“Oh, Hannah,” she said, “you are bad.”

“Yes, aren’t I?” Hannah agreed.

And they both laughed.

“But what are you going to do?” Barbara came back to the question and looked very directly at Hannah for an answer.

“I am going to do what the ton expects me to do, of course,” Hannah said, spreading her other hand across the arm of her chair and admiring the rings she wore on her third and little fingers. She tipped her hand slightly forward so that they caught the light from the window and sparkled in a thoroughly satisfying way. “I am going to take a lover, Babs.”

It sounded a little … wicked spoken aloud. It was not wicked. She was free. She owed nothing to anyone any longer. It was quite unexceptionable for a widow to take a lover provided it was a secret affair and she was discreet about it. Well, perhaps not unexceptionable. But certainly quite acceptable.

Barbara was, of course, of a different world than her own.

“Hannah!” she exclaimed, color rushing up her neck and over her cheeks and on up across her forehead to disappear beneath her hair. “Oh, you horrid creature. You said it to shock me and succeeded admirably. I almost had a fit of the vapors. Do be serious.”

Hannah raised her eyebrows. “But I am perfectly serious,” she said. “I have had a husband and he is gone. I can never replace him. I have had escorts. They are always good company, but I find them less than completely satisfactory. They feel depressingly like my brothers. I need someone new, someone to add some … oh, some vividness to my life. I need a lover.”

“What you need,” Barbara said, her voice far firmer, “is someone to love. Romantically, I mean. Someone with whom to fall in love. Someone to marry and have children with. I know you loved the duke, Hannah, but it was not—”

She stopped and flushed again.

“Romantic love?” Hannah said, completing the sentence for her. “It hurts anyway, Babs. Losing him, I mean. It hurts here.” She set her hand over her ribs beneath her bosom. “And romantic love did not serve me well before I met him, did it?”

“You were little more than a child,” Barbara said. “And what happened was not your fault. Love will come in time.”

“Perhaps so.” Hannah shrugged. “But I do not intend waiting around for it to show its face. And I have no intention of going in desperate search of it and perhaps persuading myself that I have found it when I have not and so trapping myself in another marriage so soon after the last. I am free, and I intend to remain so until I choose to give up my freedom, which may be a long, long time in the future. Perhaps I will never give it up. There are advantages to widowhood, you know.”

“Oh, Hannah,” Barbara said reproachfully. “Do be serious.”

“A lover is what I am going to have,” Hannah told her. “I have quite decided, Babs, and I am perfectly serious. It will be an arrangement purely for enjoyment with no strings attached. He is going to be someone sinfully handsome. And devilishly attractive. And wickedly skillful and experienced as a lover. Someone with neither a heart to break nor any aspirations whatsoever toward matrimony. Is there such a paragon, do you suppose?”

Barbara was smiling again—with what looked like genuine amusement.

“England is said to abound with dashing rakes,” she said. “And it is quite obligatory, I have heard, that they also be outrageously handsome. I do believe, in fact, that it is against the law for them not to be. And of course almost all women fall for them—and the eternal conviction that they can reform them.”

“Why ever,” Hannah asked, “would anyone wish to believe that? Why would any woman wish to reduce a perfectly wicked rake and rogue to the dullness of a mere worthy gentleman?”

They both doubled over with mirth for a few moments.

“Mr. Newcombe is not a rake, I suppose?” Hannah asked.

“Simon?” Barbara was still laughing. “He is a clergyman, Hannah, and very worthy indeed. But he is not—he is definitely not a dull man. I absolutely reject your implication that all men must be either rakes or dullards.”

“I did not intend to imply any such thing,” Hannah said. “I am quite sure your vicar is a perfectly splendid specimen of romantic gentlemanhood.”

Barbara’s laugh had become almost a giggle.

“Oh,” she said, “I can just picture his face if I were to tell him you had said that, Hannah.”

“All I want of a lover,” Hannah said, “apart from the aforementioned qualities, of course—they are obligatory—is that he will have eyes for no one but me for as long as I choose to allow him to continue looking.”

“A lapdog, in other words,” her friend said.

“You would put remarkably strange words into my mouth, Babs,” Hannah said, getting to her feet to pull on the bell rope and have the tea tray removed. “I want—indeed, I demand—just the opposite. I will have a masterful, very masculine man. Someone I will find it a constant challenge to control.”

Barbara shook her head, still smiling.

“Handsome, attractive, besotted, devoted,” she said, counting the points off on her fingers. “Masterful, very masculine. Have I missed anything?”

“Skilled,” Hannah said.

“Experienced,” Barbara amended, flushing again. “Goodness, it ought to be quite easy to find a dozen such men, Hannah. Do you have anyone in mind?”

“I do,” Hannah said and waited while a maid took the tray away and closed the door behind her. “Though I do not know if he is in town this year. He usually is. It will be inconvenient if he is not, but I have a few others in mind should I need them. I should have no difficulty at all. Is it conceited of me to say that I turn male heads wherever I go?”

“Conceited, perhaps,” Barbara said, smiling. “But also true. You always did, even as a girl—male and female heads, the former with longing, the latter with envy. No one was at all surprised when the Duke of Dunbarton saw you and had to have you as his duchess even though he had been a confirmed bachelor all his life. And even though it was not really like that at all.”

Barbara had come dangerously close to talking of a topic that had been strictly off-limits for eleven years. She had broached it a few times in her letters over the years, but Hannah had never responded.

“Of course it was like that,” she said now. “Do you think he would have afforded me a second glance if I had not been beautiful, Babs? But he was kind. I adored him. Shall we go out? Are you too tired after your travels? Or will you welcome some fresh air and the chance to stretch your legs? At this time of day Hyde Park—the fashionable part of it, at least—will be teeming with people, and one must go along to see and be seen, you know. It is obligatory when one is in town.”

“I can recall from a previous occasion,” Barbara said, “that there are always more people in the park at the fashionable hour of the afternoon than there are in our whole village on May Day. I will not know a soul, and I will feel like your country cousin, but no matter. Let us go by all means. I am desperate for some exercise.”