He stepped in front of her. "Sophia, wait." She felt something in her chest like a ball of iron. She had her tears well under control for the moment, but she had to get away from him. Otherwise she would not be able to stop herself from crying. "Please," he said again. She felt herself forced to look up at him. His thin face, so grave, so intelligent. "I beg you to believe me. I do want you desperately. Love is of the spirit, and it is of the body too. But I am not proposing marriage just to possess you. I want to marry you because I love you." She stood looking at this handsome young man and breathing the fragrance of pine-scented air, and she thought of David. What she felt for David drew no line between body and spirit. If she had all the things she had just been longing for--a husband, a family, a home--and David appeared out of nowhere and looked at her with those glowing eyes of his and told her to come with him, she would abandon everything for him. When she looked at David, she saw a pillar of pure fire burning inside him. There was a power in him that called out to everything that was strong in her and demanded that she accept no other man for her mate. "You think that my title, my family, is an obstacle to our marrying," Simon said. "But it is not. If you knew who I really am, you might not want to marry _me_." She laughed a little at the thought of him not being who he so obviously was. "Are you some peasant lad who stole the place of the true Simon de Gobignon, then?" "It is something like that." "In God's name, Simon, what are you talking about?" His nostrils flared. He drew air in a great gulp through his mouth. He took a step toward her, and she tensed, lest he seize her again, but he kept his hands at his sides. "The last Count de Gobignon was a traitor to his king, to his countrymen, to his own vassals. He betrayed a whole army of crusaders into the hands of the Saracens. He died in disgrace. His grave is unmarked. So foul was his treachery that no man of good family in France will permit his daughter to marry me." Sophia found that hard to believe. There must be many great barons in France who would forget the crime of the father, no matter how horrible, when the son was so attractive and, especially, so rich. "Simon, you have so much to offer a wife." She would have laughed at the absurdity of all this, but the tortured expression clearly mirrored a tortured soul. "Oh, surely, there are barons who would sell their daughters to the devil for a bit of land," he agreed. "I meant that I could not marry the women I chose. But there is worse, Sophia. I could lose everything if what I am about to tell you were known, but that is the least of it. It puts my life in your hands and the lives of my mother and--my father." _Your life is already in my hands_, she thought, her eyes hurting from looking so intensely into his. But then the full meaning of what he had said bore in on her. _His father?_