“Of course, she is. She was born of beauty and bravery.” The woman sighed as she handed over a coin. “The countess would have made the admiral the perfect wife if the barren shrew he married had the grace to die.”
The pain Alicia had released impacted her chest in dizzying rebound. Aunt Hester slipped an arm through hers and tugged, but she remained rooted. Fixed to the very spot as every emotion she’d suppressed suddenly ran riot through her mind.
Rage.
Anger.
Pain.
Pain, as unforgiving and inescapable as a humid high noon in her tropic home.
And then another type of burn, as if she were being watched. She turned, instantly locking gazes with a man. His black hair teased his collar with a hint of wave. His symmetric nose complemented his unforgettably firm mouth. He was alive and vivid, pulsing with an arresting consciousness at odds with the mourning throngs.
Something in her chest cleaved.
Hesaw. He saw the heartlessness of the woman’s statements. He saw the truth of them, as well. In short, he saw Alicia’s most closely guarded secret—the aching loneliness at the center of her heart.
Somehow, she’d unwittingly shared a more honest part of her than she’d ever shared. Alicia had been cast off, shut out. She’d wanted desperately to be let back in, yet had known the struggle was futile—the door had forever closed.
Worse still, this truth was reflected in the handsome stranger’s eyes. His sympathetic expression left her wanting dreadfully to be held.
Ash’s gaze fixed on the widow and a lightning bolt hit his chest.
She was no longer veiled as she’d been when he’d followed her from her home—the effect was glorious dawn. Not strictly a youth, she was neither a matron. Her light hair curled in discordant wisps around a soft face so lovely and luminous he nearly doubled over.
She was everything Chev had described and more. And she was standing just beyond his reach.
He refused to look away when her eyes met his, though his behavior was rude. He refused to look away because her gaze, full of tortured emotion, clashed with her presence. Tortured emotion, he understood.
A sensation, long frozen, burst free from his chest—pain. Pain, and grief-stricken anger, both suspended in yawning loneliness. The emotions—Good God—they cut through him with the messy imprecision of a surgeon’s saw.
He was feeling. Not just observing, butfeeling.
They had not even met, and Lady Stone had accomplished the impossible—she had made him feel.
In the weeks following Cheverley’s warning, he poured through his library archives, striving to find any mention of her name.
Early papers described the young bride in praise-worthy, though suspicious terms—she’d not been born on British soil, after all. She was not, therefore, one of them. Then Admiral Stone met the countess, who fell into his arms in grateful tears after his victorious fleet arrived in Sicily where she’d been stranded by war.
The countess was already a legend—a vivacious siren with a titillating past. Beauty had indeed met bravery. England collectively swooned. Lady Stone was cast out as the unwanted specter marring a world belonging to undeniably genuine—if salacious—love.
Ash understood the wilderness beyond society’s castle walls. He understood the lonely longing to be let back inside. He became more determined they meet.
In Ash’s dark dreams, she became a cinder pathway beneath his feet. In his noonday reflections, she became his muse.
His absorption wasn’t rational.
It was not even sane.
Yet his dreams persisted.
Covet was too pithy a word for a force capable of thieving a man’s reason.
And now that he had seen into her soul, he wanted to take her away. Away from the hordes jockeying for a glimpse of the admiral’s casket. Away from these women and their words, sharp as pointed shards. But away to where?Wisterley, half in ruin?
She’s embroiled in scandal enough as it is.
“Blind me!” The vendor stared at Lady Stone. “Aren’t you the admiral’s—?”
