Curious, Patricia set the novel she was browsing through back on the shelf and skirted her sister-in-law to peer over her shoulder. “What are you doing, taking notes?”

“Yes,” Charlotte answered, closing a small leather-bound memorandum pad, tucking it and a gilded pencil away in her reticule. “I have decided to conduct an informal study on the matter of falling in love. I’m not quite sure how to go about it, and this seems the best way to understand the phenomenon. I am particularly interested in those signs that indicated to you that you were about to, or had already, fallen in love. Was it any one thing, or a sum of smaller indicators?”

Patricia swallowed back a burble of laughter. Charlotte looked so earnest, it would never do for her to feel as if she were the subject of amusement. “I believe it was a number of things: the way David made me feel, the fact that I wanted to share every event of my day with him, the sense that something was lacking when he was not near, the manner in which he filled my thoughts…it was all those things, and many others.”

“Interesting,” Charlotte said, a puzzled frown between her brows. She strolled down the aisle of Hookam’s with her arm in Patricia’s, nodding to the small groups of people collected around the more popular book offerings. Once she was assured she was out of hearing range, she dropped her arm and turned to face her sister-in-law. “Dare wishes me to be in love with him before he…” She waved an arm about in an inarticulate manner.

“Beds you,” Patricia filled in.

Charlotte colored prettily. “Yes.”

“Is that a problem? Do you not love him now? I thought you were very fond of him.”

“I am. I am quite fond of him. I always have been. He is so very handsome, and we look so well together, I know we shall have children who will be just as attractive as we are, but he will not give me those children if he does not believe I love him.”

“Do you?”

Charlotte wrung her hands for a moment before she remembered she had on her last good pair of gloves, then sat down in a nearby chair with a whoosh. “I don’t know. That is the problem! I desire him, in a connubial calisthenics sense, and I enjoy being with him, as you said you do Captain Woodwell, and I believe he is kind—although he might have told me he had run through his inheritance before we wed—and I know he can be funny, because he amused me very much five years ago, but as for the rest…”

Charlotte let her gaze wander down the long room. “I simply don’t know. I do not feel as if I am in love, but I do want to be near Alasdair. I certainly want him to—” She looked up suddenly and remembered to whom she was speaking. “Oh, it is a tangle. If I am not in love with him, how am I to accomplish the feat?”