Sebastian

gave her heart a fluttery lift.
    "Sebastian."
    Then her mood sank. She hadn't found the man who had called to her when her thoughts had been mired in despair and she'd been yearning for something better. She hadn't found the man who needed her. Just looking at Sebastian was enough to tell her he wasn't the kind of man who would need anything from someone like her.
    Even worse, she was in the Den of Iniquity. A vile, terrible place. A place decent women shouldn't even know about, let alone ever see.
    Which didn't make sense, because Mam and her women friends knew about the Den. Even the younger women in the village knew about the Den. It was probably the most famous dark landscape in Ephemera.
    But, oddly enough, it wasn't an easy place to find. Some of Ewan's friends had tried to get to the Den last year. They'd crossed over a bridge and found the bad section of a large town, and one of them had gotten beaten and robbed, but they never found the Den.
    So what did that say about her?
    I guess Mam was right. I must be a bad person.
     
    Why else would she have ended up in the Den when all she'd wanted was to find a safe place? But she did feel safe. Wasn't that a strange way to feel in a place like this?
    Pushing aside the sheet and light blanket, Lynnea sat up and looked around the masculine room.
    She went into the bathroom, took care of necessaries, then experimented with the water taps on the tub until she figured out how to fill it.
    Hot water just by turning a tap. How decadent!
    Maybe being a bad person wasn't so bad after all.
    She soaked in the bath for a few blissful minutes before remembering the door that connected with another bedroom. Was someone in the other room waiting for her to finish? Using the washcloth and lightly scented soap she'd found along with two clean bath towels, she scrubbed her skin and washed her hair.
    After wrapping her hair in one bath towel and drying off with the other, she did her best to clean the tub for the next person's use before she returned to the bedroom.
    There was a storage chest at the foot of the bed. On top of it, neatly folded, were clean clothes. Cotton pettipants that would modestly cover her legs from waist to knee, and a cotton undershirt that—
    She picked up the undershirt and tried to figure out what the extra layer of material was for. Then she blushed and dropped the undershirt.
    Mam had always said only loose city women wore brassieres in order to push up their tits and entice men to act like fools. Or, worse, act like animals after a bitch in heat.
    Did Sebastian think she was a loose woman? Probably. She had offered to have sex with him. Hadn't she? She'd been so tired when he brought her to the room, she couldn't remember if she'd said it or only thought it.
    Or maybe this was the most modest underwear available in the Den. The rest of the clothes didn't look much different from the everyday clothes worn by well-to-do farmers' wives and daughters, even if the material wasn't ordinary.
    The long-sleeved blue top was stretchy enough to pull over her head. The sleeveless, dark blue jumper was cut around the neck and shoulders so that a half finger of the top showed above it. It fell to midcalf and buttoned up one side. The socks came up to her knees, and the shoes were sturdy enough for a long tramp through fields.
    Country clothes. She wasn't sure why she felt disappointed, since the clothes were new and of nice material, but dressed like she was going to a simple harvest dance made her feel less able to cope with whatever was beyond this room.
    Returning the towels to the bathroom, she found a comb inside a small cabinet between the sink and the mirror. When she'd done what she could with her hair, she stared at her reflection and winced. The natural wave in her hair—the wave that had made Mam so angry she'd threatened more than once to cut Lynnea's hair right down to the scalp—seemed to be celebrating its freedom by being wavier than usual.
    She'd lost all her pins between the bridge and the Den, and nothing short of wetting it down and pulling it back in a tight bun would get rid of the waves—and even that didn't work most of the time.
    Nothing to do about it.

    Just as she walked back into the bedroom, someone knocked lightly on the outside door. Then Sebastian walked into the room, still dressed like a bad influence and looking more handsome than she remembered.
    And her heart made a funny little bounce.

    Now he knew what getting kicked in