The Bridgertons Happily Ever After Read Online Free PDF Page B

smiled slightly. “It was good that season.”
    Simon closed his eyes for a moment, as a strange tension eased from his body.
    “It’s odd,” Daphne said. “I wonder why he never mailed these to you.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Well, he didn’t. Don’t you recall? He held on to all of them, then gave them to Lord Middlethorpe before he died.”
    “I suppose it was because I was out of the country. He wouldn’t have known where to send them.”
    “Oh yes, of course.” She frowned. “Still, I find it interesting that he would take the time to write you letters with no hope of sending them to you. If I were going to write letters to someone I couldn’t send them to, it would be because I had something to say, something meaningful that I would want them to know, even after I was gone.”
    “One of the many ways in which you are unlike my father,” Simon said.
    She smiled ruefully. “Well, yes. I suppose.” She stood, setting the letters down on a small table. “Shall we go to bed?”
    He nodded and walked to her side. But before he took her arm, he reached down, scooped up the letters, and tossed them into the fire. Daphne let out a little gasp as she turned in time to see them blacken and shrivel.
    “There’s nothing worth saving,” he said. He leaned down and kissed her, once on the nose and then once on the mouth. “Let’s go to bed.”
    “What are you going to tell Colin and Penelope?” she asked as they walked arm in arm toward the stairs.
    “About Georgie? The same thing I told them this afternoon.” He kissed her again, this time on her brow. “Just love him. That’s all they can do. If he talks, he talks. If he doesn’t, he doesn’t. But either way, it will all be fine, as long as they just love him.”
    “You, Simon Arthur Fitzranulph Basset, are a very good father.”
    He tried not to puff with pride. “You forgot the Henry.”
    “What?”
    “Simon Arthur Henry Fitzranulph Basset.”
    She pfffted that. “You have too many names.”
    “But not too many children.” He stopped walking and tugged her toward him until they were face to face. He rested one hand lightly on her abdomen. “Do you think we can do it all once more?”
    She nodded. “As long as I have you.”
    “No,” he said softly. “As long as I have you .”

The Viscount Who Loved Me:
The 2nd Epilogue
    Two days prior . . .
    Kate stomped across the lawn, glancing over her shoulder to make sure that her husband was not following her. Fifteen years of marriage had taught her a thing or two, and she knew that he would be watching her every move.
    But she was clever. And she was determined. And she knew that for a pound, Anthony’s valet could feign the most marvelous sartorial disaster. Something involving jam on the iron, or perhaps an infestation in the wardrobe—spiders, mice, it really didn’t matter which—Kate was more than happy to leave the details up to the valet as long as Anthony was suitably distracted long enough for her to make her escape.
    “It is mine, all mine,” she chortled, in much the same tones she’d used during the previous month’s Bridgerton family production of Macbeth . Her eldest son had casted the roles; she had been named First Witch.
    Kate had pretended not to notice when Anthony had rewarded him with a new horse.
    He’d pay now. His shirts would be stained pink with raspberry jam, and she—
    She was smiling so hard she was laughing.
    “Mine mine mine miiiiiiiiiiiine ,” she sang, wrenching open the door to the shed on the last syllable, which just so happened to be the deep, serious note of Beethoven’s Fifth.
    “Mine mine mine miiiiiiiiiine .”
    She would have it. It was hers. She could practically taste it. She would have tasted it, even, if this would somehow have bonded it to her side. She had no taste for wood, of course, but this was no ordinary implement of destruction. This was . . .
    The mallet of death.
    “Mine mine mine mine mine mine mine mine mine mine