He opened her mouth with his own and slid his tongue inside. She sucked it inward and pressed it to the roof of her mouth with her own tongue. He felt a pleasure so exquisite that he almost forgot about his cursed canes.

And then her face was a few inches away and her hands were on either side of his face, her fingers pushing into his hair. Her eyes were luminous and steady on his, her lips full and rosy and still moist and still inviting.

"I am sorry," he said. "I am handicapped. I cannot hold you."

"Perhaps that is a good thing at this precise moment." She smiled suddenly and looked young and very pretty. "Or perhaps it is just that we are both starved and any kiss would feel good."

"A lowering thought."

She dropped her hands to her sides, still smiling. But reality was intruding.

"I really ought not to have stayed when I discovered that Lady Matilda had gone," he said. "You will be horrified when you relive this afternoon after I have left."

"You presume to know my thoughts, do you?" she asked him. "My future thoughts? This was a horrid day before you came, Sir Benedict. I do not at all regret that Matilda has gone, but I do resent the fact that she left me feeling as if I were somehow in the wrong. And then it rained and I knew we could not ride. And the rain was dreary and I felt restless and lonely and utterly self-pitying. Self-pitying people are not pleasant company, even to themselves. And then, when I was at my lowest ebb, you came. And you somehow coaxed me into talking to you as though you were a trusted confidant. And then you flirted with me. For a few moments you bore me off with you to the sunshine above the clouds in a hot air balloon, wrapped together in warm furs and bound for a place far, far away. And then you kissed me. I am no longer at a low ebb. You can have no idea what I will feel after you have left. But I do a.s.sure you it will not be horror."

Good Lord! He thought she might find later today that she had deceived herself. He felt distinctly uncomfortable himself. This was not the way a gentleman behaved. "Your sherry will not be getting cold," she said, moving past him, "but my tea certainly will. Shall I put some biscuits on a plate for you?"

"Just one," he said as he followed her more slowly across the room. "Thank you."

She fetched him his biscuit and sherry while her dog settled at his feet again.

"How old were you when you married?" he asked.

She smiled at him as she sat down and picked up her cup and saucer. "You are good at arithmetic, are you, Sir Benedict? Let me save you the bother of doing mental calculations. I was seventeen. Matthew and I were together for a year before his regiment was sent to the Peninsula. I spent the next year at Leyland Abbey. After Matthew was brought home, we came here, where we lived for five years before his pa.s.sing a little over four months ago. That makes me twenty-four."

"You saw through my ruse, did you?" He laughed. "So you have been unkissed and celibate since the age of eighteen."

"I can do arithmetic too," she said as the flush deepened in her cheeks. "You have been unkissed and celibate since the age of twenty-three."

He sipped his sherry. "This is not a very proper conversation for a respectable drawing room, is it?"

"This has never been called a drawing room," she told him. "But you are quite right. Matilda would have an apoplexy if she could hear us. So would Lady Gramley, I suspect."

"Lord, yes." He put his plate down on the table beside him, the biscuit untouched. He set his sherry gla.s.s beside it, only two sips gone from it, and got to his feet again. "I believe I left common sense, not to mention my manners, outside in the rain when I stepped into Bramble Hall a while ago, Mrs. McKay. My being here alone with you is improper and would surely cause talk, even scandal if anyone were to learn of it. It must not happen again. I would not make you the object of unsavory gossip among your neighbors."

There was a twinge of something to her smile. Scorn? Sadness?

"You are perfectly right," she said. "But I will not regret this afternoon for all that, and I hope you will not. You have lifted my spirits when they were terribly low, and you have made me feel like a woman for the first time in years. I will remember our conversation and our kiss, brief and relatively innocent though it was. I will relive it far more often than I ought, I am sure. But you are right nevertheless. It must not be repeated. Will you give my regards to your sister?"

"I will," he promised as she pulled the bell rope and then directed the maid to have Sir Benedict Harper's carriage brought up to the door. "I am sorry about the ride. Perhaps we can try again on a better day. With Beatrice, of course."

He reached out a hand to her and she took it.

"Do come to call upon Bea whenever you feel lonely," he said. "She will be delighted. You could perhaps accompany her from time to time when she visits the sick. No one could argue that that is not an unexceptionable activity for a widow in mourning."

"Thank you," she said. "You are kind." And yet there was an edge to her voice now that he could not quite interpret.

He turned and made his way to the door. He felt clumsy, even grotesque, knowing that her eyes were upon him.

He sat in the carriage a few minutes later and raised a hand to her as she stood in the open doorway of the house, the dog beside her, wagging its tail.

So much for offering her his friendship for a while. He had ruined that possibility by being d.a.m.ned selfish and flirting with her and even kissing her. Continuing to visit her alone was out of the question now that he knew she would be alone. It was a shame. She needed companionship. So did he. But a single man and a single woman could not be companions without courting scandal. And justifiably so, it seemed.

Perhaps he could find her other companions, ones who were neither single nor male.

Two days later Lady Gramley paid Samantha an afternoon call, bringing with her Mrs. Andrews, the vicar's wife, and cheerful conversation and practical suggestions for how Mrs. McKay might involve herself in village life without in any way compromising her status as a newly bereaved widow. Before they left, Samantha's name had been added to the list of official visitors to the sick, and she had become a member of two committees, one for organizing the church summer bazaar, and one for decorating the altar. She had been urged to pay social calls at Robland Park and the vicarage whenever she wished and was a.s.sured that she would soon find herself invited elsewhere too.

"I spoke with my husband about your situation, Mrs. McKay," Mrs. Andrews told her, "and he a.s.sured me that neither church nor society would ever frown upon a widow involving herself in good works and the quiet exchange of companionship with her peers, even during the early months of her bereavement. And you may believe me when I tell you that the vicar is a stickler for correct behavior."

Samantha suspected that Sir Benedict Harper was behind this visit, and she was grateful. Being busy in a way that was useful to others would surely still her restlessness and help her fulfill her desire to live again, not merely to exist from day to day. And perhaps making new friends here was not going to be so very hard after all.

But Sir Benedict did not come again. Neither was he at Robland Park when Samantha went there for tea, perhaps because she went by invitation and he knew about it in advance. When she saw him at church, he inclined his head politely but neither spoke nor looked fully at her.

She had relived their conversation and his kiss-especially his kiss-for the rest of the day after he left. She had lain awake half the night dreaming of it-ironic, that. And she had watched through the windows for him all the following morning and from the garden during the afternoon, when the rain had finally stopped long enough for her to take Tramp outside for some exercise.

But long before it was borne in upon her that he would not come again, she had succ.u.mbed to guilt. She had encouraged him to stay when he would have left after discovering that Matilda was no longer with her. She had encouraged him to flirt with her, though it had not been deliberate. And she had quite explicitly invited his kiss.

She had behaved quite shockingly badly. It was no wonder he did not wish to see her again. And she surely would not wish to see him again if she were not so lonely and so restless.

It would be for the best if she never saw him again, she decided. And then she learned that soon he would indeed be gone. Lady Gramley was planning to leave soon to join her husband in London. And her brother, she reported to a group of ladies at the vicarage one afternoon two weeks after his visit to Bramble Hall on that rainy afternoon, was going to do some traveling about the British Isles, starting in Scotland.

Samantha told herself quite firmly that the news did not depress her in the slightest. It was nothing to her. She had put memories of that afternoon firmly behind her. Soon he would be gone, and she could devote herself to her new life here at Bramble Hall without the distraction of expecting to see him wherever she went. She intended to be active and busy while she lived out the remainder of her year of mourning.

Perhaps she would even be happy.

9.

A little over a week later, the carriage that had conveyed Matilda to Leyland Abbey returned to Bramble Hall, driven by a different coachman, with different outriders accompanying it. Samantha recognized the coachman from five years ago, but the other men were strangers to her. They were all large, burly men, as servants hired to guard travelers often were. They all also seemed particularly surly of disposition. That was what working for the Earl of Heathmoor did to people, Samantha thought. One of them handed her a letter that bore the earl's seal.

She took it from him and felt immediately chilled. She did not want any more dealings with Matthew's family, and this was hardly going to be a friendly missive. And why had other servants returned in place of the ones who had gone with Matilda? She took the letter into the sitting room and closed the door. She shooed Tramp off her favorite chair, upon which he was strictly forbidden to take up his abode-just as he had been strictly forbidden to enter the house once upon a time-and seated herself there in his place.

She did not want to break the seal on the letter. She had been feeling reasonably happy of late. She had friendly acquaintances. She had places to go, things to do while all the time preserving her respectability and her obligation to be in mourning for what remained of the year. She did not want to be plunged back into gloom and guilt. For one moment she considered tossing the note on the fire and forgetting about it. Matthew would have done just that. But the trouble was that she would not forget it. It would be better to read it now and then somehow put it out of her mind.

She broke the seal with a terrible sense of foreboding.

She read the letter through without stopping and then bent her head over her lap and shut her eyes very tightly. After a few moments she could hear Tramp panting nearby and could smell his less-than-sweet breath. A cold, wet nose nudged at her hand and he whined. She set her hand on his head.

"Tramp," she said.

He licked her face and whined again, in obvious distress.

"Oh, Tramp."

Stunned despair at the unexpectedness of it all engulfed her. The Earl of Heathmoor was displeased by the scandalous goings-on of his daughter-in-law as reported to him by Lady Matilida. That was hardly a surprise. Neither was the long-winded eloquence with which he chastised her. It was the punishment that made her feel rather as if she had been punched hard in the stomach, though he did not call it punishment. If his daughter-in-law did not know how to behave without the firm guiding hand of a man, and clearly she did not, then he must insist upon her removing to Leyland Abbey without delay. There he would himself impose the necessary discipline to halt the wayward behavior that would surely bring censure and even ruin upon the good name of his family if allowed to continue.

If there had been no more than that, Samantha might well have burned the letter after all and dealt with her seething wrath as best she was able. But there was more.

For of course-oh, foolish, foolish, foolish of her to have relied upon Matthew's expectations-Bramble Hall was not hers. It had never been made over to Matthew, and if it had been willed to him, the bequest meant nothing when he had died before his father. The house belonged, with all its furnishings and all its servants, to the Earl of Heathmoor, and now, his second son being deceased and his son's widow not to be trusted to remain here and uphold his good name, he was sending his third son to live here. Rudolph and his wife, Patience, would arrive to take up residence within a fortnight. The house would be made ready for them during the intervening weeks. The earl's head coachman and his head groom, with other trusted servants, had been given instructions to convey Samantha to Leyland with just one day of rest between their arrival at Bramble Hall and their departure. She would make herself ready to accompany them.

He made them sound like jailers. They looked like jailers.

"Tramp," she said, "why did I not see this coming? Am I an utter idiot? I never dreamed. I thought he would be happy to leave me here, out of sight and out of mind."

For a few moments she sat with tightly clenched eyes while he whined and licked her face again. Then she lifted her head and gazed into his mournful eyes only inches from her own.

"I would rather kill myself than live at Leyland Abbey again," she told him. It was only just an exaggeration.

She got abruptly to her feet and paced the room, the letter still clutched in one hand. Whatever was she to do? She would be swallowed whole if she went to Leyland. She would never be free. But what was the alternative? She had never had to consider any. Matthew had a.s.sured her that she would have a home here for the rest of her life, and she had believed him. Oh, she ought to have known ...

She stopped pacing after a while and clutched the windowsill with her free hand to prevent herself from falling. She inhaled and then found it impossible to exhale until the breath shuddered out of her in slow, jerky spurts, and then she seemed to have forgotten how to breathe in again. Her vision blackened about the edges. And then air wheezed in again. She willed herself to wake up. Right now this minute. This had to be a nightmare. But of course it was not.

She had to get out of the house, from which some force had surely sucked most of the air. The ceiling was pressing down upon the top of her head. And the house was no longer hers in any way at all. Rudolph and Patience would be here within two weeks. She turned and ran upstairs for her bonnet and cloak and outdoor shoes, Tramp thumping along at her heels.

The garden did not have enough air either. She strode along the side path without hesitating and out through the gate and along the lane beyond it until she saw a cart swaying beneath a large load of hay coming in her direction. She struck out across a field and then over a meadow-the very one in which she had met Sir Benedict Harper once upon a long time ago.

Robland Park was still a fair distance away, but she knew suddenly that it was her destination, that it had been from the start. No one could help her, but she needed the company of a friend, and Lady Gramley was the closest thing to a friend she had had for many years.

She strode onward, Tramp frisking at her heels and occasionally dashing off in pursuit of some wild creature more fleet of foot than he and therefore not at all timid about showing its head. He never learned that lesson, poor, foolish dog.

Whatever would become of him? He would certainly not be allowed to accompany her to Leyland Abbey.

Oh, she would die if she was torn away from him. Surely she would.

Samantha was not the only person in the neighborhood to have received a letter of some significance that morning. Both Ben and Beatrice had received one too. Their letters were beside their plates as they sat down to breakfast.

Beatrice's letter was from her husband's sister, fifteen years younger than he. Caroline, Lady Vere, was in imminent expectation of the birth of her first child and had been impatiently awaiting the arrival of her mother-in-law to help her through the ordeal of the confinement. But that lady had recently taken to her bed with some unnamed disorder of the nerves, and Caroline begged Beatrice, in closely crossed lines and with what seemed like near hysteria, to please come in her stead, since Vere very nearly had a fit of the vapors every time anyone so much as touched upon the coming event in his hearing and there was no one else to whom she could turn except her old nurse, who always scolded so and whose hands shook with some sort of palsy.

"I had hoped to spend at least another week or two at home before going to London," Beatrice told Ben with a sigh after sharing with him the contents of her letter. "Now it seems I must set off for Berkshire without further ado-today if at all possible. I could be there the day after tomorrow if there are no unexpected delays. I would not put poor Caroline through the terror of being alone except for her apology for a husband and a nurse who has always terrorized her. Men are always useless under such circ.u.mstances, you know, especially the expectant father himself, who always entertains the illusion that he is the great sufferer at the very heart of the crisis."

"Then you must go," Ben said, laughing.

"But what about you?" she asked with a frown. "I cannot expect you to remove yourself from Robland at a moment's notice when I specifically invited you here to keep me company. You are welcome to stay on alone, of course, but it seems very inhospitable of me to abandon you."

"I will not hold it against you," he a.s.sured her, "since Lady Vere's need of your company appears to be greater than mine. I shall be perfectly comfortable here on my own, Bea. And I daresay I will be off myself within a week at the longest."

"To Kenelston?" she asked hopefully.

"Still not to Kenelston," he said. "Probably to Scotland. I have never been there, you know. It is reputed to be very scenic and beautiful, as are Ireland and Wales and numerous parts of England. Perhaps eventually, when my adoring public is begging for more books, I will even venture abroad."

"And never settle down, I suppose," she said, still frowning. "Has it not occurred to you, Benedict, that that is the whole cause of your restlessness?"

"Not settling down? It is a somewhat obvious conclusion, I suppose," he admitted. "If I were settled, I would not be restless. If I am restless, I cannot be settled."

"I should know better by now," she said, getting to her feet after setting her napkin across her plate, "than to try to discuss your personal affairs with you."

"Alas," he said, "I have no affairs to discuss."

"Ah, these double meanings," she said. "Who invented the English language, I wonder? He did not do a stellar job of it, whoever he was."

"Perhaps," he said, "he was a she."

She gave a bark of laughter. "On the a.s.sumption that women are by nature muddleheaded? I cannot stay to argue. I must get busy if I am to leave as close to noon as possible. The bulk of my things can be sent directly to London in a few weeks' time, of course."

Ben reread his own letter after she had left the breakfast parlor. It was from Hugo Emes, Lord Trentham, one of his fellow Survivors. Hugo was getting married, to Lady Muir. Ben was genuinely pleased at the news. He had wondered if Hugo would go after her when they all left Penderris. She had sprained her ankle down on the beach when they were all staying in Cornwall, and Hugo had found her and carried her up to the house like the brawny giant he was, scowling all the way, Ben did not doubt. He had fallen head-over-ears in love with her, as she had with him, if Ben was any judge of female sensibilities. But Hugo had felt restrained by the fact that though t.i.tled and enormously wealthy, he was a man of middle-cla.s.s origin, while she was the sister of the Earl of Kilbourne and the widow of a viscount. And so he had let her go without a fight, the idiot, when her brother came to fetch her a few days later. Obviously, though, he had gone after her. They were to be married at St. George's on Hanover Square in London.

The letter was an invitation to the wedding, though Hugo did not hold high expectations of Ben's being there.

I did not have Lady Gramley's direction, he had written, and neither did anyone else. I wrote to Kenelston for it, but by the time your brother's reply reached me, far too much time had pa.s.sed and it seems impossible that you could be here even if you felt inclined to tear across half the country just for my nuptials. Imogen is coming from Cornwall, though, and Flavian, Ralph, and George are already here. I have not heard from Vincent yet.

Ben felt a longing to be there too, even if it was London. It looked as if he might be the only one of the Survivors not to attend Hugo's wedding. And he was the first of them to marry. Was he also the only one who ever would? They all liked to think they were healed and ready to take on the world again, but in truth they were a deeply damaged lot. Not that self-pity was their besetting sin. They had all fought hard against that particular trait.

The wedding was in a week's time. He could get there for it if he set out without delay. The lure of seeing them all again when they had parted not so long ago, not expecting to be together again until next year, was almost overwhelming. And they would be gathering for a happy event. It really was happy. Ben had liked Lady Muir very well indeed, and it had seemed to him that she and Hugo were perfect for each other despite the obvious differences of social status and temperament.

For a moment he felt a wave of envy. It was not jealousy. He had not fancied Lady Muir himself. It was just envy that two worthy people had found each other and connected with each other's heart, for undoubtedly it was a love match. And so they would marry and settle to a lifetime of shared pa.s.sion.

Perhaps he would go, Ben decided. Not today, though. There would be too much chaos if both he and Beatrice were preparing for a hasty departure. He could still arrive in time if he left tomorrow morning, though it would mean traveling in longer stages than he found comfortable. He would not need to stay in town for long, just long enough for the wedding and a leisurely visit with his friends. He could still go to Scotland after leaving there, making his slow, meandering way back north, writing down his impressions as he went.

Was it absurd to imagine that he could write? It probably was, but he could at least try. He had to do something.

Beatrice left just before one o'clock. Ben waved her on her way and smiled at the sight of her traveling carriage piled high with baggage while more followed in a smaller conveyance. And the bulk of her belongings were to follow her to London?

He went back inside and upstairs to the room adjoining his own where he did his daily exercises.

He had made the definite decision by the time he was finished that he would go to London, that he would surprise Hugo by turning up at the last minute to make their number complete, a.s.suming, that was, that Vincent was going. Partly, he knew, it was procrastination that drove him. Although the idea of setting out for a tour of Scotland excited him in the abstract, the prospect of actually setting out alone, no particular destination in mind, was less appealing. Perhaps Ralph or Flavian could be persuaded to join him. Or even Vince. It might be interesting to add the observations of a blind traveler to his book.

He was coming out of his room after washing and changing out of his sweaty exercise clothes when he heard the sound of voices in the hall downstairs. Beatrice's butler was informing someone that her ladyship was not at home.

"Oh," the other person said. And, after a pause, "When do you expect her back?"

It was a woman's voice. Mrs. McKay's. Ben prepared to step back into his room, where his valet was beginning to pack his bags. He had done a successful job in the past few weeks of avoiding her, of avoiding causing her any gossip in the neighborhood, for that was what it would have come to if he had continued to call upon her.

"She has gone away, ma'am," the butler explained, "and will not be back until the summer."

"Oh." Somehow there was a world of flatness in the single syllable.

Ben hesitated, his hand on the k.n.o.b of his door.

"Should I see if Sir Benedict is at home, ma'am?" the butler asked.

Ben frowned and shook his head.