Free The Black Sheep's Return by Elizabeth Beacon

the tiny squares of glass he had let into the gable walls of each cramped bedroom and there had been no need to look in the first place.
    ‘All’s well. You’ll be perfectly safe from intrusions if you bar the door behind us,’ he informed his amused guest, who was now sitting on the edge of the bed flicking through his volumes of Shakespeare.
    ‘I shall do very well,’ she assured him and, since half her attention seemed on the book, he suddenly felt awkward and in the way.
    ‘Would you like me to light the fire again?’
    ‘I’m not ill,’ she said as if the very idea was ridiculous and he concluded she’d been brought up with a host of contrary expectations.
    ‘A good many females would be after such an ordeal.’
    ‘But I am not a fragile flower.’
    ‘Let me hear you bar the door behind me anyway,’ he ordered and swung on his heel so he wouldn’t have to look at her any more and long to be on the wrong side of that door when she barred it to the rest of the world.
    ‘Yes, Papa,’ she said meekly and hopped to the door so she could do exactly what he’d thought he wanted her to and shut him out.
    Rich listened to the thud of the stout lock he’d made to fit the equally stout door so he could leave Anna and the baby alone while he went off to sell the furniture and nick-knacks he made from the wood he felled in the forest and ‘bodged’ together. He stared at the stout oak planks for a long moment, rueing his folly. Time to remember real life, he reminded himself as he whistled Atlas and waited to see which direction the faithful mastiff came from, so he could find his children without having to yell and disturb half the creatures ofthe forest as well as Miss Rowan. Like the first name he had given her, she certainly hadn’t been called by that one before she christened herself today. There, he was thinking about her
again
. Doing his best to slam aside the memory of the slender nymph he’d spied naked at her
toilette
this morning, he greeted his dishevelled children and promised them a piggyback ride by strict rotation as they set out for Keziah’s cottage, which lay just far enough away to suit their mutual liking for isolation whenever they weren’t feeling sociable.
    Melissa Seaborne finally gave up trying to court sleep and padded to the windows in order to draw back the curtains and watch June sunlight flood the mellow landscape outside. She selected a book from the shelf before returning to bed and piling up her pillows behind her to make a comfortable nest. How she wished her Lord Henry was still here to share the easy intimacy of such an early morning, she thought wistfully, smiling regretfully at the thought that there would be little time for reading if only he was.
    After six years of widowhood, she still missed him so sorely it could hurt like a knife to the gut at the most unexpected moments.She let the memory of holding each of her grandchildren and her great-niece in her arms without her beloved Hal at her side to dote on them edge in. Wonderful occasions every one, but not to grow old with her love and her lover, never to share such joy with him again, was an everyday loss that was overwhelming at times like this.
    She thought by moving out of Ashburton New Place, and refusing to tenant Seaborne House in the absence of her eldest son, this house would give her a home with no heavy reminders of the husband and father her two then-unwed daughters had lost to sadden them. Her lovely Helen was now blissfully content with a new husband and Penelope a happy and popular young lady who would be introduced to the startled
ton
as a beauty to rival her famously lovely elder sister, Persephone, Countess of Calvercombe, in a few short years. To their mama, all her chicks were extraordinary, but fifteen-year-old Penelope would fight beaux off the instant she came out, if not for the fierce protection of her cousin Jack, brother Telemachus and two brothers-in-law who didn’t suffer fools very