A new sound reached Vivi as she grappled with the unwanted news concerning the green chamber—it was the centuries’ old front door swinging open and then closing again.
The dowager had already arrived.
She wasinsidethe house.
Perish the thought.
Vivi took a deep breath, then exhaled, steeling herself for a confrontation with her mother-in-law, who had never failed to make her disapproval of—and eternal disappointment in—Vivi well-known. For she believed Vivi was responsible for Court’s defection. And in a sense, she was not wrong. However, what Vivi had never swallowed her pride enough to reveal to the dowager was that she would have given anything to keep her husband at her side. How she had needed him in those early days, Percy’s death still so fresh, his absence in her life a wound that still had yet to heal. And how Court’s leaving had torn her apart, as mercilessly as any blade.
“I will return in a moment, Mrs. Porritt, Lumley,” she said.
Leaving the servants in her wake, Vivi reached the end of the hall leading to the great entry.
And promptly stopped, shock rendering her motionless.
For there, in the marble-floored entry to Sherborne Manor, with its trickling Poseidon fountain hidden in an alcove gurgling merrily away and its hideous spoils of previous Dukes of Bradford mounted all over the walls in dubious array, stood not the dowager Duchess of Bradford as Vivi had feared.
But rather, a far more perplexing creature: a man who was vexingly tall and broad of shoulder, long-legged and lean-hipped and undeniably dangerous-looking. His dark hair was nearly long enough to brush his shoulders, a well-trimmed beard shadowing his jaw. She had a vague impression of sharp cheekbones above the beard and startling green-blue eyes.
Disturbingly familiar eyes.
She stopped, the world spinning about her.
And then the unexpected arrival spoke. “Hullo, Vivi.”
That voice.
She would recognize it anywhere, for it was the voice of Harcourt Sherborne, the Duke of Bradford, the man she had loved ever since she had been fourteen years old and he had been a lofty eighteen. He had given her a grin and his most courtly bow, and he had stolen her heart forever.
Herhusband.
CHAPTER2
His wife.
Court stood in the hall of his own country seat for the first time in too damned long, feeling like a bloody intruder as he stared at the woman before him.
He suddenly felt every one of his thirty years. Much had altered during his absence. And it was more than apparent to him now as he stared at her, awe combining with a curious sensation in his chest, that the tearful bride he had left behind had turned into a formidable woman whilst he had been gone.
A duchess in her own right, even if she was wearing a bedraggled gray gown and a floppy-brimmed straw hat. Perversely, the sight of her with such a shocking lack of polish—the opposite of every sharp-tongued letter he had received from his mother in his travels—filled him with a new sense of appreciation.
A very male and primitive one. But that, too, filled him with old guilt. For this was Vivi. His best friend’s younger sister, the one whom he had promised he would never touch. The girl who had swum in the lake in her shift and caught frogs in her bare hands and fished with him and Percy when they’d been lads up from Eaton. She was also the wild hoyden he’d married in the darkest depths of his grief over Percy’s death.
When last he’d seen her, her nose had been dappled with freckles, her boots had been caked in mud, and she’d just returned from riding her favorite horse, Visigoth, like the wind.
“Vivi,” he repeated, the pet name Percy had always used for her.
A pet name he had been granted permission to use for her as well in those careless days.
He and Vivi had been friends, great friends, once. And then one reckless night had quite thoroughly ruined that. Or perhaps, to be more accurate,hehad quite thoroughly ruined that. He had missed her every moment he had been gone, but he hadn’t realized just how much until he stood here on the great hall marble, busts of Dukes of Bradford past watching on with censorious stares.
Her shoulders went back, spine stiffening, and she snatched the hat from her head, leaving the small golden curls framing her face in disarray. The color of her hair—bright and pale as wheat in the sun—had not altered, even if the way she looked at him had.
“What are you doing here, Bradford?” she demanded curtly, thoroughly dashing the foolish musings. “I thought you were in Paris.”
She had not called him Court, he noted, but Bradford, the appellation and mantle he loathed, more suited to his odious sire than to himself. Moreover, he had last been in Paris months ago. Most recently, he had been in New York City. He wondered if she bothered to read the letters he sent her.
It shouldn’t matter either way; he was the one who had gone away. And yet, he couldn’t shake the acute stab of disappointment knifing through him at the notion that all his efforts to connect with her from afar might have been thoroughly ignored. But then, he should have expected as much, for he had never received a response from her. The silence, like the time and the distance, had simply lagged on, until he’d reached the end of his self-imposed exile, and the strain from being away from her had proven too much.
