To Win a Lady's Heart (The Landon Sisters) by Ingrid Hahn

storeroom.
    How painful it was going to be for Hetty when they announced they were putting an end to the engagement. The thought of crushing her friend’s hopes weighed heavy on her heart.
    Hetty’s voice dropped and she bowed her head. “Why does Lady Rushworth keep sending you such strange looks?”
    “Is she?” Grace, although grateful for the shift in conversation, stiffened with awareness. She forced herself not to look up lest the lady in question realize she was being discussed. Whatever might have the matron unsettled now, please don’t let it be that she found out about Grace’s morning escapade in the stables with the earl.
    “If she aims any snide remarks at you, you’ll tell me. I’ll tell my brother and believe me, he’ll find a way to make it clear with perfect decorum that he won’t tolerate such behavior.”
    Just what Grace needed. The earl’s intercession. “I’m sure it won’t come to that.”
    She turned a little in the chair to afford more privacy between herself and her friend. Were Hetty not an earl’s daughter, she might have been called plain. But her bright and open character, cheerful disposition, and discerning mind would have ensured that even were she not an earl’s daughter, nobody would have noticed.
    A round-faced maid with indifferently colored hair partially covered by a cap appeared bearing a folded slip of paper.
    Hetty was reaching her fingers to take the note when the maid shook her head. “’Tis for Lady Grace, my lady.”
    “For me?” Grace tried to keep her expression blank, the earl’s face flashing in her mind. She swallowed. There was no reason it had to be him who had sent her a message. It could easily have been… She glanced around. All the ladies making up the Christmas party at Corbeau Park were present. Well, it could be from someone else.
    She hadn’t noticed she’d licked her lips until the cool air brushed the moisture.
    The note read; Meet me in the North Gallery at midnight. It was unsigned.
    Her heart stumbled in the wake of realization. The implications were clear enough. It was from Corbeau. And Grace, at the age of twenty-seven, had her first assignation.
    That was, she had her first assignation should she choose to follow his order. Whether she would or not was yet to be determined.
    Hetty said nothing when Grace tucked away the note without comment, but her gaze followed the movements. She was too good a friend to press for a confidence when one wasn’t offered.
    Secrets were hateful things, especially when kept from dear friends. Grace didn’t wish to lie, so she, too, remained silent. One of the less fortunate lessons her late father had imparted was that when one doesn’t wish to tell a falsehood, one simply says nothing at all.

Chapter Seven
    “I suppose it was you who sent Grace that note this afternoon.”
    Corbeau, seated in his dressing room, raised his head to see his sister in the mirror. He rose to his feet and turned.
    They were both dressed for dinner, he in the standard somber male attire, fashionable but dull, she in a jonquil gown that set off the color in her cheeks. Why Hetty hadn’t descended yet was her own concern. As for him, he was stealing the last few minutes before the inevitable. If he hadn’t promised his late mother to continue all the traditions of Corbeau Park, he’d have abolished the holding of house parties here years ago. Far too many people.
    Too many people…
    He stared off, his thoughts lost to an old memory. Images he’d all but forgotten played before his mind’s eye, and he burned with the humiliation of a confused boy as surely as he were reliving the whole wretched affair.
    He’d been young, a lad of no more than five or six, and his tutor had painstakingly drilled him to memorize a passage of a poem, hours upon hours upon hours of work, words of which no child could truly grasp the meaning.
    They’d had guests, some of his father’s closest friends, a booming lot of boisterous