He plucked a white daisy from the tender green grass by her feet and rubbed it on her thigh, just above the top of her stockings.

Waves of erotic heat washed up Charlotte’s legs. Alex began to move up her body with small wolfish bites, laughing at her gasping remonstrances. In her sleep Charlotte’s face eased into a blissful smile.

But then the dream suddenly changed. She was standing on the wharf that led out into the lake, and a fog had come up. Tendrils of snaky white were twining about her feet, drifting off the water. Fogs came up so quickly in Scotland; one minute the sun was shining and the next minute the world was ghastly, faintly shiny with dew. She looked about, calling for her husband. Then to her horror she heard a floundering, splashing noise and a little voice calling, “Mama! Mamaaa!”

Charlotte woke up, her heart beating so fast that she felt as if she were ill. The baby in her womb had woken up too and was dancing a brisk tattoo. She breathed in gasps, trying to calm down. She was in her own bed, and Pippa was fast asleep in the nursery. Pippa was not drowning in a black Scottish lake, calling for her mama.

Finally Charlotte’s heart slowed and she leaned back. Something in me has changed, she realized, soothing the small, sharp bumps that were her baby’s kicking feet. Pippa … I have to protect my children, Charlotte thought fiercely. To hell with Alex’s kisses and his passion. It was empty, without trust, based on lust. He had used her, like a meal spread out before him, and then he rejected her as casually as he might reject venison if he felt like eating veal.

And Alex didn’t care about the babies anyway. He ran off to France without a second thought about Pippa. Charlotte spread her hands on her tummy, caressing the round bump that she thought was perhaps a head, or maybe a bottom. “I promise,” she whispered into the hushed night. “I promise I will love you, and trust you, and never, never let you drown in a lake.” Her eyes filled with tears despite herself. It would be so lovely if there were two of them, if Alex and she could love each other and the babies. But there wasn’t any way that could happen. And so for yet another night the Countess of Sheffield and Downes cried herself to sleep.

Chapter 21

Chapter 21

Alex found his brother after four hard days of riding. He reached Braddon Chatwin’s country house in two days but found to his intense irritation that the “young master” had left a few days earlier. Alex slapped his gloves against his leg, staring with unconscious, arrogant rage at the wilting butler before him.