Ravishing the Heiress by Sherry Thomas

Author:Sherry Thomas [Thomas, Sherry]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Romance, Fiction, Adult, Historical, General
ISBN: 9780425250877
Google: NYyDSno8BXAC
Amazon: 0425250873
Publisher: Berkley
Published: 2011-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Alice was in her usual place on the mantel of Fitz’s study, her eyes closed, her tail curled around her plump little body. The clear glass bell jar that protected her from dust and moisture provided a clue that she’d long ago departed for the hereafter, but she remained so lifelike Millie still expected her to stir and wake up.

“I’ve been looking for you everywhere in the house,” came her husband’s voice behind her. “Why didn’t you join us?”

Millie did not immediately turn around. She needed a minute to pull herself together. The sight of the Fitzhugh party coming out from the rail station was still seared in her mind, Isabelle retaking her place as if the past eight years never happened. “You are back early,” she said. “I thought everyone was to take tea at the duke’s house.”

“Everyone includes you and I’ve come to get you.”

He had spoken to her of fairness when she’d have put their pact on a bonfire and burned it. No doubt he was again motivated by his need to restore her to her rightful place. But she wanted to be an inseparable part of his heart, not a consideration for his conscience. “It will be awkward with Mrs. Englewood there.”

“She won’t be there.”

He joined her at the mantel, the shoulder of his day coat speckled with drops of water—it had started to rain as she’d reached home. And then, utterly unexpected: his hand on the small of her back; his lips on her cheek.

The gesture was more familiar than intimate. Still, they did not greet each other this way: nods and smiles, perhaps, but not kisses on the cheek that left an etching of heat upon her skin.

He turned the bell jar a few degrees. “I never asked you, Millie. But why did you have Alice preserved?”

Sometimes Millie forgot that it had been her idea. No, more than her idea: She’d also been the one to engage the services of a taxidermist. “You loved her so much I couldn’t bear to put her underground.”

He was silent, his thumb rubbing against the small plaque that bore Alice’s name.

“Do you miss her still?” she asked.

“Not as much as I used to. And when I do miss her—she was a fixture of my school days, to think of her is to remember what it was like to be seventeen and without a care in the world.”

“You miss your old life.” It was a given, but still she hurt to be reminded of it.

“Doesn’t everyone, from time to time?” He replaced the bell jar and turned toward her. “Ten years from now I’m going to miss my life as it is today, simply because I will never be twenty-seven again. There is always something worth remembering in every stage of the journey.”

“Even in the year you married?”

“Yes.” His expression was—surely she deluded herself—nostalgic. “Demolishing the north wing, for one—that opportunity will not come again. Mrs. Clements telling the colonel to shut up. Our conversation about the commodes with the queen’s portrait inside—still one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard.

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