how the sight of blood and gore on his newborn babies absolutely terrified him. Odd that he was so adept when it came to equine infants.
“She’s a beauty, like her mother.” Reyn sat on the bed, noting the sheets had been changed too. He was pathetic, he really was, but the idea of Maris in pain paralyzed him.
There was a word for him—uxorious. He had come across it in a book he was making himself read, and had not known the meaning at first. It meant excessively devoted to one’s wife. Guilty as charged.
She was radiant, and his heart swelled. “Thank you, Maris, for everything.”
“I should be thanking you.” She grinned, looking half her age. “I can’t wait until I’m well enough so we can—”
“No!” Reyn held up a hand in alarm. “Don’t say it! Don’t even think it!”
“Have a picnic in the garden with the children? Surely you can have no objection to that. The leaves will be turning, and if everyone dresses warmly, we should be fine, even little Juliet. We can bring her along in a Moses basket. I do so love the fall.”
Reyn shut his eyes. His wife surprised him daily with her cunning. He was very sure that was not what she had intended to say at all.
Ah, well. He’d worry later. At the moment, he was going to kiss his countess.
Did you miss the first book in Maggie’s LONDON LIST series?
Lord Gray’s List
From duchesses to chamber maids, everybody’s reading it. Each Tuesday, The London List appears, filled with gossip and scandal, offering job postings and matches for the lovelorn—and most enticing of all, telling the tales and selling the wares a more modest publication wouldn’t touch . . .
The creation of Evangeline Ramsey, The London List saved her and her ailing father from destitution. But the paper has given Evie more than financial relief. As its publisher, she lives as a man, dressed in masculine garb, free to pursue and report whatever she likes—especially the latest disgraces besmirching Lord Benton Gray. It’s only fair that she hang his dirty laundry, given that it was his youthful ardor that put her off marriage for good . . .
Lord Gray—Ben—isn’t about to stand by while all of London laughs at his peccadilloes week after week. But once he discovers that the publisher is none other than pretty Evie Ramsey with her curls lopped short, his worries turn to desires—and not a one of them fit to print . . .
And don’t miss LADY ANNE’S LOVER, coming in August. Here’s a sneak peek!
Wales, December 26, 1820
Lady Imaculata Egremont had danced naked in a fountain. She’d eloped to France with a rackety gentleman she’d just as soon forget. She’d sold chestnuts on the street. There was no reason on earth why she could not pick up a dead mouse and dispose of it with her usual élan.
She fought back an unfortunate gag and told herself to stop breathing. To think of lilac bushes in her mother’s Dorset garden in the spring. Great purple masses of them, their heavy cones bursting into flower, gray-green leaves shivering in the warm breeze. She was not in Wales. It was not winter. She was not standing bent over a tiny desiccated body in a grim hallway that smelled like death.
And gin.
Somewhere her new employer must have spilled a vat of it and had probably joined the mouse. He certainly had not opened the door to her as she’d injured her hands pounding on it for a full five minutes on the misty doorstep. She’d finally taken the initiative—anyone would tell you Lady Imaculata was bold as brass—and pressed the latch herself, finding the door unlocked. If she were truly a housekeeper, she supposed she should have entered by way of the kitchen, but Lady Imaculata was an earl’s daughter, and some habits were hard to break.
The possibly dead Major Ripton-Jones had not sent any transportation to fetch her, either. She’d gotten off the mail coach in Hay on Wye foolishly hopeful, but in the end she’d arranged for a donkey cart herself to bump her along to Llanwyr, hoping her presence had not been noted by her father’s spies. She was still almost frozen from the long ride, and the temperature in Ripton Hall’s hall was not much warmer than outside. She was probably giving the dead mouse a run for its money with her own eau de bourrique.
Lilacs. Think of lilacs. Her favorite flower. No donkeys or dead mice. It was