Not that he gave a damn about the crystal, or anything else in this house. He didn’t intend to take so much as a teaspoon from here back to London with him. Tomorrow he’d order everything packed away forever. They were welcome to smash every glass in the house until then, and the windows too, if they liked.
“Oh, here comes the housekeeper with the bowl of brandy,” a lady next to him whispered to her companion. “It’s so pretty when it’s lit, isn’t it, with the blue flames?”
A flutter of excitement passed over the knot of people gathered in the drawing-room, and a hush fell as the servants lowered the lamps and doused the candles. Every head turned to the door, the faces alight with anticipation. The children were wriggling with excitement, and the adults were nearly as enthusiastic.
Despite himself, Ethan felt a twinge of anticipation. They’d played Snapdragon in this very room when he was a boy. He straightened from his slouch against the wall to get a better look, but the servants had plunged the room into near darkness, and he couldn’t see a bloody thing.
“Over here, ma’am!” George Munro, who’d evidently escaped his pursuer, was hopping up and down and waving his arms in the air. “I’ve been a very good boy!”
Ethan snorted aloud at this blatant falsehood, but the sound was swallowed by another childish voice, this one raised in outrage. “Yehaven’tbeen a good boy, George. Ye made Becky drop the glasses and they all smashed to bits! Ye’re naughty, and ye don’t deserve any raisins!”
“Quiet, Henry, ye tell-tale!”
A furious shriek followed this insult, and Ethan turned just in time to see Henry leap upon George’s back and the two tumble to the floor in a tangle of limbs. He watched them with a grin, because a brawl was good fun—especially one so indecorous as to happen in the midst of a Christmas Eve party—but this one was even more impressive because the two boys looked so much alike, it was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began.
“Henry, George, you will stop that scuffling at once.”
A tall, slender woman with dark hair passed near Ethan, carrying a large glass bowl in her hands. She was looking down, and he couldn’t see her face, but one thing was certain.
She wasn’t Mrs. Hastings.
His memories of that good lady were indistinct, but he was damn sure her scent hadn’t made his mouth water. This lady smelled of warm, rich brandy, with a faint hint of cinnamon and vanilla, and her voice—low and faintly husky, but utterly feminine—tugged on him, as if a hook had caught at the memories buried deep inside him and was trying to drag them out through his chest.
They two boys climbed off each other, but Henry couldn’t quite hold in his ire. “Aw, but Miss Sheridan, he called me a—”
“At once, Henry, or no raisins for either of you.”
Ethan might have laughed at the chastened expression on the boys’ faces, but he wasn’t looking at them anymore.
He was looking ather.
Miss Sheridan.
He went still, his mind reeling with shock. There had only ever been one Miss Sheridan, and there’d never be another—not for Cleves Court, and not for him.
Thea was here.
Theadosia Sheridan, his childhood playmate, then his dearest friend, and then, when he was fourteen, the year Ethan was sent away from Cleves Court for good, his first love.
His only love, though he couldn’t have known it at the time.
He never thought about her—he wouldn’t let himself think of her, because thinking about Thea was like floating to the surface and sucking in great gulps of air when you hadn’t even realized you were underwater. Once you got that air, once it filled your lungs you realized again that you needed it, that you couldn’t live without it …
It was so much easier just to drown.
He stiffened as she drew closer, so close he could reach out and catch a handful of her silk skirts in his fist, but he forced his arms to his sides, and she passed by without noticing him.
“Here we are!” She set the large bowl carefully on a wide table that looked as if it had been brought in for that purpose. She touched a cloth to the candle on the table and lit the brandy, then raised her beaming face to the crowd gathered around her. “There are plenty of raisins for everyone this year—too many to count!”
Ethan sucked in a breath as blue flames rose from the bowl and shone full on her face, and he could see every graceful line of her features, every curve of her smile …
And those eyes.
Wide and green, long-lashed, and still with that touch of cheekiness that had driven him mad as a boy, before he was even old enough to understand what it meant to be driven mad by a woman.
Theadosia Sheridan. A termagant, a sharp-tongued hellion, a scapegrace—yes, she was all of those things. Bold and fearless, too, and if her eyes were any indication, she hadn’t changed.
What was she doing here? As far as he knew she’d left Cleves Court two years ago. When had she come back, and why—
