Vixen Read Free

no attempt to contact him and he’d been honor bound to respect her wishes, even after all this time. And then just a scrawled note … a demand. And now this.
    He turned back to the hall. The dog had gone to Chloe and sat at her feet, gazing up at her adoringly.
    “Letters’ll be in the library, I shouldn’t wonder,” Samuel observed, examining his fingernails. “Wi’ t’others ye’ve not opened. I always said one day there’d be sum-mat important in there.”
    Hugo glared at the man who’d been his companion and servant since he’d first gone to sea as a lad of twenty. As usual, Samuel was right. The pounding in his head became fierce, and he knew he couldn’t deal with this another minute. “Get that dog out of the house,” he commanded, striding to the staircase. “And put that damn cat and her litter in the stables, where they belong … and put a cover on that parrot,” he added savagely as the bird tossed out another example of its dubious vocabulary.
    “Oh, no!” Chloe exclaimed. “Dante lives inside—”
    Hugo swung his head carefully in her direction. “Dante?” he demanded incredulously. “That dog is called Dante?”
    “Yes, because he came out of an inferno,” she informed him. “I rescued him from a bonfire when he was just a puppy. Some louts had tied him up and were setting a fire around him. I did think of calling him Joan of Arc,” she added reflectively, “until I realized he was the wrong sex.”
    “I don’t think I want to hear any more,” Hugo said. “In fact, I
know
I don’t want to hear any more.” He enunciated his words with great care. “I have not yetbeen to bed, so I am going upstairs, where I shall probably say my prayers for the first time since I left the nursery. And when I wake up, I devoutly trust that my prayers will have been answered, and I shall find that this …”He waved his hand in an expansive movement across the scene in the great hall. “That all this will prove to have been no more than the hideous figments of a disordered imagination.”
    The parrot cackled in an uncanny imitation of a hysterical drunk. “Get this menagerie out of here!” On which hopefully decisive note Sir Hugo Lattimer took himself to the sanity of his own bedchamber, hearing the fluttering whimpers of Miss Anstey behind him.
    He was a chronic insomniac but proficient at catnaps. Ten years of night watches at sea had turned a tendency into immutable habit, one he welcomed since the nightmares haunted his night sleep but visited less often in the short bouts of daytime unconsciousness.
    He dropped his clothes in an untidy heap on the floor, crawled into bed, and closed his eyes with relief. The throbbing at his temples lessened with the absence of light. He couldn’t begin to think about Elizabeth and the child who looked so like her and yet so unlike her. Some vast mistake had been made. She belonged at Shipton with the Greshams.
    The brutal face of Jasper Gresham swam abruptly into his internal vision and he was wide awake again. Jasper was his father’s son … Stephen’s son. No fit man to have charge of a young girl. Was that what Elizabeth had been trying to avoid? But in what kind of madness could her father’s killer be considered a fit guardian? A recluse who sought relief from the past in drink and the city stews.
    He groaned and turned over. The sound of wheels on the courtyard cobbles came from below the open window.Hope flickered that the post-chaise with two passengers and a menagerie was leaving, and when he awoke this craziness would be over. But he had a prickling premonition that his life was about to undergo a profound change.

Chapter 2

    D OWNSTAIRS, C HLOE STOOD on the steps and waved the chaise and Miss Anstey out of the courtyard. The poor lady had been torn between her perceived duty to Chloe and her unquestionable duty to her new employers. But her perceived duty had not been proof against Chloe’s brisk dismissal of her fears, and she had