She would not have kissed him otherwise. But she was so grateful and relieved that Basil had come to her family’s rescue. She had held off the wolves for two days, and she smelled the terror emanating from both herself and her family during the long siege. They’d thought this might be the final situation from which they could not escape. Thanks to Basil they had, but now her eyes were blurry from lack of sleep and her emotions were rubbed raw. When Basil rode up to the soddy, she could have sworn he was on a white horse, and the sun glinted off his coat of armor. It was the tiredness, that was all. He was no knight rescuing the damsel in distress. She tried to shake the cobwebs from her tired brain to eliminate the unwanted image of Sir Basil. He might be a ladies’ man, and totally outside of her social class, but he alone had saved her from an impossible situation. She closed the door to the soddy, took a deep breath, and plunged into the myriad of household tasks needing to be done to bring some order back to the interior of the house.
