So in Love Read Free Page A

the year before. France was swallowing its aristocracy, cleansing itself of nobility one person at a time.
    Was that what had happened to Jeanne? Had she escaped France because she was no longer accorded the privileges of her rank? With some difficulty, Douglas focused his mind on his host and the business at hand. Until he left Robert Hartley’s home, he would concentrate on being a genial guest.
    Revenge could wait until later.

Chapter 2
    J eanne couldn’t breathe. There was a cold spot next to her heart and a pounding in her chest. She felt as if the past were a heavy stone, much like the punishment she’d received at the Convent of Sacré-Coeur. There, she’d been made to stand in the center of her cell, a series of progressively heavier rocks hung from a chain around her neck.
    “Will you confess, Jeanne Catherine Alexis du Marchand?” Sister Marie-Thérèse demanded.
    “I do,” she’d whispered, the punishment for silence so much greater than any admission of her sins.
    “You fornicated?”
    A terrible word for the love she and Douglas MacRae had shared. But what would that stern-faced nun know of physical joy, of laughter in the sunlight?
    “I did.”
    “You lusted?”
    God forgive her, but she had. And did, in her nightly dreams of him. But then she woke. “I did.”
    “You bore a bastard?”
    She placed her hands on her flat belly, feeling the eternalemptiness there. “Yes,” she said, keeping her head bowed.
    The heavy stones were gone now, but the memory of them still pulled at her shoulders, not unlike the burdens of guilt, regret, and grief.
    What was Douglas doing in Edinburgh?
    Seated, he had still seemed tall, his shoulders square, his build neither slender nor overly muscled. His gaze, from eyes a deep and fathomless blue, was direct without revealing anything of the man. The groove of dimple in his cheek, however, proved that he sometimes smiled.
    But not at her.
    The child, Davis, was talking. Jeanne forced a weak smile to her lips, knowing that she had to answer him. Perhaps this was just a dream, and her charge was only a participant in it. But the wall was hard against her back and she could smell the perfume of the flowers in the hall and feel Davis’s small hand cupped in hers.
    Please, God. The prayer was the first time in years that she had actually implored the Almighty. She’d had enough of God in the convent. He hadn’t saved her from Sister Marie-Thérèse. Make him be a ghost. But it was all too obvious that Douglas was real, and seated not twenty feet from her.
    God must have been listening after all, because she somehow found the strength to continue down the hall and then up the stairs to the third floor.
    “You don’t look at all well, miss,” Davis said, as she stopped on the landing, trying to quell her sudden nausea. The little boy looked up at her, eyes narrowed. Davis was a great worrier, his thin little face almost always drawn and pinched.
    “Of course I am, Davis,” she said, wishing that her heart would slow its staccato beating and her breath would come easier.
    “I don’t think you are, miss.”
    “Nonsense,” she said. But she was grateful not to see any of the many maids or footmen who patrolled the hallways of the Hartley home. They would glance at her pale face and not hesitate to report her appearance to Robert Hartley.
    There was nothing at all wrong with her. A fully fleshed ghost had appeared from her past, that was all.
    Determinedly, she mounted the last of the steps and began to walk with lengthening strides away from the narrow back stairs and toward the nursery.
    “Are you certain you’re not going to be sick?”
    Jeanne searched for the words that would keep the young boy from asking too many questions, none of which she could answer. She had enough to do to breathe, to put one foot in front of the other, and to continue on in the present when the past summoned her with such fervency.
    She could feel the tentacles of it stretching out