Languish by Alyxandra Harvey Page A

feel?”
    â€œHungry.”
    â€œLet’s see if there’s any pineapple cake left in the pantry.”
    â€œFood can wait,” he said, drawing me closer. He kissed me long and sweet as the scent of lavender enveloped us. I pulled back slightly, narrowing my eyes at the spirit of Lady Jasper, flickering like a candle’s flame.
    â€œYou’d think we’d learn not to kiss in graveyards,” I muttered.
    Colin looked over his shoulder suspiciously. “Who now?”
    â€œLady Jasper,” I told him. “Is Rob well and truly gone?” I asked her, clenching my teeth as I tried to force her to stay in focus. She nodded. “And Lord Jasper was never in any danger, was he?”
    She shook her head. Then she smiled and came apart; the mist of her turning into white moths and flying away. I didn’t think we’d see her again.
    â€œShe’s gone,” I whispered to Colin.
    â€œAre you sure?”
    â€œSure as I can be,” I replied as the cooling wind brought the loud song of frogs in a nearby pond. The moon touched the little church, and the headstones, and gleamed in Colin’s eyes.
    His voice was smooth but his fingers were work roughened when they tangled with mine. “Let’s go home.”

Don’t miss how Violet and Colin’s romance began …

Chapter 1
1872
    A
lady does not dance more than two dances with the same gentleman.
    The daughter of an earl precedes the wife of the youngest son of a marquis but not the wife of the youngest son of a duke.
    And I was the daughter of a Spiritualist medium lately from Cheapside.
    I was used to simple rules:
don’t get caught.
    I went back to memorizing the many intricate and involved rules of the British aristocracy, because as convoluted and boring as they were, it was still preferable to talking to my mother.
    A lady eats what she is served at dinner without comment.
    I was usually hungry enough to eat what I was given without comment, but if the earl served boiled tongue or calves’ foot jelly, I fully intended to wrap it in my napkin and hide it in the nearest umbrella stand.
    A well-bred lady always removes her gloves at dinner but never at a ball. She should also travel with two sets of silk gloves and one of kid.
    Never mind that I had only two pairs of gloves to my name to begin with, I wasn’t a well-bred lady. I might look the part in my secondhand dresses with the added silk ruchings and delicate embroidery, but I’d done all that work myself, sewing until my fingers bled, to have them ready for this journey.
    It was all a pretense.
    And it might work well enough in our London parlor for an hour or two, but this trip was a different matter altogether. I’d never dined with earls or dowager countesses or even wealthy tradesmen. Frankly, I’d rather walk alone on the outskirts of Whitechapel. At least I knew what I was about there; I knew what the dangers were and how to avoid them.
    An earl’s country estate might as well be deepest India.
    When the train reached the next station, I slipped onto the platform before my mother could start another lecture on regal bearing under the cover of the noise of the crowds and the steam engine.
    I knew I shouldn’t venture out into the crowd unaccompanied, but I needed a few moments away from my mother and the starched and proper aristocrats with whom we shared the car. They knew we didn’t belong there.
I
knew we didn’t belong there. Only my mother seemed determined to ignore that fact with sniffs of disdain and complaints about the violent rocking of the train and what it was doing to her delicate sensibilities.
    Mother was delicate the way badgers were delicate.
    Since this was likely to be my last moment to myself until later in the evening when we reached Lord Jasper’s estate inHampshire, I rushed out, accidentally bumping into a countess with a tiered bustle that took up the space of three people. I