Free The Lady Risks All by Stephanie Laurens

him up to date with his sisters and their offspring. This one informed him that his sisters would be descending on Ridgware in a week’s time to spend several days planning Edwina’s wedding. The youngest of his sisters, Edwina was the last to wed. Despite the unstated yet underlying suggestion that his input would be welcome should he be able to visit, he couldn’t imagine that the five females who would be closeted at Ridgware would need any help from him.
    He’d attended Millicent’s and Cassandra’s weddings by slipping inside the church at the last minute, remaining out of sight, then sliding out again before the bride and groom had even turned to come back up the aisle. If matters had been otherwise, he would have led both girls down the aisle . . . Henry, a mere boy, had had to stand in for him.
    And that had hurt.
    More than he’d expected.
    Now Edwina was about to marry, and he wouldn’t be able to lend her his arm down the aisle, either.
    Staring at the letter, imaging his little sister walking down the aisle—experiencing in a visceral way the irretrievable passage of time, of years gone that he could never have back, of opportunities passed up that would not come again—his mind slid in a direction he rarely allowed it to take, to dwell on his regrets.
    On the dreams he had, so long ago, set aside.
    At the time with little thought, with little real appreciation of what he was sacrificing. That hadn’t seemed important at the time. Now . . .
    Twelve years on, his frame of reference had shifted.
    He was thirty-eight and could see no hope of ever achieving the one goal that, underneath all else, solid and real but unrecognized until recently, encompassed his ultimate desire.
    Family had been his lodestone, the pivot about which his life had swung . . . but the family he’d given up so much for was fragmenting. The girls would soon all be married, with husbands and children, families of their own. His mother was aging, and Henry, although currently still dependent on him, would be grown and his own man all too soon.
    And he . . . would be left with no one.
    No family to care for, no one to look out for.
    He was too cynically clear-sighted not to know that his role—his one true purpose in life—had always been to protect others. That was who he was.
    So who would he be, and what would he do, when he had no one?
    The blankness in his mind cleared, and he saw again the face that had proved so riveting last night.
    He wondered why his mind made the connection . . . then recalled that he’d told her Roderick no longer needed her to watch over him.
    His lips twisted; the advice had been sound. He knew all about sacrificing, and then having to let go.
    A moment passed, then he sat up, set his mother’s letter back on the desk. Determinedly shaking off his melancholy mood, he reached for a pen and settled to write to his sister-in-law, reassuring her that Henry’s performance at Eton was perfectly acceptable—indeed, to be expected. Anything more and he would have been concerned that his nephew wasn’t learning all that he should.
    Imagining Caroline reading that, he grinned.
    “T hese pigs’ trotters in calf’s-foot jelly are excellent.” Gladys looked at Miranda, seated at the foot of the table. “We should have them when Mr. Wraxby comes to dine. I’m sure he’ll appreciate them.”
    Miranda nodded. “I’ll speak with Mrs. Flannery in the morning to make sure Cook gets more in.” On Corrine’s death, she’d assumed control of the household; it gave her something to do, something to accomplish. Glancing at Roderick, seated in the large carver at the table’s head, she added, “We don’t yet know when—or even if—Mr. Wraxby will be able to dine, but he wrote to Aunt Gladys that he’ll be in town next week and will look to call on us.”
    Roderick arched a brow. He made no comment, but she read his thought clearly in his expression: Wraxby wrote to Gladys ?
    She looked down at