The Bridgertons Happily Ever After - By Julia Quinn Page 0,84

melting smile, she said, “For someone who’s never, you’re rather good at it.”

For a moment she thought she saw tears in his eyes, but then, just like that, they were gone, replaced by a wicked, wicked twinkle. “I plan to improve with age,” he told her.

“As do I,” she returned, just as slyly.

He laughed, and then she laughed, and they were joined.

And while it was true that they both did get better with age, that first time, up in the Hare and Hounds’s finest feather bed . . .

It was bone-crackingly good.

Aubrey Hall, Kent

Twenty years later

The moment Violet heard Eloise scream, she knew something was dreadfully wrong.

It wasn’t as if her children never yelled. They yelled all the time, generally at each other. But this wasn’t a yell, it was a scream. And it wasn’t born of anger or frustration or a misplaced sense of injustice.

This was a scream of terror.

Violet ran through the house, with speed that ought to have been impossible eight months into her eighth pregnancy. She ran down the stairs, across the great hall. She ran through the entry, down the portico stairs . . .

And all the while, Eloise kept screaming.

“What is it?” she gasped, when she finally spied her seven-year-old daughter’s face. She was standing at the edge of the west lawn, near the entrance to the hedgerow maze, and she was still screaming.

“Eloise,” Violet implored, taking her face in her hands. “Eloise, please, just tell me what is wrong.”

Eloise’s screams gave way to sobs and she planted her hands over her ears, shaking her head over and over.

“Eloise, you must—” Violet’s words broke off sharply. The baby she was carrying was heavy and low, and the pain that shot through her abdomen from all the running hit her like a rock. She took a deep breath, trying to slow her pulse, and placed her hands under her belly, trying to support it from the outside.

“Papa!” Eloise wailed. It was the only word she seemed able to form through her cries.

A cold fist of fear landed in Violet’s chest. “What do you mean?”

“Papa,” Eloise gasped. “Papapapapapapapapapa—”

Violet slapped her. It would be the only time she would ever strike a child.

Eloise’s eyes went wide as she sucked in a huge breath of air. She said nothing, but she turned her head toward the entrance to the maze. And that was when Violet saw it.

A foot.

“Edmund?” she whispered. And then she screamed it.

She ran toward the maze, toward the booted foot that was sticking out of the entrance, attached to a leg, which must be attached to a body, which was lying on the ground.

Not moving at all.

“Edmund, oh Edmund, oh Edmund,” she said, over and over, something between a whimper and a cry.

When she reached his side, she knew. He was gone. He was lying on his back, eyes still open, but there was nothing of him left. He was gone. He was thirty-nine years old, and he was gone.

“What happened?” she whispered, frantically touching him, squeezing his arm, his wrist, his cheek. Her mind knew she could not bring him back, and her heart even knew it, too, but somehow her hands would not accept it. She could not stop touching him . . . poking, prodding, yanking, and all the while sobbing.

“Mama?”

It was Eloise, come up behind her.

“Mama?”

She couldn’t turn around. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t look at her child’s face, knowing that she was now her only parent.

“It was a bee, Mama. He was stung by a bee.”

Violet went very still. A bee? What did she mean, a bee? Everyone was stung by a bee at some point in their lives. It swelled, it turned red, it hurt.

It didn’t kill you.

“He said it was nothing,” Eloise said, her voice trembling. “He said it didn’t even hurt.”

Violet stared at her husband, her head moving from side to side in denial. How could it not have hurt? It had killed him. She brought her lips together, trying to form a question, trying to make a bloody sound, but all she could get out was, “Wh-wh-wh-wh—” And she didn’t even know what she was trying to ask. When did it happen? What else did he say? Where had they been?

And did it matter? Did any of it matter?

“He couldn’t breathe,” Eloise said. Violet could feel her daughter’s presence growing close, and then, silently, Eloise’s hand slipped into her own.

Violet squeezed it.

“He started making this sound”—Eloise tried to imitate, and it sounded awful—“like he was