me, it seems.”
“Yes,” Tom said, encouraged by the remark. “Take me on. Influence me for the better. It will be a public service.”
“Hush,” Cassandra begged, touching his lips with her fingers, “before I change my mind.”
“You can’t,” Tom said, knowing he was taking the words more seriously than she’d intended. But the very idea was like an ice pick to the heart. “That is, don’t. Please. Because I …” He couldn’t break their shared gaze. Her blue eyes, as dark as a cloudless midnight, seemed to stare right inside him, gently and inexorably prying out the truth. “… need you,” he finally muttered.
Shame caused his face to sting as if from spark burns. He couldn’t believe what he’d just said, how weak and unmanly it had sounded.
But the strange thing was … Cassandra didn’t seem to think less of him for it. In fact, she was looking at him with more certainty now, nodding slightly, as if his mortifying admission had just cemented the bargain.
Not for the first time, Tom reflected there was no understanding women. "
― Lisa Kleypas , Chasing Cassandra (The Ravenels, #6)
