Free To Wed The Widow by Megan Bryce

overly friendly with a lady you are dallying with. It would be very embarrassing for me, Sebastian.”
    She closed the door and Sebastian sat there. He was fairly certain his mouth was hanging open and he looked like he’d been whacked one too many times in the head.
    This must all be George’s fault. Flora had been spending too much time with him and he brought chaos wherever he tarried.
    Sebastian looked at the closed door and thought, his wife had needs ?

Five
    Elinor flirted and teased and smiled and fluttered her way through another week, another set of dinners and balls.
    But not too much.
    She was beginning to understand that less was more when there was actually the possibility of going through with the seduction.
    She was beginning to understand that she might never find a suitable gentleman.
    Mr. Framingham had smiled at her too widely, and she’d crossed him off her list.
    Mr. Dorchester had accidentally touched her bottom, and she’d laughed and pinched his cheek hard enough to leave a mark. And she’d crossed him off her list.
    She hadn’t seen Mr. Sinclair since she’d run in to him accidentally , and. . .he’d never been on her list.
    She couldn’t cross him off, even though it would have made her feel better.
    She wasn’t quite sure why she would have felt better.
    Elinor took out a piece of paper and a pen from her desk. She dipped and she wrote.
    A list of widowers this time, and she sighed to herself. Was she really getting that desperate?
    Apparently, yes.
    Widowers with children of their own already, of course, and that came with problems. Lots of problems.
    Husband number one had had children. But they’d been older than her. There had still been problems but she hadn’t had to live with any of them.
    But a widower young enough to give her children would already have young children.
    Young children who’d lost a mother, young children who would be worried they would lose their father to his new wife.
    But she wrote down all the names she could think of. Ten widowers.
    And if that wasn’t enough she would think of something else. Someone else. Perhaps go to the continent and find herself a Frenchman. Or another Italian. . .
    Perhaps not.
    But she could always, if all else failed, find herself a Scot.
    A cranky, tightfisted, skirt-wearing hater of everything English.
    Because even that would be better than the last name she’d written down on her short list.
    Surely she’d only put him there so she could cross him off.
    George Sinclair .
    Or perhaps she’d written him down because he would be her last choice. . .he was at the bottom of the list.
    Mrs. George Sinclair.
    . . .That wasn’t good. She’d never done that before.
    Elinor, Lady Ashmore.
    . . .Wellington, we have a problem.
    She blinked and blinked, staring at the paper and that title. She’d been Elinor, Lady Haywood, for eleven years. Through husband after husband, keeping her title.
    She wasn’t searching for a new and better title but there was a certain pull to being George’s countess.
    But then she laughed. Sebastian Sinclair, Earl of Ashmore, would live forever just so Elinor Rusbridge would never take that title.
    She ripped off the bottom of the page, throwing Mr. George Sinclair and his Mrs. and his perhaps-one-day countess into the fire.
    She watched the paper burn. Watched until it was just a pile of ash.
    She turned back to her widowers and said to the empty room, “I’ve burned you off my list, Mr. Sinclair.”
    Retribution raised his head to stare hopefully at her and she called him over to scratch his head lovingly.
    “No, I wasn’t speaking to you. I was talking to an empty room.”
    A cold, empty, boring, lifeless room.
    “I won’t do it again.”
    Retribution sighed like only a dog could and she petted him, his warm head heavy in her lap.
    “London is squeezing in on us, isn’t it? This house is becoming too, too small.”
    Her country house, the Earl of Ashmore would call it a cottage,