Extraits

CHAPTER 1

SETH

Watching Charlie and Lincoln talking quietly together, it was difficult for Seth to remember that he'd once been half in love with her.

Perhaps not love. Not really. At least not the depth of love a husband has for his wife—or ought to—and clearly not the depth of love Lincoln and Charlie had for each another. They thought alike, finished one another's sentences, and knew each other better than they knew themselves.

It was a marvel that anyone could love a cold, calculating man like Lincoln. Even more miraculous was that Lincoln loved her back. They'd all thought him incapable of emotion. Before Charlie came to live with them at Lichfield Towers, Seth, Cook and Gus joked that Lincoln had been created in a mad scientist's laboratory.

How wrong they'd been.

No, Seth had never really been in love with Charlie, but he did adore her. She'd once said their relationship was like a brother and sister, but in his experience, brothers and sisters bickered. He and Charlie rarely argued. Favorite cousins? No, that wasn't right, either. He loved Charlie like a…like a man who'd be there to pick up the pieces when her husband died. Like a man who knew she wasn't the grand love of his life, his soul mate, but didn't want to see her suffer, either. There. That described them perfectly, and quite poetically too, if he did say so himself.

He propped his booted feet on a footstool, clasped his hands over his stomach, and watched his two good friends share a secret smile. A pang twisted his gut. No one had ever looked at him that way, and sometimes he wondered if anyone ever would.

Thoughts of Alice threatened to rise but he quashed them. There was no point thinking about her. She simply wasn't interested in him, and that was the end of it. If only they didn't keep bumping into each other, Seth was quite sure he'd lose interest. If only she weren’t always around. He was a fickle lover, after all; he rarely kept his paramours for more than a few months. Just as soon as Alice moved out of Lichfield, all would be well again. He could find himself a lonely widow or bored governess, someone older but not too old. Someone who appreciated the attentions of a younger man. Not someone like Alice with a biting wit, fierce intelligence and formidable elegance.

Not someone who'd be shocked by his past.

Seth's mother swanned into the drawing room as if she were mistress of the house. It was a testament to Charlie's good nature that she put up with the indomitable Lady Vickers. Seth's mother could be trying, to put it mildly.

She clicked her tongue and shooed his feet off the stool so she could pass.

"You could have gone around, Mother," he said.

"Your boots are filthy. Charlie doesn't want dirt on her velvet stool." She lowered herself onto the sofa and regarded him levelly.

"That's for Charlie to decide, not you."