The Black Sheep's Return. Elizabeth Beacon

of her showed than was inevitable in her state of semi-nakedness. If she had met him in a London drawing room when she first came out, might he have saved her all the petty humiliations of the last few years? He must have been wed and done with the stifling elegance of the London Season by the time she came out, if he’d ever been tame enough for that in the first place, so it was just as well he hadn’t been there to confuse her even more.

      ‘Where are the children?’ she asked to distract herself from such silly daydreams.

      ‘About somewhere. They usually obey me in their own unique fashion and at least Atlas is with them,’ he said as he stood aside for her to precede him.

      ‘Would it not be better if you went ahead? I’m very slow, despite the staff you kindly found for me.’

      ‘Who knows what you might get up to if I leave you to make your own way, Perdita? You might even find a bear to chase you.’

      She chuckled at the reference to the most unlikely stage direction in the whole of Shakespeare’s mighty canon—‘exit, pursued by a bear’—and decided to occupy herself by reading A Winter’s Tale from the volumes of the great playwright’s work from the shelf slotted in next to her box-bed, as he clearly had to use every inch of the small space the cottage allowed.

      Rich fought the husky and totally unselfconscious appeal of the right sort of feminine laughter. He vividly recalled the high-pitched titter of the débutantes and their older, freer sisters as they did their best to charm elusive Richard Seaborne, grandson of a Duke and close relative and friend to the wild and deliciously elusive Jack, Duke of Dettingham. Now the difference between those brittle, affected lovelies and his lost princess was so similar to the gulf between his Annabelle and the rest of her kind it should make him wary.