Private Arrangements by Sherry Thomas

Author:Sherry Thomas [Thomas, Sherry]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780553904765
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2008-10-02T22:00:00+00:00

A garden party was in full swing. Set against a profusion of red tulips and yellow jonquils was a kaleidoscopic parade of women, the edges of their creamy skirts blurring like a distant memory. In the middle of this swirl of colors, an oasis of calm. A man sat at a small table by himself, his cheek in his palm, his gaze enthralled by someone just outside the frame of the painting.

Lord Frederick was a far more talented and vivid painter than Camden had guessed. The painting radiated warmth, immediacy, and charming wistfulness.

A Man in Love, said the small inset on the bottom of the frame.

A man in love.

At his sister Claudia's house in Copenhagen, there was a framed photograph of Camden, taken the day after New Year's Day 1883. He'd been waiting for his mother and Claudia to finish their primping in advance of a family portrait, and the photographer had captured him in a pose nearly identical to that of Lord Frederick's man in love—daydreaming in an armchair, his head propped up in his hand, smiling, gazing somewhere beyond the range of the camera.

He had been looking out the window in the direction of Briarmeadow and thinking of her.

The photograph remained Claudia's favorite, despite all his efforts to persuade her to get rid of it. I like looking at it, she'd insist. I miss you like that.

Some days he, too, missed it. The optimism, the headiness, the feeling of walking on air. He knew perfectly well now that it'd been based on a lie, that he'd paid for those few weeks of unbridled happiness by never being able to feel anything like that again, and still he missed it.

He might divorce her, but he'd never be free of her.

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