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“When it’s most important,” she said.

“I begin to think the opposite. It could be that you are most important, Jemma. To me.” He held her hands for a moment, and then let them go. “I shall come directly to the king’s yacht on the twenty-sixth, Jemma. And I shall look for you.”

Jemma never really understood the description of a singing heart until that moment, but as she threaded her way out of the crowded chambers, every man arguing over issues of clemency to convicts, deportation to foreign lands, banishment, execution, hanging…She couldn’t stop the foolish smile on her lips.

Or the song in the general vicinity of her breast.

Chapter Twenty-seven

The Dower House

March 3, 1784

Isidore did not want to have an intimate meal with Simeon. It was too heart-wrenching. After having thought of him as her husband for so many years, some parts of her couldn’t stop thinking of him that way. Mostly, if she were strictly honest about it, her body.

She only had to see him to want to kiss him. If they ate together, just the two of them, she might embarrass herself somehow.

They had spent the afternoon working through the final stack of papers. They had an argument over one of the letters. It talked of love, rather than money. That made it worse, to Isidore’s mind, and she thought that the woman deserved more than the standard four-hundred-pound gift they had agreed upon.

“She may be in no need of funds,” Simeon pointed out. “She doesn’t mention his promises, unlike the rest of them.”

“But she knows he is married. He is a duke, and she addressed the letter to him. Why would she write if she didn’t need funds?”

“She loved him.”

Isidore took the letter back. “She does address him by his first name.”

“She asks him to visit her. She says she misses him.”

“Your poor mother,” Isidore said.

Simeon blinked. “I was just thinking that it was nice to find that my father didn’t wheedle his way into this woman’s bed with financial promises and then disappear. She doesn’t sound angry.”

“No, just lonely. Your father may have acted honorably toward her. Perhaps this mistress is in comfortable circumstances.”

“Perhaps she’s a rich widow,” Simeon said. There was something longing in his voice.

“I’m sorry,” she said quietly.

“As am I.” And that was the end of that.

All afternoon, as the light coming into the room turned from pale yellow to gold, it played in his hair. She was developing a foolish love of unpowdered hair. The light made Simeon’s hair look as if there were streaks of near blue among the curls. When he pushed it back with his hands, one ringlet always fell back over his brow.

She kept shifting uneasily, aware that her body was sending her all sorts of treacherous signals, signals that didn’t agree with her newfound resolution to find a man who would court her.

Because for all Simeon was polite enough to say he liked her, that wasn’t good enough.

She wanted to be loved.

After all the years in which she’d schooled herself into cheerfully accepting whatever type of man her duke turned out to be, she’d discovered that if she had the choice, she would like to be loved with a deep passion. The kind she had seen in her father’s eyes when he bent to kiss her mother.

Why had she never before realized how important love was?

The last thing she wanted was to be betrayed by an unruly lust for unpowdered hair into some sort of indiscretion with Simeon, something that would turn their marriage into a fait accompli.

Chapter Twenty-eight

Revels House