LITMIR.BIZ

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long ago was it that your wife died?’

      ‘Three years.’

      ‘People used to say to me “time softens pain.” And I used to think nothing will ever soften this ache. Nothing. But time did. It flattened out the rawness and left only memories. Good memories. Now when I think of James—that was his name—I think of his lisp and his curly blond hair and the thoughts make me smile.’

      ‘I rarely speak of Melanie to anyone.’

      ‘But you should, for it helps. A worry shared is a worry halved. Have you not heard the old adage?’

      ‘Your father again?’

      She smiled and in the light of the new day her dimples were as easy to see as the faint holes in her ears. For earrings, he determined, and not just one, either. A whole row of tiny marks pierced both lobes. He imagined jewels sparkling there and was still as a memory shifted and was lost.

      Reaching out, he touched the slight indentations and she didn’t stop him. Rather she leaned into his embrace.

      She was so damnably responsive, he thought. Any slight caress had her heart beating faster and the flush well upon her cheeks. What would it be like to part the moist lips of her womanhood and slip inside? The thought had him stiffening and he pulled away.

      Hell. After yesterday’s débâcle he was back to acting like some green boy straight out of school. He wondered if she would notice the thickening bulge at the front of his trousers. His much-too-tight trousers, he amended, and readjusted them for the second time in two days.

      The sound of his mother’s voice made him groan. To be caught in the gardens by a parent with his trousers metaphorically down was something he had not contemplated. It hadn’t happened at seventeen, so he had certainly not expected it to happen at thirty-one. Pulling the front of his long jacket closed he watched as Alice Wellingham, the Dowager Duchess of Carisbrook, was wheeled into the gardens by her maid. A quick look at Emma Seaton disorientated him. She was staring straight at him and trying not to smile. Lord, he thought. He was being given the run around by a Catholic chit, who had fed him a potion of ingredients that were causing his eyes to blur with tiredness.

      His mother’s smile was not helping either. He recognised that look, had seen it before every time some eligible woman had come into the sphere of his notice since the death of his wife, but today for the first time he was unreasonably irritated by it.

      ‘You look terrible, Asher.’

      ‘Good morning, Mother.’

      ‘You look terrible and your servants let it slip that you have not slept at all in a week. And you have finished as many bottles of brandy as you do usually in a month.’ Her voice broke. ‘You will kill yourself with this behaviour and I hate to think what might happen to Falder and the dukedom.’

      ‘Taris would undoubtedly assume the mantle of responsibility were such an unlikely event to occur.’ He was cruel in his response, but he had had this talk before and did not want it in front of Emma Seaton now.

      ‘Unlikely?’ His mother was about to say more when her eyes rested on the face of Emerald and he introduced her.

      ‘You are the Countess of Haversham’s niece, are you not?’

      ‘I am.’

      ‘Many years ago I had a passing acquaintance with her family. Which branch do you hail from?’

      ‘A distant one, I am afraid.’

      Emma was a master at not answering any question about her past, Asher thought, but his mother failed to note the fact.

      ‘She had a brother, Beauvedere. Have you ever come across him?’

      ‘I do not believe so.’

      ‘Then it is well that you haven’t—I often wonder what happened to him. He was a striking man with the bluest eyes and a way with the women that was legendary. Ashborne always said he would come to no good…’ She began to giggle. ‘I am sorry. It is age, I think, this constant referral to times past. Easy to remember what happened thirty years ago and hard to think what it was one did yesterday. Instead of regaling you with old nonsense, I should be asking if are you being properly looked after here at Falder. Do you like the room you’ve been given? You are in the yellow room are you not? Do you play whist?’

      ‘Badly.’ Emerald looked startled by the quick changes of topic.

      ‘Good. Then I shall set you up as my opponent this evening. Would you mind? My sister usually partners me, but she has gone down to London for the week as my nephew has arrived from the Americas. You will have a lot to catch up on, Asher,’ she added, and even as she said the words his heart sank.

      Just another person to tell him how he had changed for the worse.

      He hoped that his cousin would keep any criticisms to himself and was suddenly as tired by it all as he ever had been.

      It was the potency of Emma’s remedy combined with a lack of sleep, he determined, and resolved to knock himself out early tonight with a strong brandy. He hoped belatedly that no maid had woken his brother slumbering on the armchair in front of Melanie’s portrait. Taris must have come back into the room. He frowned. He had not heard him do so, which in turn suggested that some time around the very early dawn he had, after all, nodded off. The notion cheered him considerably. If he could sleep a little, it would follow that he could also sleep a lot. As his mother’s maid wheeled her from the garden, he had another thought.

      ‘Does the potion you made act as a sort of sleeping draught?’ He could barely keep his eyes open.

      ‘It does. And quite quickly too.’ The laugh she ended the sentence with worried him.

      ‘How quickly?’

      When the dizzy whorl hit him he had his answer, then he felt only blackness.

      He slept twenty hours straight and awakened just as the sun was rising on the dawn of the following day.

      Emma Seaton sat next to him, reading Mary Wollstonecraft, the revolutionary tract criticising the restricted educative norms for women. Even her reading matter worried him.

      ‘You are awake?’ she said softly and put down the book. ‘I know that I should not be here, but it was my potion and I was worried that perhaps I had wrongly remembered the proportions. I came in to see that you still breathed.’

      ‘Just here?’ he asked back and looked around the room for any signs of shifted possessions.

      ‘I would not hurt your family. I like them.’

      ‘But you would hurt me?’ He was suddenly still, for today everything seemed clearer. It was him she had bumped into at Jack’s ball and him she had targeted at the Bishop’s dinner. Talking with George about it the next day, he had discovered that Lady Emma Seaton had intimated to Flora that she was an old friend of his and that she should be pleased to renew the acquaintance.

      And when she had fallen against him at the ball he had known her faint to be false.

      Lying on his back in bed with almost nothing on, however, he felt it was neither the time nor the place for confrontation. Consequently he turned the subject.

      ‘You could probably make a fortune curing the plight of London’s insomniacs with your tonic. The ton would take to you like a saviour.’

      ‘How do you feel?’

      ‘Better.’

      ‘You do not sound it.’

      ‘How do I sound?’

      ‘Annoyed.’

      ‘And you could not imagine why?’

      ‘I gave you the gift of sleep.’

      ‘You knocked me out and God knows what you have been up to in the meantime, making free with the things in my house in your quest for…what?’ Steely eyes swept across her.

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