So in Love Read Free

amenable to your suggestions?” How odd that Douglas’s voice didn’t reveal the tumult of his thoughts. Instead, it sounded steady and he appeared only barely interested in the topic at hand.
    “What choice does she have? She’s only a governess, after all. They may carry themselves as high and mighty, but in the end she’ll do what’s necessary to keep her position.”
    Douglas placed the glass carefully on the brass coaster beside him.
    The room in which he sat was comfortable without the touches of grandiosity marking the remainder of Hartley’s home. Bookcases lined the walls and the hundreds of gilt-edged books were arranged by thickness rather than topic, leading Douglas to wonder if Hartley was one of those men who furnished his library by the case, judging his reading material by weight more than content.
    Some men prided themselves on being learned without any attempt at learning.
    The evening had been one filled with business. RobertHartley was not a friend but a customer, one who wanted to engage in the importation of French textiles. Up until a few moments earlier it had been a tolerable evening.
    “You should have seen her a few months ago. Scrawny little thing she was, but she’s filled out nicely.”
    “Did you hire her yourself?” he asked and forced himself to sit back against the chair, feigning a nonchalance that he didn’t feel. Instead, each of his senses was alert, his hearing attuned to the answer.
    Hartley studied his glass, looking entirely too self-congratulatory. “It was my wife who brought her into the household. Evidently the girl’s aunt was a friend of my wife’s mother. A pity Jeanne chose to be a governess. She might have been a very sought-after courtesan with that bosom of hers.”
    The anger Douglas felt was a surprise, but then, he hadn’t expected Jeanne to be resurrected from his past, a ghost given form. How strange that, of all the places in the world, all the cities and towns, all the houses, taverns, hovels, and huts, she would be here, in Robert Hartley’s home on this one night.
    He glanced toward the door, wondering at the fact that his blood was just now beginning to warm. His heart still beat in a staccato fashion, and his grip on the arm of the chair was a bit too fierce.
    His host, however, seemed to have seen nothing untoward in his behavior, for which he was grateful. Douglas didn’t want to explain to anyone that the sight of that one particular woman had enraged him so fully that his hands shook with the emotion.
    “I understand you’ve been to France many times,” Hartley said, pouring himself another glass of whiskey.
    “I have,” Douglas answered. “But my brother and his wife are the most traveled.”
    Hamish and Mary had decided to engage in a rescue effort in the last few years, crossing the Channel innumerable times to ferry those fleeing France to safety. He had no intention of divulging their activities to Hartley or the fact that while the English were intent upon removing Huguenots from Nova Scotia, Hamish and Mary were just as determined to populate his native country with French émigrés.
    “It’s a terrible thing what’s happening there,” Hartley said.
    Strange, but the other man didn’t sound all that concerned. But then, Douglas had felt the same until accompanying his brother on one of those trips to Calais. His compassion had been born the moment he’d seen the despair in the eyes of those who’d escaped France, and heard their stories.
    “I suppose that any revolution has its share of brutality,” Douglas said, sipping from his whiskey. “The French feel disenfranchised, which only encourages a certain radicalism.”
    “They’re hard on their nobles, though,” Hartley said, grinning. He leaned back in his chair and held his glass up to the light to admire the dark caramel color of the whiskey.
    “And their king and queen,” Douglas contributed, speaking of the fact that Louis XVI and his wife had been arrested