Free The Kiss by Sophia Nash

grandmother while you and Her Grace enjoy some time alone? Really, I hadn't wished to bring this matter up."
    "What do you want?"
    "I'm looking for a steward. A man I can trust to ease Georgiana away from the role she assumed when her father became ill."
    "Going to give Georgiana and her family the boot, are you? I won't help you there."
    Quinn sighed in exasperation. "No, you fool," he seethed, finally deciding on heat for heat as a last resort. "I'm trying to settle her in comfort— away from the damned pigsty. Now do you have a name for me or not?"
    The Duke of Helston pursed his lips and broke out into a smile filled with deviltry. "Actually, yes. I have the very man for you. Brown is his name— John Brown. I think you and he will get along verra well, laddie. In fact I guarantee it." The last was said in a growling purr. "You must be riding a Cornish wave of luck, as my former steward is due to arrive for a visit any day now. I shall send him directly to you. Of course, you'll have to offer him a king's ransom to stay on. He retired to his small Scottish property last year."
    Quinn knew perverse pleasure when he saw it, and he would bet his last farthing the Duke of Helston was hatching a plan to confound him. He sighed. Well, he would learn soon enough if this Mr. Brown was a cheat, a drunk, a liar, or just plain corrupt. He had had enough experience in those arenas of humanity to render him an expert.
    Hours later, long after the duke and his wife had returned to Amberley with their raven-haired cherubs, Quinn took pleasure in his evening ritual, which relieved the day's tension of holding onto his every last emotion. He walked from room to room on the lower level, checking for lit candles, speaking to the servants, inspecting every detail of the smoothly run great house. "Putting the house to bed" was how he chose to think of it.
    He sighed.
    A father missing a child was a wretched thing, he thought ruefully. Putting a house to bed, indeed.
    He continued his tour and took a lonely sort of pride as the newest caretaker of this massive estate, one of the largest in the British Isles. Penrose was the southernmost of five residences in the Fortesque family portfolio of entailed properties. All of them were prosperous. It boggled the mind. How Cynthia would have reveled in all of it. If she had only shown restraint, only shown more ... He ruthlessly forced the thought away.
    He wasn't sure when he had taken the decision to walk to the opposite end of the house, where a small suite had been reserved for Mr. Wilde before the steward had married and been allowed the use of Little Roses cottage. But his unhurried step led him here. He slowed in front of the steward's rooms. Something was wrong, Quinn thought. The door to the spartan study was wide open, as was the connecting door to the small bedchamber beyond, and a fire burned in the tiny grate.
    Georgiana, however, was nowhere to be seen.
    Quinn lifted a candle to illuminate the small suite more clearly and stepped across the threshold. "Georgiana?" he asked to be sure. Opaque beeswax dripped onto his coat sleeve, and the familiar honey fragrance reminded him of the scent of Georgiana's hair when he had carried her to the folly.
    He set the gleaming silver candlestick in the windowsill and opened the sash to breathe in the warm summer evening air. A thousand and one stars filled the night sky, all the way to the horizon.
    A lone star lay lower than the rest, giving the illusion of resting its fiery head upon Loe Pool in the distance. And for a tiny flicker of a moment Quinn wished Georgiana was beside him. She was the one person, he instinctively knew, who would take joy in this magical illusion in nature. He blew out his candle to more fully enjoy the sight, only to find that the darkness brought naught but more melancholy.
    Georgiana sat on the bench facing Penrose's great house, leaned her cheek against the cool windowpane in the glass lake house, and closed her