Summer Surrender

Written for Sunday Whirl Wordle. Our host is
Brenda Warren; her prompt words for this week are
shown below. Here’s where the prompts took me.

taste, summer, sweetness, snap, rush, half,
resin, turn, melts, luck, passion, and hand

The summer air hung heavy over Pemberton Hall, thick with the warm resin of pine and the drowsy perfume of roses half-open in the afternoon heat. Thunder roared in the distance. Lady Arabella Storme stood at the orchard’s gate, her heart beating as though it meant to escape the silk cage of her bodice altogether. She had told herself she would not come. She had told herself that a hundred times.

Then she heard his step …. that decisive rush of booted feet on the gravel …. and every sensible resolution she had ever formed seemed to melt like beeswax in the sun.

Lord Declan Wilde was not handsome, precisely. He was something more dangerous than handsome. He carried himself with the easy authority of a man who had never needed luck, who had taken what he wanted from the world and offered his thanks in return. And yet when his gaze fell upon Arabella, something shifted …. a snap of tension in the jaw, a vulnerability he could not quite conceal. Thunder rumbled as the sky turned gray.

“You came,” he said. Only that.

“I am half a fool for doing so,” she replied, lifting her chin. But she did not turn away.

He crossed to her in three strides, and pressed a peach into her hand …. warm from the tree, soft with a fragrant sweetness. She closed her fingers around it with both of his. His touch carried all the passion that propriety would not permit his lips to speak …. or taste.

Thunder bellowed as lightning broke the sky. His mouth brushed the supple lobe of her ear. “Then let us both be fools together,” he murmured, “for the rest of our days.”

NAR©2026
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This is “Thunderstruck” by 2CELLOS

Wordle 749

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