“With all due respect, you cannot hide in here forever, Your Grace.”

Looking up from the ledgers he’d been tallying, Eric scowled at his butler. “I am not hiding,” he growled as he pushed his chair back and stood up. “I am working.”

“And I suppose it is just a coincidence that you have been ‘working’ ever since you and Her Grace had a falling out?” Newgate asked.

“How the bloody hell do you know about that?”

“Aside from the fact that you have both been taking great pains to avoid one another for the better part of a week, Her Grace’s bedchamber still smells like perfume. Adelaide threw a candlestick at my head once,” he said, smiling vaguely at the memory.

Walking around to the front of his desk, Eric crossed his arms and leaned back against it. “What did you do?”

“Before or after I regained consciousness?” the butler said dryly.

It wasn’t often that Newgate spoke of his wife, who had died nearly eight years ago of consumption. She had been a sweet woman, constantly sneaking Eric biscuits when she thought her husband wasn’t looking. Which of course he always had been. There wasn’t very much that escaped the butler’s notice, then or now.

Including the dismal state of my marriage, Eric thought silently. Picking up a feather tipped quill, he twirled it absently between his fingers.

“You and Adelaide seemed happy, Newgate.”

The aging butler inclined his head. “We were, Your Grace. Very much so. I miss her every day.”

He touched the quill to his chin. “My parents were never happy.”

“No,” Newgate agreed. “I fear they were not.”

Eric was silent for a long moment. After his fight with Caroline he’d been filled with righteous anger. He’d made it clear what their marriage was and what is wasn’t, had he not? Why couldn’t she be content with what he could give her, instead of dwelling on what he couldn’t? But then his anger had faded, and he’d felt…lost. Empty. Alone. And the only thing he’d wanted to fill the void in his heart was Caroline.

Whether by accident or design, his little wife had gotten under his skin in a way no other woman ever had. He didn’t just want her body. He wanted her smile. He wanted her laughter. He wanted her blushes. He wanted the shy glances she snuck in his direction when she thought he wasn’t looking. Until she had taken them away he hadn’t realized how much they’d come to mean to him. How much she had come to mean to him.

If that wasn’t love, then devil take it he didn’t know what was.

“I saw what my mother did to my father,” he said slowly. “The pain she put him through. The ultimatums she gave him. I thought that’s what love was. What it looked like. What it meant. But now I don’t think it is. Love isn’t something to be bartered or traded. It isn’t a weapon or a means to get something you want. It can’t be found in an emerald necklace or a pint of ale.” He met Newgate’s steady gaze. “I was so bloody determined not to turn into my father that I became my mother. But I don’t want to be either one of them. Not anymore. Do you think Caroline and I could be happy together? That we could love one another, as you and your Adelaide did?”

“Respectfully, Your Grace, that is a question only you can answer.”

Eric’s chest tightened as he recalled the misery in Caroline’s beautiful gray eyes when she’d poured out her heart to him.

‘I know you are capable of more than what you’re giving. I’ve felt it when you touch me. I’ve seen it in your eyes when you look at me. It would be easier if you really couldn’t love me. But I know you can. I know it. You just don’t want to.’

“I think I already have, Newgate.” He dropped the quill, picked up his coat, and, much to Newgate’s astonishment, gave the butler a two-armed embrace that left the older man gasping for breath. “I think I already have.”

 

Where the devil did I leave it? Caroline asked herself, borrowing one of her husband’s favorite curses as she steered Buttercup between two towering pines. Her head bent and her ears flattened against the brisk wind, the draft mare trudged gamely through the snow as they wound their way deeper and deeper into the woods.

They’d been walking for what felt like hours, searching in vain for the short, stout log that Caroline had left propped against an old stump the last time she’d ventured this far into the forest. Of course there hadn’t been any snow then…and it hadn’t been nearly as cold, or as dark. With a shiver she pulled gently on the reins and Buttercup came to a halt, twin plumes of smoke rising up from her nostrils as she lifted her neck.

“I am terribly sorry,” Caroline said apologetically, reaching down to brush flakes of snow off the mare’s scruffy mane. “I did not think it would take this long. If I could just find where I left it…” She brought a hand to her brow and scanned their surroundings, but with everything covered in a blanket of white it was impossible to decipher one log from the next.

The one she was looking for was much smaller than a traditional Yule log, but that was why she’d picked it. So she could easily drag it back herself. In hindsight she wished she’d sent a group of footman to carry out the task for her. But there was nothing she could do about it now…except to turn back around.

Collecting up the reins, she nudged her frozen feet into Buttercup’s sides and the mare started walking again. But they’d gone no more than ten feet before Caroline pulled her up once more, a flicker of unease coiling in her belly when she realized she hadn’t the faintest idea what direction they were traveling in. She’d thought the manor was behind them. Or was it in front of them? With the snow on the ground and more falling from the sky every minute, she could no longer be certain.

“Oh dear,” she fretted. “I never should have come out here.”

Maybe if she allowed Buttercup her head the mare would know how to get them back to the barn. But when she loosened the reins and gave a light kick the draft merely turned and looked up at her with large, unblinking brown eyes as if to say, ‘You got us into this mess and it’s your job to get us out’.

“You’re right. Of course you’re right. The manor is…that way!” she decided, pointing at a cluster of pine trees that looked vaguely familiar. Drawing her cloak more snugly around her shoulders, she urged Buttercup onwards through the snow with an encouraging cluck of her tongue.

After two wrong turns and one frightening slide down an embankment, they finally stumbled out of the forest and Caroline breathed an enormous sigh of relief when she saw lights twinkling in the distance.

“See?” she said, leaning down to give Buttercup a teeth chattering hug. “I knew we could do it!”

But no sooner had they set off across the field than an icy chill of warning swept down her spine.

And then the wolves began to howl.