Bridgerton Collection, Volume 2 - Julia Quinn Page 0,285

that much was clear.

But try as he might, he couldn’t figure out what else he could have done. It wasn’t as if he’d meant to hurt her, and he certainly hadn’t stopped, pondered, and decided Oh, yes, I do believe I shall act like an ass, but even though his reactions had been swift and unconsidered, he didn’t see how he might have behaved any other way.

He knew himself. He didn’t always—or these days even often—like himself, but he knew himself. And when Francesca had turned to him with those bottomless blue eyes and said, “The baby was to have been yours in a way, too,” she’d shattered him to his very soul.

She didn’t know.

She had no idea.

And as long as she remained in the dark about his feelings for her, as long as she couldn’t understand why he had no choice but to hate himself for every step he took in John’s shoes, he couldn’t be near her. Because she was going to keep saying things like that.

And he simply didn’t know how much he could take.

And so, as he stood in his study, his body taut with misery and guilt, he realized two things.

The first was easy. The whisky was doing nothing to ease his pain, and if twenty-five-year-old whisky, straight from Speyside, didn’t make him feel any better, nothing in the British Isles was going to do so.

Which led him to the second, which wasn’t easy at all. But he had to do it. Rarely had the choices in his life been so clear. Painful, but painfully clear.

And so he set down his glass, two fingers of the amber liquid remaining, and he walked down the hall to his bedchamber.

“Reivers,” he said, upon finding his valet standing at the wardrobe, carefully folding a cravat, “what do you think of India?”

Part Two

March, 1824

Four years later

Chapter 5

. . . you would enjoy it here. Not the heat, I should think; no one seems to enjoy the heat. But the rest would enchant you. The colors, the spices, the scent of the air—they can place one in a strange, sensuous haze that is at turns unsettling and intoxicating. Most of all, I think you would enjoy the pleasure gardens. They are rather like our London parks, except far more green and lush, and full of the most remarkable flowers you have ever seen. You have always loved to be out among nature; this you would adore, I am quite sure of it.

—from Michael Stirling

(the new Earl of Kilmartin)

to the Countess of Kilmartin,

one month after his arrival in India

Francesca wanted a baby.

She had for quite some time, but it was only in recent months that she’d been able to admit as much to herself, to finally put words to the sense of longing that seemed to accompany her wherever she went.

It had started innocently enough, with a little pang in her heart upon reading a letter from her brother’s wife Kate, the missive filled with news of their little girl Charlotte, soon to turn two and already incorrigible.

But the pang had grown worse, into something more akin to an ache, when her sister Daphne had arrived in Scotland for a visit, all four of her children in tow. It hadn’t occurred to Francesca just how completely a gaggle of children could transform a home. The Hastings children had altered the very essence of Kilmartin, brought to it life and laughter that Francesca realized had been sadly lacking for years.

And then they left, and all was quiet, but it wasn’t peaceful.

Just empty.

From that moment on, Francesca was different. She saw a nursemaid pushing a pram, and her heart ached. She spied a rabbit hopping across a field and couldn’t help but think that she ought to be pointing it out to someone else, someone small. She traveled to Kent to spend Christmas with her family, but when night fell, and all of her nieces and nephews were tucked into bed, she felt too alone.

And all she could think was that her life was passing her by, and if she didn’t do something soon, she’d die this way.

Alone.

Not unhappy—she wasn’t that. Strangely enough, she’d grown into her widowhood and found a comfortable and contented pattern to her life. It was something she never would have believed possible during the awful months immediately following John’s death, but she had, a bit through trial and error, found a place for herself in the world. And with it, a small measure of peace.

She enjoyed her life