Free Slightly Dangerous by Mary Balogh

brush.
     
    B Y THE TIME Christine went to bed that first night, she felt a great deal better about the house party than she had before it began and until just after tea. She had not wanted to come in the first place, and of course it had begun disastrously. But her success in luring the Duke of Bewcastle into spending an hour with her had amused her and lifted her spirits, even if she
had
decided not to share her triumph with the other ladies.
    She
did
share it with Justin, however, when she sat with him in the drawing room after dinner while the tea tray was still in the room. She told him about the whole absurd wager and about the ease with which she had won it, though no one else would ever know.
    “Of course,” she explained, “it was not an
easy
hour. I can understand why the Duke of Bewcastle has such a reputation for coldness. He did not
once
smile, Justin, and when I told him that I had been invited here only after Melanie had been cast into hysterics by Hector’s inviting
him,
he neither laughed nor looked chagrined.”
    “Chagrined?” he said. “Bewcastle? I doubt he knows what the word means, Chrissie. He probably thinks it is his divine right to attend any house party that takes his fancy.”
    “Though I cannot imagine that many parties do,” she said. “Take his fancy, that is. But we must not be nasty, must we? I am very glad that I
have
won that foolish wager to my satisfaction. Now I can happily avoid the man for the next thirteen days.”
    “His loss, my gain,” Justin said, grinning at her. “I would love to have seen his face when you crashed into him.”
    But there was something else that had made Christine more cheerful by the end of the evening. She had faced something she had been dreading for two years—the moment when she must come face-to-face with Hermione and Basil again—and she had survived it. And, having done so, she had realized that there was really nothing else to fear and nothing else to inhibit her from being herself.
    She had come here to Schofield determined to blend into the background, to be an observer rather than a participant, to avoid all incidents and encounters that might make her the subject of gossip. She had come here, in fact, determined to behave as she had tried to behave during the last few years of her marriage before Oscar died. It had never worked then, much as she had tried, and it had not worked now during the first few hours of the party.
    She was glad her plan had failed so soon.
    For her failure had made her ask the question—
why
would she behave in a manner that went so much against her nature? If the villagers knew that Christine Derrick was planning to spend two weeks at a house party sitting in a corner observing the activity around her, they would surely collapse in a heap of mirth—if they believed such an apparent bouncer.
    Why
should she behave so—or try to behave so—just because her brother- and sister-in-law were at the party too? They believed the worst of her anyway. They still hated her—that had been clear since the afternoon. But she was free of them now and had been for two years. Oscar was long dead.
    She could be herself again.
    It was a wonderfully freeing thought, even if the memories of Oscar—brought alive again with particular poignancy out at the stone bridge by the lake—and the sight of Hermione and Basil had caused a certain tight soreness of grief in her chest.
    She
would
be herself.
    And so she spent the rest of the evening playing charades even though at first she was not chosen for either team on the assumption, she supposed, that she was to be identified with the older generation. She was picked finally only because one team was one player short and Penelope Chisholm refused to fill the place, declaring that she was so poor at the game that soon every member of her team would be begging her to resign.
    Christine was
not
poor at charades. It was, in fact, one of her favorite indoor games. She had always loved