"I am nothing if not patient," he said. He lied. Because Sharpe knew himself to be a very impatient man indeed. But when it came to women, constancy was a strength of his. Or, at least, now it was. Love, and losing love, had a strange way of reforming a man.

And although he too wanted to draw her into some sort of embrace, he kept himself rigid and separated from her. Years of army drills were good enough to keep him in his place, even when his memory burned with the small kiss she'd once gifted him. Small and light and chaste.

"There are women worth waiting for, you see..."