His Christmas Countess

Since then Kate had tried hard not to allow the locked room to become a Bluebeard’s chamber in her imagination, applying rigorous common sense to keep her own nightmares at bay. She had found her way around the house without looking at the door if she could help it, she had asked no further questions of the staff, but it refused to be forgotten. There were times when she seriously considered picking the lock with a bent hairpin, or seeing if a slender paperknife would trip the catch, then told herself to not even think about something so unseemly.

Now she wondered just what Madeleine’s crimes had been. A disaster as a mother. That, somehow, did not make sense. Surely she could not have beaten the child—neither Grant nor his grandfather would have allowed her unsupervised access if they feared violence. And being a distant and cold mother was nothing unusual amongst the nobility, Kate knew. Many a child was raised almost entirely by servants without anyone accusing the parents of being a disaster.

The only explanation Kate could think of was that she was a failure as a wife and therefore morally unfit to be a mother. Had she taken a lover—had Grant found them together in her bedchamber? It was an explanation, but it was difficult to imagine Grant being cuckolded. In fact, her mind refused to produce an image of a more attractive alternative who might have tempted his wife to stray.

‘Which is very shallow of me,’ she admitted to Anna. The baby stared back at her with wide green eyes. ‘Grant is intelligent, good-looking, and he was the heir to an earldom when she married him. But good looks and position are not everything. If Madeleine had found her soulmate...’

Then she should have resisted temptation. Madeleine was married, she had made vows, she had a child. Which is easy enough for me to say. Despite being a well-brought-up, respectable young lady, I gave my virtue easily enough. Of course, having a scheming brother who put her in the way of a man who could be trusted to yield to temptation when it was offered and who could not afford a scandal had helped her along the path to ruination. Her becoming pregnant was, as far as Henry was concerned, the perfect gilding on his plan to blackmail her lover. What if Jonathan came back now, walked around that bend in the path ahead?

Kate watched the bend approach. No one appeared around it, of course, least of all the rakish Lord Baybrook. And if he did, he would not be coming with protestations of undying love, with explanations of how she had entirely misunderstood his flat refusal to marry her when Henry had confronted him two months later, after she had been forced to confess her predicament.

Not that she had seen him then, of course. Henry, as befitted the male head of the household, had taken himself off to London to, as he put it, deal with the matter. Only, he had not dealt with it, not brought her a husband back. At the time it had struck her as strange that her brother had not been more angry, but she had decided that perhaps he had been relieved that he had not found himself facing the viscount at dawn on Hampstead Heath. Then she had found the letter in Henry’s desk, the coldly furious response to blackmail, the counter-threats. But Lord Baybrook had not called Henry’s bluff. He would pay, she thought, reading the letter. Pay—and then she was certain that one day he would find some way to make Henry pay and Kate, too, the woman Jonathan thought had deliberately set out to ensnare him.

Anna gurgled and Kate stopped, her feet sinking into the soft mulch of the path. There was nothing to be gained by brooding on it, fretting over the long arm of a vengeful aristocrat or wincing in shame at her own part in her brother’s schemes. Most certainly, she was in no position to judge Grant’s first wife on moral grounds. Equally certainly, if she had the choice between Grant Rivers, Lord Allundale, and Jonathan Arnold, Lord Baybrook, she had no doubt which man she would choose now.

Chapter Eight

Grant sat up in the marble bath and considered the tricky, but eminently safe, subject of plumbing. His grandfather had installed baths with a cold-water supply and drains for the main bedchambers, but he had not risked the newfangled systems of boilers and piped hot water. Grant had agreed with him at the time, but lugging the cans of hot water upstairs and along endless corridors certainly made a great deal of work for the servants.

He lathered the long-handled brush and scrubbed his back while calculating the safe location for boilers and the length of pipework one would need. It was technical, complicated, and was entirely failing to stop him brooding on the subject of his wife. His second wife.