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Megs stopped on the first-floor landing. “What?”

“Tomorrow morning is soon enough to see my brother.” Sarah smiled gently from three steps below. “I’ll go help with Great-Aunt Elvina.”

“Oh, but—”

Megs’s feeble protest was made to the empty air. Sarah had already scampered lightly down the stairs.

Right. Library. Second door on the left.

Megs took a deep breath and turned to face the gloomy hallway. It’d been two years since she’d last seen her husband, but she remembered him—from the little she’d seen of him before their marriage—as a nice enough gentleman. Certainly not ogrelike, anyway. His brown eyes had been quite kind at their wedding ceremony. Megs squinted doubtfully as she marched down the corridor. Or were his eyes blue? Well, whatever color they’d been, his eyes had been kind.

Surely that much couldn’t have changed in two years?

Megs grasped the doorknob to the library and quickly opened it before any last-minute second thoughts could dissuade her.

After all that, the library was something of an anticlimax.

Dim and cramped like the corridor, the room’s only light came from the embers of a dying fire and a single candle by an old, overstuffed armchair. She tiptoed closer. The occupant of the ancient armchair looked …

Equally ancient.

He wore a burgundy banyan frayed pink at the hem and elbows. His stockinged feet, lodged in disreputable slippers, were crossed on a tufted footstool so close to the fireplace that the fabric nearest the hearth bore traces of earlier singeing. His head lolled against his shoulder, casually covered by a soft, dark green turban with a rather rakish gilt tassel hanging over his left eye. Half-moon spectacles were perched perilously on his forehead, and if it weren’t for the deep snores issuing from between his lips, she might’ve thought Godric St. John had died.

Of old age.

Megs blinked and straightened. Surely her husband couldn’t be that old. She had a vague notion that he was a bit older than her brother Griffin, who had arranged their marriage and who was himself three and thirty, but try as she might, she couldn’t remember her husband’s actual age being mentioned.

It had been the darkest hour of her existence, and, perhaps thankfully, much of it was obscured in her mind.

Megs peered anxiously down at the sleeping man. He was slack-jawed and snoring, but his eyelashes lay thick and black against his cheeks. She stared for a moment, oddly caught by the sight.

Her lips firmed. Many men married late in life and were still able to perform. The Duke of Frye had managed just last year and he was well past seventy. Surely Godric, then, could do the deed.

Thus cheered, Megs cleared her throat. Gently, of course, for he was the main reason she’d come all the way to London, and it wouldn’t do to startle her husband into an apoplectic fit before he’d done his duty.

Which was, of course, to make her pregnant.

GODRIC ST. JOHN turned his snore into a snort as he pretended to wake. He opened his eyes to find his wife staring at him with a frown between her delicate brows. At their wedding, she’d been drawn and vague, her eyes never quite meeting his, even when she’d pledged herself to him until death do they part. Only hours after the ceremony, she’d taken ill at their wedding breakfast and been whisked away to the comfort of her mother and sister. A letter the next day had informed him that she’d miscarried the child that had made the hasty wedding necessary.

Grim irony.

Now she examined him with a bold, bright curiosity that made him want to check that his banyan was still tightly wrapped.

“What?” Godric started as if surprised by her presence.

She swiftly pasted on a broad, guileless smile that might as well have shouted, I’m up to something! “Oh, hello.”

Hello? After two years’ absence? Hello?

“Ah … Margaret, is it?” Godric repressed a wince. Not that he was doing much better.

“Yes!” She beamed at him as if he were a senile old man who’d had a sudden spark of reason. “I’ve come to visit you.”

“Have you?” He sat a little straighter in the chair. “How … unexpected.”

His tone might’ve been a trifle dry.

She darted a nervous glance at him and turned to aimlessly wander the room. “Yes, and I’ve brought Sarah, your sister.” She inhaled and peered at a tiny medieval etching propped on the mantel. Impossible that she could make out the subject matter in the room’s dimness. “Well, of course you know she’s your sister. She’s thrilled for the opportunity to shop, and see the sights, and go to the theater and perhaps an opera or even a pleasure garden, and … and …”

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