Read Online Gifts of Love by Kay Hooper; Lisa Kleypas - Free Book Online Page B

actions and results were without the motivations and causes.
    “Milady? Do you feel faint?”
    She looked up to find Plimpton hovering anxiously, and supposed that she must have gone pale. “I know what happened, and when,” she murmured, “but I don’t know why. ”
    “Milady?”
    Antonia shook her head. “Nothing. I am quite all right, really. What time is it? I should dress for dinner.”
    “We can have a tray brought up, milady—”
    “No. No, I had better go down, or Mama will be convinced I am ill.”
    “Very well, milady,” said Plimpton, clearly unconvinced. “I will draw your bath.”
    Just over an hour later, Antonia encountered Richard waiting at his door to escort her, and felt a pang when she saw that he was wearing the button fob. His eyes were unreadable when they met hers.
    “Good evening, Toni,” he said quietly, offering his arm.
    For an instant, she hesitated, but she seemed to have no more power over her longing to be near him than she had had over the compulsion to follow a ghost through the darkened corridors of the castle.
    “I trust you are feeling better,” he said as they walked down the hallway together.
    “I was not ill, merely tired.” Quite suddenly, Antonia had a vision of years to come, of meeting him socially and behaving with this horrible stilted politeness, and her very heart seemed to wrench in pain.
    How could it all have gone so wrong?
    He might have been thinking similar thoughts. His voice was very even when he said, “As soon as the weather clears sufficiently, I will remove myself. I am sure you don’t believe this, but I have no wish to distress you any further.”
    Not trusting herself to speak, Antonia merely nodded. She walked beside him, her head a little bowed, and wondered vaguely if the Wingates had always been unlucky in love. It seemed so. It seemed so indeed.
    She was never able to recall afterwards how she managed to get through the evening. She remembered nothing of conversations, though knew she must have spoken because neither her grandmother nor her mother seemed to find anything amiss. She recalled only the long, slow walk with Richard back to her room late in the evening, and the stiffly polite good nights at her door.
    She changed into her nightclothes and firmly sent Plimpton off to bed. Expecting another ghostly encounter, she didn’t go to bed herself, but sat by the fire reading the account of Mercy Wingate’s childhood, marriage—and tragically young death. It was not the best of stories to read while alone, and she was actually a bit relieved when a soft knock fell on her door a little before midnight.
    It was Richard, of course, and his voice held the same quiet note as before, “I doubt either of us is in any mood to observe yet another passionate embrace in the hallway, however ghostly.”
    Without even thinking of suggesting that he wait somewhere else, Antonia nodded and stepped back, leaving the door open as he entered. She returned to her chair by the fire, torn between her longing to be with him and the pain it caused. What she should have done, she knew, was to have moved to another room long since, but that had only just occurred to her.
    “I believe they will both be in this bedroom tonight—at least for a time,” she said. “If, that is, they are reenacting the events of their lives.”
    “How do you know that?” Richard asked as he came to stand near the fireplace.
    Antonia touched the book on a small table by her chair. “I have been reading about them in this book of family history. Their account was based largely on their own journals.” She frowned briefly. “I must ask Grandmother if the journals still exist; I would like to read them.”
    “So would I.” He hesitated, then added, “Though, of course, I will be gone soon.”
    Antonia experienced another sudden flash of memory. It was early in their engagement, when he had taken her to visit the British Museum, and they had scandalized several other