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tongue.”
    â€œYou’re drunk.”
    â€œWell,” he said. “And so.”
    â€œI disapprove of spirits.”
    â€œWhereas I cannot live without them.” He let his head fall back against the chair. “I am not a happy drunk, Mrs. Evans. I hope that tomorrow you will have the kindness to recall nothing of my condition.”
    She stopped with her arms full of sheets. “Leave Nan alone, and I’ll have no cause for complaint.”
    â€œShe is pretty.” He nodded to himself. “And she has a lively eye. I wonder that you hired her.”
    â€œTommy is never here.” She dropped the sheets onto a chair.
    Once again he looked her up and down. His eyes were unpleasantly cold. “You’re not a’tall what I expected.”
    â€œA crone?” she said.
    He smiled, and it transformed his face, giving it all the warmth he’d previously lacked. He took her breath. “Bent over and crippled in both legs.”
    â€œWith a long, hooked nose.” She skimmed a finger along her nose, and Banallt’s gaze followed her motion. “Pie-eyed and shrewish, too.”
    â€œBut famously deep in the pockets.”
    â€œYes,” she said. “Tommy has described me to the last penny.”
    He clasped his hands on his head and stared hard at her. “I am not too drunk to fathom the entendre in those words of yours. You’re a clever girl,” he said slowly. “Not a girl. A woman. A clever woman.” He shook his head. “No good ever comes of clever women.”
    She wanted to laugh. To think here sat the man whom she’d given the role of knight in shining armor! Her imagination was far more pleasant than reality. As she’d done for Maeve, she took blankets from the chest at the foot of the bed. He stood again and walked to the fireplace where he leaned an elbow on the mantel and rested his chin on his palm, facing sideways so that he watched her. Sophie felt their rapport slip into intimacy, as if they were lovers who’d parted amicably and were now comfortable in friendship. Well. Was he not the very man she’d imagined meeting since she was ten and overheard her mother telling some visitor that, yes, the Earl of Banallt owned property just two miles distant? How strange that she should meet him now. So many years later and so far from home.
    â€œI continue to struggle, Mrs. Evans, with the notion that you are Tommy’s wife. You were described to me as—well, nothing like you.”
    â€œYou said yourself you’ve had too much to drink. I expect tomorrow you’ll see me clearly and find your opinion in accord with my husband’s.”
    â€œI’m not that foxed, ma’am.” He considered her again with a slow perusal she found more than faintly insulting. And—something else she couldn’t name. “Are you certain you’re not an imposter?”
    â€œQuite.”
    â€œYou’ve the finest eyes I’ve ever seen on a woman. Bar none. And that, madam, is saying something. Your eyes are lovely.”
    â€œThank you.” She was in the process of spreading one of the blankets on the bed, and while she was doing that, she discovered he’d moved toward her without making a sound.
    â€œMrs. Evans.” He spoke in a different sort of voice. A voice that sent a shiver up her spine. It was the voice he’d used to whisper to Maeve. The kind of voice Tommy never used with her. She froze with one hand on the edge of the blanket. “Perhaps,” he said in that caressing, silken voice, “you would care to join me in this lovely bed?”
    She turned around, the backs of her legs touching the mattress. “I am a married woman.”
    â€œAnd I am a married man.” He crossed his arms over his chest and looked at her with those awful eyes, gray with that odd rim of black. She felt quite certain she would never be free of the heat of his gaze. “What