Free My Lady Below Stairs by Mia Marlowe

earbobs and travel in style.”
    She pressed the pair of sapphire and pearl studs into his open palm. He studied them so intently, she wondered if he was considering adding them to a still life composition.
    “No, my selfish little heart,” he said with a laugh as he returned them to her. “Your trinkets you must keep. Giovanni will take care of you. Perhaps I will sell a paint ing on the way to the wharf and we can move up to a second-class berth. Would you like that?”
    “I don't care,” she said fiercely as she hugged him, hooking one leg around his and rocking against him. Selfish? Well, it was what she'd called herself, wasn't it? “ As long as I'm with you, it doesn't matter where we are.”
    He kissed her long and deeply, cupping her bottom to lift her against him. Sybil moaned into his mouth. Just when she thought she'd persuaded him to stay, he pulled away.
    “If I do not go now, we miss the morning sailing.” He wound a thick muffler around his neck. His southern blood had never thinned enough for England's cold, damp winters. “Go back to bed and keep warm. I will join you soon.”
    Once he had latched the door behind him, Sybil slumped on the edge of the bed. Over the last six months, she and Giovanni had made love in his little garret apart ment so many times, she'd lost count. Fear of being caught stealing away from her father's house had added spice to the adventure. The tiny space was magical when Giovanni was with her, a fleshly pleasure garden.
    Now, looking around the sorry collection of cast-off furniture and half-finished canvases, she could only see its seediness. And the neighborhood was so dicey he even had to lock the much-dented trunk that held his spare clothes. She wondered how Giovanni could bear this place alone.
    Sybil drew the blanket up to her chin. When he had left, he'd taken the only source of heat with him—his body. Once he returned, she wouldn't give his pitiful room another thought. She could live anywhere, so long as Giovanni was with her.
    But what about Father?
    Her conscience hadn't troubled her in so long, Sybil was surprised when she heard its small voice in her mind.
    “He'll be fine,” she said aloud.
    She replayed their last, crockery-smashing argument in her head. His angry tirade hadn't moved her, but when her indomitable father finally sank into his leather desk chair and held his gray head in his hands, his shoulders shaking with suppressed sobs, Sybil had been completely overcome.
    Only the threat of her father's utter ruin made her agree to let Mr. Roskin arrange a lucrative match for her. But then the earl had left for a season of hunting, as if her sacrifice were nothing.
    It had been easy to climb out the window this morning without a backward glance.
    What will happen to Father?
    The small voice began chanting the question. A snippet of memory rose up to torment her.
    “ Oh, Father, you remembered!” An eight-year-old Sybil squealed with delight as the earl lifted her onto the back of a fat pony. She'd hounded her father for months about a mount of her own and now, he took as much pleasure in it as she did. Her father’s eyes lost that look of carefully guarded emptiness for a few moments as be watched her trot around the small pen.
    Mother's fever was better that day, so she watched, too. Small and frail in her wheeled chair, she was so obscured in the dark shade of a broad sycamore, it was as if she watched from some other realm already.
    Sybil's father had seemed to shrink into himself when her mother died not a fortnight later.
    Guilt, Sybil suspected.
    She knew men of her class thought nothing of keep ing a mistress, and most of their wives maintained a state of willful ignorance about that "other one." But when her mother had discovered her father had sired a bastard on one of the help right under her own roof, her health, never robust, began its steep decline. Lord Somerville blamed himself.
    Now, her father faced his own decline—a financial