I've been wanting to share favorite romantic scenes, but it's hard to pick one that isn't a spoiler. In a book I just finished rereading Once Upon a Christmas by Diane Farr, there are hilarious and sad scenes both. This scene is a part of the section of the book where our H and h meet. Jack suspects his mother of inviting a girl to the family Christmas celebration in hopes of doing a little matchmaking. And he's right. To discourage the scheme, he returns to the family seat with a scheme of his own.
Munsil (the butler) stepped hastily forward. "Miss Delacourt, allow me to present your cousin, the Marquess of Lynden." She inclined her head and curtseyed. Jack resisted the urge to bow. "Cousin, did you say? Cousin?" He raised the quizzing glass again. "Balderdash. Never saw her before in m'life." Munsil looked appalled, but as he opened his mouth to speak the girl intervened. "I am, more properly, the daughter of your father's cousin, my lord." "Eh?" said Jack blankly. "My grandfather was your father's uncle." "Eh?" She bit her lip and tried again. "My grandfather was Lord Richard Delacourt. Younger son of the 15th duke, you know." … "Your father's uncle." "Never met him, either," said Jack. He then startled Munsil by digging an elbow suddenly into the butler's ribs. "Not my father! His uncle! Haw! Haw! I've met my father. Eh?" He threw back his head and emitted the laugh he had been practicing for the past three days. It was painfully loud, and struck all the notes of a horse's whinny. It had caused John Emerson (Jack's friend) to laugh so hard that the boy had fallen off his chair, right in the middle of Boodle's. Jack was frightfully proud of it."
The laugh was just a part of his scheme to discourage this girl.
A recent reread reminded me of this scene I love from Mackenzie's Mountain by Linda Howard. It fits the characters of Wolf and Mary so well.
His voice was low and rough as he murmured in her ear an explicit explanation of what he was going to do.
Mary drew back a little, her blue eyes slightly shocked, feeling slightly excited, and also slightly embarrassed because she was excited. How was it possible to feel both scandalized and excited? “Wolf Mackenzie!” she said, her eyes going even larger. “You said . . . that word!”
His hard face looked both tender and amused. “So I did.”
She swallowed. “I’ve never heard anyone say it before. I mean, not in real life. In movies—but of course that isn’t real life, and in movies it almost never means what it really means. They use it as an adjective instead of a verb.” She looked perplexed at such an inexplicable grammatical oversight.
He was smiling as he entered her, his black eyes shining. “This,” he said, “is the verb.”