Map of a Lady's Heart by Caroline Linden

Author:Caroline Linden [Linden, Caroline]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Caroline Linden

Chapter 6

After the electric moment with the earl, when he caught her hand and looked at her as if he’d like to pull her back into the privacy of the storage cupboard and kiss her senseless, Viola tried to busy herself with dull tasks in the distant reaches of the castle. Not because she feared the earl actually would pull her aside and kiss her senseless, but because she was coming to hope he might.

Her hand had tingled for an hour where his lips brushed it. After she delivered the makeshift crown to Bridget, she fled the drawing room, even though it left Sophronia completely in charge. The earl had watched her go—Viola could swear his gaze made her feel warm and giddy from all the way across the room—but thankfully he didn’t follow. That was proper, she told herself; she was a servant and he was a gentleman of leisure.

So she ended up sitting in the small room off the duchess’s private parlor where she normally worked, staring out at the snow and wondering about the foreign lands Lord Winterton had been to. Had he seen the ancient pyramids in Egypt, which Stephen said were marvels of engineering? Had he been to India and seen elephants? Lord Newton had told the young ladies fantastical tales of his uncle’s journeys, and as much as Viola reminded herself it was not her place to know, she burned to ask him about all the places she had read of, but would never see herself.

It was true that everything and everyone she held dear was in England. Even more, the dearest person in the world to her, her brother Stephen, relied upon her being prosperously employed, and that was easiest to accomplish in England. She had neither means nor opportunity to go abroad, whether she wished to or not. Unlike the earl.

She sighed, brushing her fingertips over the knuckles he had kissed. Everything about her life was unlike the earl’s. She was an idiot to sit here thinking a kiss on the hand meant anything. He was being polite, or flirting, or even trying to persuade her to help him locate that atlas. Not that she didn’t understand his desire to have it. She’d made sure Stephen got their father’s astrolabe and sextant, and she’d kept her mother’s pearl necklace, which would have paid for a term at Cambridge.

But whether or not the duke would be willing to sell the atlas, if he even had it, Viola knew she ought to stay out of the matter. Her growing sympathy for and interest in Lord Winterton could only get her in trouble.

She was still torn when she went down to dinner. It was part of her duties to help oversee dinner and entertain the guests in the drawing room before and after the meal, but she was not expected to dine with the guests. When it was just family, she was often invited to join them, but during this party she receded to her proper place.

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