Emily Greenwood Read Free

minutes’ walk from the drive. She liked the cottage, though like Tethering its roof leaked and its furniture was old. But it would do for now, and more importantly, it belonged to her family, which could not at the moment be said of Tethering.
    But she had hope. Already, she had written to a lawyer, although she’d not yet mentioned this to her father. Whoever this gambler was, he was not going to find a warm welcome when he arrived.

Two
    Well, James Collington thought as he neared the wrought-iron gates of the Tethering estate, he was a long way from a sun-drenched Spanish vineyard. One week he’d been immersed in the intricacies of the Palomino grape and its profitability, the next he was staking everything he had in a London gaming hell. And now the foreseeable future involved an estate he’d won from someone he barely knew. At least he would have a home for the time being, however temporary.
    Tethering was worth about three hundred pounds a year, Jonathan Beresford had said when he staked it. James had seen right away that if he won the estate, he could sell it—and solve his problem.
    Raising his eyes, he caught sight of the manor house in the distance, at the top of the hill that gradually sloped up from the gate. Were those turrets poking up near its roofline?
    He passed through the gate, which was, unhappily, rather rusty. Something to fix. Already James had an interested buyer, and he wanted the property to be irresistible. The carriage with the few provisions he’d bought in the village followed him onto the estate.
    He wondered if Beresford’s old family retainers had moved out, as James’s lawyer had suggested they do in the letter he sent, in case they were upset about their master losing the manor.
    To the left, not far from the drive, stood a small stone cottage with some washing hanging from a line in the back. Ah, doubtless the new location of the servants. Who would, he hoped, have the key to the manor, and maybe the name of the bewitching young woman he’d just met. He would go there first.
    ***
    Felicity put the watercress in a bowl in the kitchen and discovered a line of ants crawling up one of the legs of the work table. Martha, their lone servant, was at work in the cellar, so Felicity investigated the ant problem herself. A piece of bread had fallen outside the kitchen door, attracting the ants, and she got rid of it.
    The kitchen once again secure, at least until the next invasion, she made her way to her father’s study, stopping in the doorway to greet him. Deeply immersed in work on his latest book of poems, he did not at first hear her.
    Like Felicity, Mr. Wilcox was wearing clothes from Tethering’s attic. A leaky roof had spoiled much of his more recent attire, and so he was dressed today in a gaudy gold and emerald coat from the Georgian era. She smiled to herself at the picture he presented amid his books and papers. He looked up at her over his spectacles.
    “Here you are, my dear,” he said warmly. His tufty white eyebrows, which matched his thick white hair, rose upward as he took in her damp and muddy appearance. “It looks as though you’ve been busy.”
    “I was getting some watercress for our lunch and slipped in the stream,” she said, deciding not to mention the stranger.
    Just then a sharp rap sounded at the front door, startling them both. As she knew Martha couldn’t have heard it, Felicity went to answer it herself.
    She opened the door and before her stood her handsome gentleman from the stream bank.
    He blinked at her in evident surprise, then his mouth turned up in that familiar crooked grin.
    “Well, hello again,” he said.
    “But how did you find me?” she asked in a voice filled with the pleasure she was feeling because he’d come to find her, never mind that she’d been able to enjoy herself with him because he was a stranger. Out of the corner of her eye she caught sight of a mud spot on her bodice and wished she’d changed already. The stranger