No, she hadn’t. They’d been stored in the attic and had gone with the other furnishings to wherever Lord Everett had had them taken.

“They’ll be here when it’s time,” was the best she could offer him at the moment. “So please don’t worry about it. Just get better, so you’ll be able to do some of the decorating yourself.”

She had to get out of there. Tears were already streaming down her cheeks, which she didn’t want him to see. It wasn’t going to be a normal Christmas for them this year. She was afraid, so very afraid that they would be spending it without their father.

Chapter 5

Chapter 5

LARISSA WASN’T SURE HOW SHE FOUND THE BEDROOM that she had been given, when she could barely see through her tears, and no one had answered any of the knocking she had done on all the doors between hers and Thomas’s, so she’d had to peek into each room. But she finally did spot her trunks piled at the foot of the bed in one of the last two rooms at the very end of the hall, a much longer distance from her brother than she cared for.

Had she thought Thomas’s room was immense compared to his old one? The one she had been given was even grander. There was even a separate dressing room attached to it, with a large bathroom off of that, and another connecting door led to still another bedroom, which, to her shock, she realized was the baron’s bedroom. She’d been put in the lady’s half of the master bedroom suites. Good heavens, why? Surely a house this size had other rooms for guests, and hadn’t she just passed at least a half dozen in the hall?

This wouldn’t do, must be a mistake, and she would have to tell the housekeeper—just as soon as she could manage to stop crying. To accomplish that, she sat down on the edge of the bed and gave in to all the emotions that were crowding in on her. Oddly enough, a few of those emotions were new to her and took over, drying up the well.

She had let Thomas distract her, purposely, since she knew he could. It was why she had raced to his room. But she was alone now, her thoughts once again disturbed by that strange luncheon she had shared with the baron.

She didn’t know what to make of him, but he had flustered her beyond anything she had ever experienced. It wasn’t that he was so very handsome that he had taken her breath away for a moment, when she’d had her first good look at him there in the bright hall. At least it wasn’t just that.