Chapter One

      Elmswood Manor, June 1831

      With a heavy sigh, Kate pushed aside the letter she had been attempting to compose to Eloise. Her husband’s eldest niece, she had just learned, had given birth to a daughter. She had, it seemed, embraced motherhood with an enthusiasm that was staggering, considering that she had originally wed Alexander with no intentions of consummating the marriage, far less of conceiving a child. But Eloise’s marriage of convenience had turned into a true love match.

      Her obvious happiness leapt off the page of the letter Kate had just received, and she was desperate to accept the invitation to her home in Lancashire to meet baby Tilda for herself. For the moment, however, that was sadly completely out of the question.

      She had missed so much while she’d been away. How long would this very strange state of affairs continue?

      Pushing her chair back from the desk, Kate prowled restlessly over to the window. The morning room faced out to the back of the house. The expanse of lawn had been neatly mown and trimmed, revealing a vast swathe of verdant green. Leaves covered the huge, ancient oak which Eloise had been so fond of climbing when she’d first come to live at Elmswood. On the still waters of the lake a pair of swans were gliding effortlessly.

      Had it really been last October when those two distinguished gentlemen had turned up unannounced on her doorstep? ‘Colleagues of her husband’, was how they’d introduced themselves, and she’d thought they were bringing her some long overdue letters. She’d served them tea and cake, and they’d talked about the weather, and the shocking state of the roads, and there had been mention of them having met Eloise socially, she recalled, before they had revealed the real purpose of their visit by informing her that Daniel’s wellbeing was a matter of grave concern.

      She’d still been wondering what connection the pair of them might have with Eloise, and why Eloise had never mentioned it, when she realised that their polite smiles had been replaced with another expression entirely.

      Then the interrogation had started, with questions being flung at her one after the other in rapid succession, until finally she’d startled them by demanding that they stop bombarding her with demands for information and start providing her with answers. What they told her and what they had proposed had sent her reeling.

      They’d given her no time to recover her composure before the younger of the two, Sir Marcus, had started issuing her with a series of concise instructions, including what she was permitted to say to Estelle, whom she’d had no choice but to press-gang into holding the fort. Within three hours of their arrival they had been gone, taking Kate with them, on the start of a journey that had taken her through the end of one year and well into the next.

      In the end, she’d been abroad for all of winter and spring, arriving home yesterday with the beginning of summer.

      Looking around her now, smelling the sweet perfume of the rose she’d picked only an hour ago, Kate had to remind herself that she really was home, for Elmswood Manor didn’t feel in the least bit familiar. The Elmswood Coven was no more.

      For the first time since her husband’s nieces had arrived, more than nine years ago, she was alone, all her beloved wards gone, embracing their own lives without any further need of her.

      Eloise had a husband and now a child. Phoebe had not only opened a restaurant in London while Kate had been away, but also married a man Kate had never heard of, never mind met. A man she would not meet for the foreseeable future, and a restaurant she wouldn’t be able to visit, no matter how much she longed to.

      For this next, wholly unexpected and hopefully brief stage of her life she would be without the company of any of her husband’s nieces, for even dear Estelle, who had stepped into the breach and held the fort at Elmswood for nine long months, had been obliged to leave.

      Not that she’d objected, thank goodness. Quite the contrary, in fact. She’d embraced her freedom and the chance to embark on a long-planned Continental trip, loyally refraining from asking awkward questions or from making what in Kate’s opinion would have been perfectly reasonable demands under the circumstances.

      And what circumstances!

      Kate sank onto one of the chairs, leaning her head back and closing her eyes. Had the last nine months really happened? She had told the girls only the bare bones. Not the story that Sir Marcus had constructed for public consumption but the truth—or a fraction of it. What they truly made of it she couldn’t begin to imagine, but they were fiercely loyal, and she knew that if they talked it would only be amongst themselves.

      Now it was over, and it felt like a dream—or should that be nightmare?

      However she chose to describe it, it wasn’t over yet. Upstairs, in one of the guest bedrooms, was a very real, lurking reminder of that fact—a simmering volcano which could erupt at any time.

      Daniel, her husband of eleven years. The girls’ nearest living relative. A man Kate barely knew and whom his nieces had never met.

      The sound of the handle of the morning room door being turned made Kate’s eyes fly open. She was on her feet when the man in question appeared, larger than life and, if not actually bursting with health, very far from death’s door and most certainly not a figment of her imagination.

      ‘So this is where you hide yourself away.’

      ‘Daniel!’

      Instinctively, Kate rushed to help him, but the fierce frown she received made her sit straight back down again. He was dressed oddly, in a somewhat exotic-looking tunic and loose pantaloons, over which he had donned a rather magnificent crimson silk dressing gown emblazoned with gold dragons and tied with a gold cord. A matching pair of slippers covered his bare feet.

      ‘Chinese,’ he enlightened her, noting her stare. ‘It seems the powers that be managed to get my luggage back to England ahead of me. Considerate of them, don’t you think? That they moved heaven and earth to make sure my effects were delivered? A small consolation for you, dear wife, in the event that you’d been forced to return here alone.’

      ‘Don’t say that!’

      To her horror, tears welled up in her eyes.