Yesterday morning, she’d received solid proof that she was, indeed, sharing the same Yorkshire air as him.
And all he’d left her with was a shadow and a pair of words to parse.
Lady Artemis.
Not much to parse there, really.
But the voice that had spoken those words, velvet and resonant, was the same as she remembered, perhaps deeper.
Nay, not precisely deeper.
Growlier.
Yet that voice held enough familiarity to light a sense memory through her. Her ears and her brain remembered that voice.
Other parts of her body did, too.
The instant they’d issued from his mouth—Lady Artemis—those words had produced a spray of goose bumps across her skin, as if she’d just seen a ghost.
Well, she had, hadn’t she?
Who said all ghosts had already departed this world for the next?
At any rate, they had no business materializing whenever and wherever they so liked.
Lady Artemis.
Such a measured two words. They’d abruptly cooled the hot blast of anger she’d flung at him. And thank the heavens for small blessings, for who knew what words would have tumbled from her mouth next.
Certainly not she.
So, she’d fled, but in addition to the kittens, she’d been left holding a question.
Why?
Whywas Lord Branwell a guest at Château Bottom’s Roost?Whyhad Sir Abstrupus invited him?
A whole host ofwhys.
With one answer certain—mischief.
But what sort of mischief?
She needed to know.
Sir Abstrupus would tell her. He never could resist riling her. It was giving him purpose and enlivening his winter years.
She took the front steps with slower care than she was inclined toward, and gave her bodice a subtle adjustment beneath the studiedly neutral eye of the footman standing beneath the wide, columned portico and holding a torch.
A torch.
Sir Abstrupus and his dramatics.
“Come on, girl,” she spoke to Bathsheba as they entered the open front door. Sir Abstrupus was entitled to his eccentricities and she to hers. Bathsheba accompanied her everywhere, as the sheepdog suffered from a nervous disposition that was surely the result of her injuries and possible abuses.
Inside the foyer, with its two-story-high frescoed ceiling of frolicking baby angels, a different footman took her indigo woolen cape. A touch of self-consciousness suddenly overcame her. She had decidedlynotworn her best or even second- or third-best dress to this midnight supper. The problem was that this fourth-best dress hadn’t been worn in years and was so snugly fitted that her breasts might have formed the impression they were at liberty to pop out of her bodice at a moment’s notice.
She offered up a silent prayer that they would behave.
