Probably the most surprising part of the last three weeks, he finally realized, was how much he missed Pippa. For months he had been the primary person in her life—and then, in a fit of petulant rage, he drove off and left her in a carriage with a nanny and a stepmother she barely knew. And he missed her now, missed her with a deep visceral ache in his belly. He found himself wondering in the middle of the night how she had gone to sleep without him twirling the curl on her forehead and telling her to have sweet dreams. If nothing else, the Pippa ache told him that his scheme to bury Charlotte in Scotland wasn’t a good one. Unless he buried himself as well.

No, Alex thought grimly, he’d accept his wife. He would bring her back to London. They could rub along pretty well together, now that he had given up his rosy illusions about falling in love with the woman he married. They would have to go to bed together, because he needed an heir. (That he was using the necessity of an heir as a justification, given the likelihood that Patrick would have a child, was just barely hidden from Alex’s consciousness.)

He shook his fishing line irritably. Where the hell was Charlotte? For the last two nights his mind had filled with the alarming stories he’d recently heard about raiders lurking on the Scottish border, waiting to jump on unsuspecting English travelers. God, why had he been such a hotheaded, arrogant brute? What if Charlotte and Pippa were robbed, taken for ransom—or worse? Even as Charlotte’s carriage stopped, a mere two hours from Alex’s estate, and the occupants ambled into a flowery meadow for a leisurely lunch, Alex tortured himself by imagining a far crueler fate.

So when the two travel-stained carriages finally trundled through the huge stone walls marking the entrance to the courtyard, Alex glimpsed them from his library window, and just barely controlled himself from bounding down the stairs and pulling his wife and child into his arms. Instead he stayed next to the window, rigidly braced against the sill. There came his wife, nimbly stepping down from the third, rather shabby servants’ carriage. Then the second carriage opened and Pippa half-tumbled out, running over to Charlotte and holding up her arms. Alex couldn’t know that this had been the arrangement for the last two hours only, that normally Charlotte rode in Pippa’s coach. Pippa had tormented her nanny for the last hour, demanding her mama. He saw Charlotte laughingly swing Pippa up into her arms, and Pippa wind her little arms around Charlotte’s neck and nuzzle her. This was what he had wanted, wasn’t it?