A Gift of Love by Andrea Kane

Author:Andrea Kane [Kane, Andrea]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Five

THE ATTIC BLOOMED LIKE A CHAOTIC FLOWER GARDEN, bursting with color. Ballgowns and petticoats well past their first blush, outmoded frock coats and impossibly bright waistcoats, blossomed in disarray over the edges of the trunks Gabriel had pilfered for costumes to use in the game of charades that had whiled away the afternoon.

His grandmama's turban had graced the head of the dread infidel Saladin, while silver gauze had gilded Richard the Lion Heart with regal magnificence. Marie Antoinette had lost her head, and Sir Lancelot had saved his Guinevere from the flames.

Dozens of games and hours of laughter had almost disguised the fact that it was Christmas and that almost every other house was bursting with family and laughter and good cheer.

Alaina looked down at her small charge, who had curled himself up on a mountain of cast-off clothes, his last ginger cookie drooping from his fingers as he slept. She wished that Tristan could see him.

Tristan, with his sad eyes and his implacable mouth, his broad shoulders carrying pain he wouldn't acknowledge even to himself, let alone anyone else. Tristan, who had smiled for just a heartbeat in the garden, snow sprinkling his ebony hair and glistening in angel kisses upon the chiseled contours of that starkly beautiful masculine face.

She'd been so angry with him the night before, this man who had become so hurt and disillusioned in the years she'd been away from the window. But in that stark moment in the garden when she'd stared into eyes that were suddenly naked, vulnerable, she saw a shadow of the Tristan she had known: a man, sensitive, kind, loving, staring at her through cold bars of a prison of guilt and self-loathing.

Her heart had broken for him, and she knew that if she held the deed to every star in the heavens, she would gladly have traded all their shimmering beauty to put the light back in Tristan's eyes.

She ranged about the attic, her gaze tracing a rocking horse with a crooked leg, too unsteady for another child's play, yet too beloved to be cast into the rubbish heap. The nook beneath the eaves was filled with cherished memories, bits and pieces of childhood, legacies of first dances and weddings, mourning brooches and castaway dreams.

Alaina wandered to the corner, searching for pieces of the Tristan she had loved for so long—letters home from the years he'd been a scholar at Harrow, an abandoned cricket bat.

A leather-covered volume was tucked beneath a broken fan, and Alaina drew it out, running her fingers over the legend embossed in gold upon the cover: Charlotte Sophia Koenig, Her Journal.

Alaina tensed, catching her lip between her teeth. Charlotte ... this journal had belonged to Tristan's wife. She should put it back among the cobwebs, where layers of dust could dull the edges of the broken dreams it held. A life cut short, a love robbed by death.

She had no business prying through its pages. And yet, where else would she have a better chance

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.