“Come home with me now.” He turned his head to look at her.

“Barbara will be home for dinner,” she said, “and I have accepted no invitations for tonight. We are to enjoy a blessed evening at home just talking to each other and enjoying each other’s company. She is more dear to me than anyone else in the world, you know, now that the duke has gone. You will send a carriage at eleven.”

“Does anyone disobey your commands, Duchess?” he asked.

She half smiled at him. “You do not wish to see me tonight?” she asked him. “Or to make love to me?”

He actually grinned.

“I shall send a carriage at eleven,” he said. “You will be ready. If you are not at my house by a quarter past, I shall personally lock the door.”

She laughed.

And they were swallowed up in the crowd.

She felt suddenly and quite breathtakingly happy.

BARBARA WAS TIRED after her day at Kew Gardens, though she had had a wonderful time there and told Hannah all about it, especially about the pagoda, which she thought one of the loveliest structures she had ever seen. And she had been perfectly delighted with Simon’s cousins, whom she had not met before. They had treated her as though she were quite one of the family already, and she had made them laugh by trying to see resemblances between them and Simon. She had played a game of hide-and-seek with the children even though they were twelve years old. They were twins, a boy and a girl.

She was eager to hear all about Hannah’s tea party, which had been planned and arranged in such a hurry after breakfast. And she listened in some dismay as Hannah informed her that Constantine would be calling in the morning to apologize for last night.

“You must tell him that he is forgiven,” she said, “as indeed he is. I daresay he meant no real harm, Hannah. He merely wanted to know more about you, and I must honor him for that as it suggests he values you as a person. Perhaps he is in love with you. Perhaps—”

But Hannah was laughing.

“You may convince yourself that you are a dusty spinster, Babs,” she said, “but you will not convince me. You are a romantic, as you have always been. Who else would have waited until she was perilously close to her thirtieth birthday before choosing her life’s companion? Constantine Huxtable’s feelings for me have nothing to do with romance, I do assure you. Which is just as well, you know, because neither do my feelings for him.”

“Do not let him come here tomorrow to speak with me,” Barbara begged. “I would be so embarrassed.”

“I shall try to deter him,” Hannah promised.

Barbara retired to bed soon after ten.

The carriage arrived at five minutes to eleven. Hannah, who had been ready since half past ten, waited fifteen minutes before leaving the house. When the carriage arrived at Constantine’s house some time after quarter past eleven, the door was locked. Hannah tried it herself when it did not open as it usually did on her arrival and when the coachman’s discreet knock brought no results.

“Well,” she said, partly dismayed, partly amused.

And, as if she had spoken the magic word, the door swung open. She swept inside and Constantine shut the door behind her. She turned to face him and could see that he was dangling a large key from one finger.

“Tyrant!” she said.

“Minx!”

They both laughed, and she closed the distance between them, threw her arms about his neck, and kissed him hard. His arms came about her waist like vises, and he kissed her back—harder.

Her toes were barely brushing the floor when they were finished. Or finished with the preliminaries, anyway.

“You made a tactical error,” she said. “If you wished to take a firm stand with me, you ought not to have opened the door.”

“And if you had wanted to take a firm stand with me,” he said, “you would not have got out of the carriage to creep up the steps and try the door handle.”

“I did not creep,” she protested. “I swept.”

“It still showed how desperate you were to get at me,” he said.

“And why exactly,” she asked, “were you skulking behind the door, the key at the ready? Because you did not want me to get at you? And why did you open the door?”

“I took pity on you,” he said.

“Ha!”

And even her toes left the floor as they kissed again.

“I have some questions to ask you,” she said when she could. “I tried writing them all down, but I could not find a sheet of paper long enough.”

“Hmm,” he said, setting her feet on the floor. “Ask away, then, Duchess.”

His dark eyes had turned slightly wary.

“Not yet,” she said. “They will wait until after.”

“After?” He raised his eyebrows.

“After you have made love to me,” she said. “After I have made love to you. After we have made love to each other.”

“Three times?” he said. “What am I going to look like tomorrow, Duchess? I need my rest.”

“You will look far more rugged and appealing without it,” she said.

He set the key down on the hall table and offered his hand. She set hers in it, and his fingers closed about her own as he led her in the direction of the staircase.

And oh, dear, she thought, she was still feeling happy. She ought to be glad about that. She had looked forward to this spring affair with such eager anticipation all through the winter. And physically speaking, it was more than living up to her expectations.

Why was she not glad, then? Because of the bickering and the teasing and the laughter? Because she had the strange, uneasy feeling that they had somehow crossed a barrier today from being simply lovers to being entangled in some sort of relationship?

Because she was feeling happy?

Could she not be happy and glad about it?

But she would think later, she decided as she stepped inside his dimly lit bedchamber and he closed the door behind them.

Sometimes there were far better things to do than thinking.

THEY MADE LOVE with fierce energy the first time, with slow languor the second—if it was possible to be languorous while making love. Either way they were both exhausted by the time they were finished.

Hannah curled onto her side, facing away from him, and he curled around her from behind and slid one arm beneath her head while he wrapped the other about her. She snuggled back against him and raised his hand so that she could rest her cheek against the back of it.

And she slept.

Constantine did not. An uneasy conscience was the perfect recipe for insomnia.

Were other people like him, he wondered. Did everyone make the most ghastly blunders at regular intervals through their life and live to regret them ever afterward? Was everyone’s life filled with a confusing and contradictory mix of guilt and innocence, hatred and love, concern and unconcern, and any number of other pairings of polar opposites? Or were most people one thing or the other—good or bad, cheerful or crotchety, generous or miserly, and so on.

As a boy he had hated Jon, his youngest brother—the very person he loved most in the world. He had hated Jon because he was sunny-natured and warmhearted and guileless despite the difficulties of his life, because he was overweight and ungainly and had facial features that made him look more Asian than English, and because he had a brain that worked slowly—and because he was going to die young. Constantine had hated him because he could not put things right for him—and because Jon had what Con had never wanted anyway. The heirdom.

How could he hate so fiercely and love with such deep agony all at the same time? He had left home as soon as he was old enough and sowed some pretty wild oats, most of them with Elliott. Constantine had not cared about the way life had treated him or about the people he had left behind. Why should he? But he had known that Jon pined for him, and he had hated him more than ever and had gone back home because he loved him more than life itself and knew he would not have him for long.