First Kiss Friday – Sass Meets Class by Jill Hughey

Today’s First Kiss Friday featured guest is Jill Hughey, author of sweet romance Sass Meets Class.  Welcome Jill!  Here’s the first kiss between Susan Mellott and Alexander Dorcester.

In Jill Hughey’s sweet romance, Sass Meets Class, an English aristocrat finds himself unexpectedly drawn to a simple American girl in 1880s Arizona Territory.  Despite their growing affection, he decides to stick to his plan to return to England.  Susan is broken-hearted and angry, and is not afraid to tell him so.

“Hang your chivalry!” Susan shouted in his face.  “Hang it until it turns purple and its eyes bulge out.  Chivalry and all your other rules are just an excuse, an excuse to treat women like they can’t think for themselves, like they can’t sort out their own feelings and see the truth.  I see the truth.”  Susan scrambled to her feet to tower over him.  “You want me.  You said it in your oh-so-uppity way and you meant it.  You meant it from here.”  She poked her chest.  “You’ve never said you want Furnivall with a spark in your eyes like when you look at me.  I’ll bet you never sat around the dinner table there and laughed as hard as you did when Pa told us about meeting up with that skunk.  How can you choose a life centered on what you should do instead of what makes you come alive?”

He leaped to his feet too.  “That you make me feel vital and invincible is irrelevant.  I cannot have you.”

She stepped forward to stand toe-to-toe with him.  “I am telling you that you can.  But you aren’t choosing me.  The only salve I’ll have on my soul is that when you are married to a woman as cold and flat-faced as your marble floors then you’ll know it is because you didn’t believe enough in either of us to choose me.”  A fierce wind blew down the valley.  Her hair streamed around her face, battering them both with whipping strands.

He grabbed it harshly, collecting the locks and wrapping the rope around his hand until her head tilted back on her neck.  “Curse this hair.”  His eyes fixed on her mouth.  “Curse it.”  He covered her lips with his own, the wet heat clinging and taunting until she clutched his shirt to keep standing.  He slid his free hand to the small of her back, pulling her tight against him.  She couldn’t breathe, she didn’t want to breathe, she had to breathe as her heart threatened to burst from her chest.  This was a life-changing event!  Here and now, he’d finally accepted the two of them as they should be.  Together.

When he pulled away, his eyes seared into hers.  But then, slowly, in a nightmare from which she could not awaken, they frosted to ice blue, flat, frozen and harder than she’d ever seen them, harder than any stone floor could ever be.  “Goodbye, Susan,” he said as he turned resolutely away, leaving her alone at the cypress tree.