Free With This Ring by Celeste Bradley

only one person who knew what she’d done.Lysander didn’t count.He barely spoke to her, much less anyone outside Worthington House.
    It all hinged upon this man.Mr.Hastings had nothing to gain by carrying tales of her actions, unless he liked to live dangerously.
    Nothing of import had happened anyway.
    Just two things. Just two kisses that nearly made you forget everything you have based your life upon for the last decade.
    Elektra felt fully able to excuse her enjoyment of the first kiss.After all, she had thought she was kissing her future husband!How joyful to discover that he riveted her sensual attention so thoroughly!
    That happiness had been unfortunately short-lived.The discovery that her captive was only an ordinary manservant had been most disappointing.
    So why did you kiss him again?
    He kissed me!
    And you kissed him back. A lot.
    She had indeed.In fact, she was a little stunned to realize that in both kisses, er, cases, it had been Mr.Hastings who had the presence of mind to call a halt to matters.
    I must be losing my looks.
    Then again, maybe she wasn’t.Elektra’s gaze slid sideways to where Mr.Hastings lay sleeping still.There remained a definite shape beneath his trousers.
    Elektra turned her gaze virtuously away, but she allowed herself a smirk.She still had everything required to turn a man’s head.Which meant that Mr.Hastings was an exceptionally well-behaved fellow.
    How alarming!The last thing Elektra needed was a man who felt compelled to Do the Suitable Thing.No, she needed Mr.Hastings to be the sort of bloke who looked assiduously after his own skin—that was the only way she could be sure that he would never breathe a word of what had happened last night.
    Restless, she rose to her feet and began pacing the squelching carpet.She had to make a plan.She needed to brush the cobwebs from her mind and think .
    *   *   *
    The sun flashed in her eyes and she went still in a warming shaft of sunlight coming through a broken window.For a moment, the past dozen years slipped away and she could see the room the way it was.
    The high arched windows filled the room with light that gleamed from polished furnishings and made the exotic patterned carpet glow with jewel colors.Two little fair-haired girls ran giggling through the room, chasing across the fine rug, dashing around the spacious chamber, until a laughing dark-haired boy sprang from behind the luxurious settee to startle them, screeching with gleeful terror, back down the hall.
    Little Calliope and Elektra and Lysander, from a time when the world was full of magic and promise.It was more than another time.It was another world, another Worthington family … none of which still existed.
    No one knew how the fire started.Elektra had long suspected one of Orion’s experiments, or perhaps it had been the twins brewing up something foul in one of the fireplaces.Whatever the cause, the result was a house that was naught but walls and broken slate, still filled with the possessions that had been too ruined to take away, too broken even for vagrants to steal.
    It can be saved. Someday, Attie will run through these halls that she was robbed of. Someday these cracked walls will fill up again with a whole, perfect family, just as it used to be.
    Elektra know how to get it back for Attie.For them all.If she made the match of the decade, they could have it all back.
    As she stood there, her hand stole to the ribbon that hung from her neck.Lifting it, she pulled out the key.
    The beautifully scrolled iron key from the front door—the key that no longer worked on a door that no longer locked.The door itself had long been carted away to fuel someone’s fire.
    Still she kept the key.She carried it always.Someday that door would be repaired and when it was, she would have the key to open it.
    *   *   *
    Aaron felt sunlight on his face and for the first time in a thousand years, some tiny fragment of him was warm.
    No, that wasn’t quite