He took Rebecca’s gloved hand and kissed it at the lowest point of a deep bow. “Miss O’Carey, you are blooming into quite the young lady.”“And you, sir, look as fine as always,” Rebecca lied, watching him straighten before her. Tall and dark, he might have been handsome but for a stray bullet that had caught his cheek during the War Between the States ten years before, burrowing a thick scar from nose to eye.Rumor had it that the visible wound wasn’t the only one he’d suffered during the war—and that despite his status as a bachelor in a border state deprived of many of its young men by the ravages of war, this disappointment with regard to offspring was the main factor that had kept several ladies from accepting his hand in marriage. However, the prospect of the bloodline ending mattered not to Rebecca’s self-centered and business-minded grandmother, who thought the match advantageous, for someday it would merge Captain Vanderslice’s vast horse farm with her own.It mattered to Rebecca.
