“Very well.” She turned her chin up to allow Søren to press a sedate chaste kiss onto her cheek. “I see you’ve brought your shadow with you.”

  “Follows me wherever I go,” Søren said.

  Claire held out her hand and Kingsley kissed the back of it.

  “Have you been taking good care of my brother?” Claire asked him.

  “He’s not dead yet,” Kingsley said.

  “Well done.” Claire patted his shoulder. “Morning room? I’ll ring for tea.”

  In minutes they were ensconced into Lady Claire’s cozy morning room seated on yellow velvet chairs drinking tea from dainty cups.

  “How is your Aunt Adeline?” Søren asked, as if this were a simple social visit.

  “She’s well,” Claire said. “Went to buy a gown in mourning black. Said if I won’t wear mourning, someone in the house has to.”

  “You could wear green and white stripes for all I care,” Søren said. “In fact, you should. Let’s go to the shops and buy garish clothing for all of us.”

  “Frater,” Claire said. “You’re stalling.”

  “Possibly,” Søren admitted.

  “Do I want to know what Father—” Claire feigned spitting after saying his name, “did to us?”

  “You don’t,” Søren said, sitting back in his chair. “But I’ll tell you anyway.”

  Claire listened as Søren recounted the terms of the will. Her mouth opened slightly, she gasped, and her eyes widened hugely. And then…at the end…she laughed.

  “That is not an appropriate response,” Søren chided.

  “I can’t help it. You always said you would never marry, even with a gun to your head. And there’s no gun to your head. It’s just me. Father—” She feigned spitting again, “held me to your head. He was a clever arsehole, wasn’t he? Before the pox made mincemeat of his brain, I mean.”

  “Claire!” Søren sounded like an appropriately-scandalized older brother.

  “Oh, piffle.” She wave her hand. “I’ve been living with Eleanor for the past four years. She’s taught me all the good bad words. Shall I go and fetch Eleanor then? So you can propose to her?”

  “When did I say anything about proposing to Eleanor?” Søren demanded.

  “Who else would you marry?” Claire asked.

  “Goliath,” Kingsley said.

  “What was that?” Søren asked.

  “Yes, what was that?” Claire asked as well.

  “Earlier I was trying to think of a mythological or biblical figure with an enormous—”

  “Kingsley,” Søren said.

  “Head,” Kingsley said. “Goliath. He was a giant. So he must have a giant head. We were discussing hat sizes of biblical figures.”

  “Did you really mean ‘head’ or were you talking about—” Claire lowered her voice, “cocks?”

  “For God’s sake, Claire.” Søren shook his head. “I suppose Eleanor taught you that word as well.”

  “Twas…” She pointed at Kingsley.

  “I am the sole adult,” Søren said, “in a world populated entirely by tall and abominably-behaved children.”

  “He means us,” Kingsley said to Claire. “We’re abominable.”

  “Cheers then,” Claire said. Kingsley and Claire clinked their teacups together like sailors down the pub.

  Søren stood at the front window, one hand on the sill and one on his hip, head down—the very picture of deep contemplation.

  “Eleanor’s missed you,” Claire finally said.

  Søren turned around. “Has she?”

  “I caught her throwing darts at your portrait last week. She has marvelous aim. I won’t tell you where the darts landed, but it was a poor choice to be painted full-length, Frater. Let’s hope your portrait self wasn’t planning on children.”

  “She’s been a bad influence on you,” Søren said.

  “Yet, I’ve never been happier. Funny that.” Claire stood and walked to him, took his hand in hers. “Frater, I would rather live on the streets selling matches than see you unhappy. The only reason I’m telling you to marry her is because I know you want to, even if you can’t admit it.”

  “I am her guardian,” Søren said. “If another man in my position who was like me in every important respect came to me and asked permission to marry her, I would tell him no, absolutely not.”

  “Of course you would.” Claire poked him in the chest, “because you wish to marry her yourself. And if you tried to stop her from marrying the man she wanted to marry, she’d run away to Gretna Green with him after leaving a dead snake in your bed.”

  “Live snake,” Kingsley said.

  “True,” Claire said. “I hate to break the news to you, but you are her guardian in the same way I am a lady—in name only.”

  Søren sighed. Kingsley couldn’t imagine how difficult this was for him—his conscience at war with his heart. What a blessing, Kingsley thought, that he didn’t have a conscience. Made life much easier.

  “If you’re happy with her,” Claire said, “and I know you will be, then Father loses. The last thing he’d ever want is for you to be happy.” She put her hands on her brother’s chest and gazed up at him. “He drove my mother into her early grave just as he did yours. I have an equal right to hatred, but I would rather see him forgotten and you happy. And me, as well. She’s been a sister to me for four years. If I could have one thing from you for Christmas, it would be to have her for a sister-in-law.”

  Søren said nothing and the nothing he said said everything. He kissed Claire on the forehead. She smiled, triumphant.

  “I’ll go and fetch her,” Claire said.

  “I’ll do it,” Kingsley said. “She might be armed.”

  Kingsley left and strode upstairs. When he walked past Søren’s official portrait hanging in the hall, he saw the holes in it from the darts. Dozens of holes. A hundred perhaps.

  Eleanor’s door was slightly ajar, and Kingsley peeked in before announcing himself. She sat at her writing desk in a pale green gown with an ivory lace collar scratching words onto a sheaf of parchment. She glanced at him. Once.

  “Can’t even face me himself,” she said. “Had to send his lapdog.”

  Kingsley barked.

  She looked at him and arched her eyebrow. He remembered the day she demanded Søren teach her how to do that. Clearly she’d been practicing.

  “Writing another of your lurid scandal stories?” he asked, stepping into her elegant white and gold bedroom, a far cry from the cramped and filthy room she’d been sleeping in with six other girls, all pickpockets, when Søren rescued her from her life of crime.

  “I’m writing about a wicked rogue with dashing dark hair and a devilish smile. A man designed by God to wear tight trousers.”

  Kingsley was, in fact, wearing tight trousers. Fitted riding breeches and polished Hessian boots with brass buttons. Might not be fashionable, but he’d yet to meet a lady who’d complained about how he dressed.

  “Ah, my biography then.”

  “A murder mystery, actually. You make quite a handsome corpse, even disemboweled.”

  “Is my killer a beautiful black-haired girl of nineteen? With green eyes, delicious lips, and a bad temper?”

  She sat up straight and tore her paper in half.

  “Damn,” she said, “you guessed the ending. Back to the drawing board.”

  Her voice was lower than Kingsley remembered, huskier, more womanly. A voice like running one’s hand backwards across velvet.

  “Lord Stearns would like to speak with you.”

  “He can speak to the Devil for all I care.”

  Kingsley strode to her writing desk and stood looking over her.

  “When the constable was seconds away from hauling your thieving hide off to gaol, the sainted son of a Baron—the very man whose wallet and pocket-watch you stole—intervened. He paid off your debts. He bought your freedom. And if that wasn’t enough, he took you into his home and treated you like his own sister. I don’t care what you’d rather do, you will go—now—and speak to him, or I will carry you.”

  She rose from her chair and remained there, unmoving.

  Kingsley smiled. “I was hoping you’d do that.” He swept her up and into his arms. If she was surprised, she didn’t show it. He carried her to the bottom of the stairs.

  “There.” He pointed at the door. “Go.”

  She started to brush past him, but he caught her by the waist and held her in place.

  “I didn’t want to leave,” he said. “I serve him, in every way, as you know, but you and I were close, in our own way. Being there with you and him and Claire, it was as if I had a family again.”

  “Then you should hate him, too.”

  “Kiss me,” he said.

  “Why should I?”

  “To spite him. If you really hated him you would. But we both know you don’t—”

  She kissed him. Her lips brushed his and he pulled her body flush against him and deepened the kiss with a nip of teeth on her bottom lip. A potent kiss, the sort that went straight from the mouth to the groin.

  She broke the kiss and ran her hand through his hair.

  “You need a haircut, Kingsley,” she said. “You look like a pirate.”

  4

  Eleanor entered the drawing room and shut the door behind her. Søren sat at the piano, playing Beethoven’s Für Elise. He’d removed his jacket and rolled up his cuffs a turn. She came closer, watching him play, watching his long and lovely fingers waltzing across the ivories, watching his noble head as it bowed over the keyboard.

  One courageous strand of his perfect golden hair threatened to fall over his forehead. She longed to reach out and brush it back. But she didn’t. She wouldn’t. The piece ended and the notes rang out and died. He looked at her.

  “Hello, Little One,” he said and smiled.

  “I tried to grow as tall as I could while you were gone,” she said, “so you couldn’t call me that ever again.”

  He slowly rose from the piano bench and looked down at her. He held his hand at the top of her head and moved it to rest at his collarbone. He sat again, point made.

  “I said I tried. I didn’t say I succeeded, Lord Stearns.”

  “We know each other too well to be formal.”

  “Once, yes. But now? You’re a stranger to me, My Lord.”

  He met her eyes once and then put his fingers at the keys again. “Am I?” he said and began to play.

  She recognized the piece at once. “Lo, How a Rose E’re Blooming,” an old German Catholic Christmas hymn. Her mother’s favorite hymn, which Søren knew. She’d told him that during their first Christmas together four years ago, after he’d just brought her into his home. He’d gone to six different churches and chapels until he’d found a hymnal that included the song so he could learn to play it for her.

  The piece ended. His fingers stilled.

  “Eleanor, I need you.”

  She almost laughed. “You need me? Where were you when I needed you?”

  “You wanted me. You didn’t need me.”

  “I told you I loved you,” she said, gazing down at him, fire in her eyes. “Do you know how hard it was for me, sixteen, to say those words to you, almost thirty? You, the son of a Baron and me, the common daughter of a common thief. Do you know how hard it was for me to tell you what was in my heart?”

  “Very hard?”

  “No,” she said. “It was the easiest thing I’d ever done or said. Because I trusted you.”

  He had the decency to look away as if ashamed.

  She remembered that moment like yesterday. A winter evening at Edenfell and the air was fragrant with the scent of sleeping trees and falling snow. A week before Christmas. Claire had gone to bed early with a novel. Kingsley was likely off debauching his favorite local widow. Søren sat in the low club chair by the fireplace going over the estate’s accounts. With his father in the sanitarium, Søren had taken charge of the estate. It flourished under his tender care and so had she. It had been exactly a year since he’d made her his ward. A year of new dresses and Claire’s easy friendship and lessons with tutors and dancing masters and horse-riding instructors. And her favorite part—Mass on Sundays with Søren at the small Catholic chapel two villages away. That night as Søren made little notes in his ledger, she sat at his feet in front of the fire and laid her head on his knee. Between one mark and the next in his ledger, Søren rested his hand lightly on the back of her head. With one gentle knuckle, he’d stroked her neck from her ear to throat and back up again. Had she been a cat, she would have purred. But she was a girl in love, so she turned her head and smiled up at him.

  “I’m in love with you,” she’d said. “And I know you’re in love with me. If you came to my room tonight, I wouldn’t turn you away.”

  He didn’t reply, not in words. Instead he caressed her lips with his thumb, a sensual touch that thrilled her even to recall it three years later. And when he pressed the tip of his thumb into her mouth and touched her tongue, she knew for certain he would come to her bedroom that night.

  But he hadn’t. He’d left the house by morning, taking Kingsley with him. No note. No explanation except a letter to Claire a week later saying “business” had called him away. That night at his feet in front of the fire had been the last she’d seen of him for three years. Until now.

  “You abandoned me,” she said.

  “You were left with Claire’s Aunt Adeline who treated you like her own daughter.”

  “But you were my guardian.”

  “And I left so I could better guard you.”

  “That makes no sense.”

  “I can’t explain further, but I do apologize for the hurt I caused you.”

  “All’s forgiven,” she said though it wasn’t. “Happy now?”

  “You’re in the same room with me. Of course I’m happy.”

  She closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

  “What would you do if I stood on your piano and screamed my head off?” she asked.

  “Quite frankly, I’m surprised you haven’t already,” he said.

  Quite frankly, so was she.

  She took a deep breath and temporarily silenced her desire to scream.

  “Now…what do you need of me?”

  “I need you to marry me.”

  He looked at her and she at him. In her nineteen years, no one had ever shocked or surprised her more.

  “What?”

  “You heard what I said.” He began to play again.

  Eleanor shut the fall-board, nearly closing it on his fingers. He managed to pull them out just in time.

  “Marry you?”

  “Sit,” he said. “Here.”

  He pointed at the piano bench. She sat. She was too addled to fight him.

  Once seated, he began to speak. He told her quickly of the condition in his father’s will, how they couldn’t risk contesting it, how fulfilling it meant Claire would have a home always, and she would never have to marry for money or security, how if they failed to fulfill it…they would lose all. This house. Edenfell. The money. They only had until half-noon tomorrow.

  “Father had sworn for years he was leaving everything to Claire to punish me. I shouldn’t be surprised that he lied even about that. I can’t support her and you on my own, or I wouldn’t presume to ask this of you.”

  “This is madness,” she said.

  “This is revenge. I told him, more than once, I would never be the son he wanted. I wouldn’t marry, wouldn’t have children, wouldn’t use my title…I would reject everything he was and stood for and wanted. I went so far as to nearly join the Jesuit order and take a vow of celibacy.”

  “You never told me that.”

  “There are many things I’ve never told you.”

  “How many?”

  “How many things haven’t I told you?”

  “Yes. How many secrets are you keeping from me? I want to know the number.”

  He raised his hands in surrender, but then she saw him ticking off his fingers as if counting.

  “Four,” he finally said.

  “Four. What are they?”

  “If I told you they wouldn’t be secrets, would they?”

  Eleanor growled and stood up. Not to leave but to put some distance between her and Søren. She couldn’t think when she sat so close to him. He was far too beautiful. Her fingers itched to touch that spun gold hair of his. His eyes were grayer and wilder than she remembered, like a stormy December sky, and when she breathed in, she could smell the scent of him—like frost on a pine tree in a snow-deep forest.

  “I know you despise me now,” he said. “I’m not asking for a true marriage. We’ll have an arrangement. We’ll marry, and you can live at Edenfell with Claire. Or here if you prefer. You’ll have a generous allowance. Kingsley and I will return to the continent, and you’ll be free of me.”

  “Not good enough,” she said.

  “Name your price.”

  She turned and faced him. “Everything.”

  “Everything?”

  “You asked my price. My price is everything. I do want a true marriage with you and everything that comes with it, including your secrets.”

  “You can’t imagine what you’re asking.”

  “Why? Because I’m a virgin?”

  “That’s certainly part of it.”

  “There’s this marvelous book called a Thesaurus. Have you seen it? It lists synonyms for words. If you look up the word ‘virgin’ it in, you’ll find ‘naïve’ is not listed among its synonyms.”

  “Of course not,” he said. “They’re entirely different parts of speech. One’s a noun, the other’s an adjective. ‘Virginal’ is the adjective form of ‘virgin.’ ”

  “‘Virgin’ may also be used as an adjective,” she said. “Example—He trampled the virgin snow under his feet. No one would call it ‘virginal snow.’ That would be snow that’s never been sexually defiled.”

  “And what would you know about sexual defilement?” Søren demanded.

  “It was discussed in a religious pamphlet Aunt Adeline made Claire and I read.”

  “And what did the pamphleteer have to say about sexual defilement?”