Lorene leaned back against the soft leather seat of the carriage. Outside snowflakes fluttered down from a sky almost milky white from the light of the moon. The snow on the fields glowed and the sounds of the horses’ hooves and the carriage wheels were as muffled as if passing over down pillows. It was the perfect end to a perfect day, a day-long visit with her two sisters, their husbands and the man she adored.

Thank goodness her husband had refused to come with her.

Her husband, the Earl of Tinmore, a man in his seventies and at least fifty years her senior, had forbidden her to spend Christmas Day with her sisters at their childhood home, Summerfield House. Lorene had defied her husband’s dictate. She’d walked the five miles to Summerfield House that morning. Snow had been falling then, too, but the cold merely filled her with vigour and made her feel more alive.

How different it was at Tinmore Hall where she had to kill every emotion merely to make it through the day.

‘Will you be all right?’ the man seated next to her asked.

She turned to him and her heart quickened as it always did when looking at him, Dell Summerfield, the Earl of Penford, the man who had inherited her childhood home. His blue eyes shone even in the dim light of the carriage. His well-formed lips pursed in worry.

She could not help but stare at those lips. ‘I suspect he will be asleep. He retires early, you know.’ She did not have to explain that she spoke of her husband.

‘What of tomorrow?’

She loved his voice, so deep, like the lowest notes on the pianoforte, felt as well as heard.

How silly to have a schoolgirl’s infatuation at the advanced age of twenty-four, especially since she was a married lady and he’d merely been civil.

No, he’d always been more than civil.

He’d been kind.

The last thing she wanted was for him to worry about her. Or to think of her. He must never know how much she thought of him. Or how much his kindness towards her meant to her.

She smiled. ‘The worst I will endure is a tongue lashing, but I might earn one of those for choosing the wrong dish for breakfast, so I am very used to it.’

Dell frowned and glanced away.

‘It is equally as likely he will say nothing,’ she added quickly. ‘One never knows.’

Dell had insisted upon returning her to Tinmore Hall in his carriage and insisted on accompanying her. Lorene treasured these rare moments alone with him when she could pretend they were the only two people in the world and that she had not been forced to choose marriage to Tinmore.

Although no one had forced her. She had approached Tinmore and offered herself to him. She’d done so because her father had left his children penniless and Lorene could think of no other way to help her sisters and half-brother. She’d promised to marry Tinmore and to devote herself to his comfort for the rest of his life. In exchange he agreed to provide generous dowries for her sisters and enough money for her brother to purchase a captaincy.

Nothing turned out as she’d thought, though. Her sisters and brother found happiness, but who could say it was not in spite of Tinmore, instead of because of him?

Their happiness was a sufficient prize for Lorene, though, even if the cost had been her own happiness.

‘I did have the most lovely day,’ she said to Dell.

She’d felt close to her sisters again. She’d basked in the joy they shared with their husbands.

And in being near Dell.

He turned back to her, his gaze meeting hers and warming her all over. ‘I am pleased.’

Once when she’d been a child caught in a thunderstorm, lightning struck a tree near her, so close she’d felt the crackle of the bolt around and through her. Sometimes it felt like that lightning bolt crackling when she was with Dell.

How silly was that?

The carriage reached the iron gates of Tinmore Hall and their gazes broke away. The cupolas of the huge country house came into view, like wagging fingers chastising her.

She’d done nothing wrong, though, except to defy her husband who had no good reason to keep her from Summerfield House. It certainly had not been wrong of her to want to spend

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