“Ma’am,” she said. “We didn’t expect you back so soon. Rob hasn’t even gone to put the horses to yet—”

“Someone drove me back,” Alva said, casting her own coat off. “There’s a visitor here to see me?”

“A man,” Liza said, lowering her voice as though she was imparting a great confidence. “Ever so sophisticated, too.”

Calling Sam sophisticated seemed like a stretch, but she supposed he did have a certain polish. “What room?”

“The front parlor. He—”

“Thank you.” Alva strode to the door and opened it, preparing to tell Sam exactly what she thought about men who refused to take a hint, and froze.

Her dead husband was sitting by the window.

CHAPTER SEVEN

“Alva,” the sleek, handsome blond man said. “So gratifying of you, rushing to see me like this.”

His voice released her. “What are you doing here, Alfred?” she said, her voice distant in her ears. Alain and his brother had always hated each other, Alain because he couldn’t stand that there was someone else who looked like him and Alfred because he’d been done out of a family inheritance by a matter of eight minutes.

“I was in the area,” he said, tossing the newspaper he’d been reading onto a nearby table. “I could hardly leave without seeing you, dear sister.”

“I’m not your sister.”

He shrugged, an elegant, boneless motion that made her breath stop again, it mirrored a gesture of his brother’s so exactly. “Death may have parted you from my brother, but we’re family. No funeral can change that. You’ll always be a Webster.”

Funny, that—how a name could structure your entire life. When she’d been a girl the Rensselaer name had made all her decisions for her: where she lived, who she knew, who came courting her when she turned sixteen. It was the same name that had attracted Alain; it stood for conservatism and money, both things he had needed very much. And now he lived on through his name’s attachment to her, putting his mark on every contract she signed, every letter she wrote. On the book marking her new beginning. And now, apparently, on her sitting room.

She remembered the uncomplicated happiness in Sam’s face when he’d talked about his family this morning. Obviously being a Moore was a different affair.

She tugged her gloves off and tossed them on a nearby end table. “I’ll ask you again. Why are you here?”

“I can’t come see my late brother’s wife? I was worried about you. You didn’t tell anyone you were coming back—I had to find out about it from the papers! Imagine my surprise to learn my own sister-in-law hadn’t seen fit to tell her family she was returning home. And to discover she’d already bought a house, and not even in the city! What are you up to, my dear?”