A Valentine Wedding Read Online Free PDF Page A

couldn’t be in the same room together anymore without this bitter antagonism. They had hurt each other too deeply in the past ever to recover even a semblance of ease in each other’s company. Ned had known that. So why had he made such a disposition? He had loved his sister, and he had loved his friend. Why would he choose to make them both miserable?
    There was only one answer. Ned had believed that by throwing them together in this hideous fashion, the chemistry that had always been between them would reignite. He had been overjoyed at their engagement and devastated at its breaking. He had reproached neither of them openly, and had stayed close to them both, scrupulously refusing to take sides, but he hadn’t been able to hide his sorrow and disappointment.
    Emma left the salon and made her way to the frontbedchamber on the floor above. Her maid was in the midst of unpacking. Gowns lay on the bed, draped over chairbacks and the arms of the chaise longue standing beneath the window. Shoes, fans, scarves littered every surface.
    “Lord love us, Lady Emma, but I never would have realized we’d brought so much with us,” Mathilda said, laying an armful of linen into a drawer of the armoire. “And I’ll lay any wager that you won’t be wearin’ a stitch of this stuff once you’ve been to the silk warehouses and the milliners and the bootmakers.”
    “You’re probably right, Tilda,” Emma said. “Everything must be hopelessly out of fashion.” News of Ned’s death had reached them only in November. Dispatches from Portugal took a long time a-coming. She had been in Hampshire throughout the summer and had stayed on through the beginning of the London season while lawyers had dealt with probate and the entail. In her grief, she’d had no interest in the fashion periodicals over which Maria pored, no interest in society gossip, had been content to live in riding dress and the light mourning she’d been obliged to adopt to receive condoling visitors.
    But now she was tired of black and lavender and dove gray. It was time to return to the fashionable world. Eyebrows might be raised at such a swift putting off of mourning, but Emma, like her brother, had never cared a fig for public opinion, and she had a shrewd suspicion that public opinion would overlook any impropriety when it came with such a vast fortune. Flouting convention would be viewed as an interesting eccentricity.
    She left Tilda to her unpacking and went into the next-door boudoir. Her writing case had been set outon the secretaire, and a footman was lighting the candles on the mantelpiece. A fire burned brightly in the hearth, and the room seemed a haven of quiet and order compared with the rest of the house.
    She sat down at the desk and opened the case. Her fingers went, as they always did these days, to the fold of leather where she kept her private correspondence. She drew out the oiled parchment packet and sat with it in her hands, looking at the rusty stains of Ned’s blood.
    Then she slid the sheet of paper out of the parchment and opened it carefully. It was unlike any correspondence she’d ever received from Ned before. It was a poem of some kind, clearly one he’d written himself, and Ned was no poet, even the most partial sister had to admit that. It was really a very bad poem. Had he meant it as a joke? And why was there no covering letter?
    Emma dashed a hand across her eyes. She refolded the sheet of paper, replaced it in the parchment, and slid it back into her writing case. Whatever he’d meant by it, she would never discover now. But this was all she had left of him—the last concrete thing she possessed of her brother. It had Ned’s blood on it. And she would treasure it.
    Maybe Alasdair would see the point of the poem. He understood Ned in ways different from Emma’s ways. And Alasdair always had answers to everything. It was another of his infuriating characteristics. He wasn’t always right, but he was always forcefully