He swung down from the saddle outside the great double front doors and handed the reins to a groom, who had materialized from the stables without having to be summoned. He wondered if his approach had been noted from the house too, if it had been watched for with as much reluctance as he felt. Even as he wondered, the front doors swung open from within, and the butler was bowing regally to him and welcoming him home.

Edwin nodded affably and bade the butler a good afternoon.

“Is Mrs. Chambers at home?” he asked.

But she was coming through the stairway arch even as he spoke, and he was struck again, as he had been thirteen months or so ago, when he had set eyes on her for the first time, by her breathtaking beauty. She was on the tall side, slender and yet shapely. She bore herself with an aristocratic grace that was bred into her very bones. She had dark golden hair, large blue eyes, and perfect features.

She was like an icicle, he had thought from the start-and nothing had happened since to cause him to change that initial impression-ethereally lovely, but icy cold, frigid to the heart. Everything about her bearing and manner proclaimed her contempt for the man who had allowed his father to purchase her as a trophy for his son.

She curtsied. “Mr. Chambers,” she said. “I trust you had a pleasant journey?”

He inclined his head to her as he handed a footman his hat and greatcoat and gloves. She had never called him by his given name, though he had invited her to do so when he had called upon her to go through the farce of proposing marriage to her. He had deliberately called her by hers after their nuptials, though she had never invited him to do so. Her greeting chilled and irritated him. The married couples from his world did not address each another with such impersonal formality.

“Yes, thank you, Elizabeth,” he said. “You are well? You have recovered your health?”

“Yes, thank you,” she said.

“And my son?”

The tightening of her lips was almost imperceptible, but it suggested unexpressed annoyance. He wished he could recall his words and speak them again to refer to Jeremy as their son. But he was accustomed to boasting to his friends about his golden-haired boy-my son-whom he had last seen when the child was ten days old.

“He is well, thank you,” she said.

If, he thought ruefully, he had married a woman from his own world, she would perhaps have greeted him each evening of the past year on his return home from work with a smile and a kiss and warm, open arms and an eagerness to share her day with him and to hear about his. He would naturally have thought of their child as ours. He would have seen their son every day of the child’s life.

But he had only himself to blame that things were not so. His father had not forced him into this marriage. Indeed, he would have been horrified if he had realized that Edwin did not really want it.

“Would you like to go to your room to freshen up?” she asked, her eyes moving over him and making him intensely aware of the less than pristine state of the clothes in which he had been riding for the better part of the day. “I have guests in the drawing room.”

“Lord and Lady Templar?” he said. “I trust they are well?”

“Yes, thank you,” she said. Her chin rose a notch, and she suddenly looked arrogant as well as cold. “We decided to have a family Christmas here. All the members of my family arrived yesterday.”

What? Good Lord! Without any consultation with him? Was he to have been even informed? How disastrous his own decision to come home at such short notice must have seemed to his wife and her family. How disastrous it seemed to him! If he could, he would have turned and left the house without further ado and ridden away back to London. All her family? He had never even met most of them. Their wedding had been a fair-sized affair, but apart from Lord and Lady Templar and their son and daughter-in-law, all the guests had been his family and his friends and his father’s. He could not leave now, though.

He would not leave. This was, after all his home.

“I will meet and welcome them to Wyldwood later,” he said. “But first I would like to go to the nursery. Will you come there with me?”

“Of course.” She turned to accompany him through the arch to the staircase. She clasped her hands gracefully in front of her, discouraging him from offering his arm.

“How many guests?” he asked as they ascended the stairs. He could hear the chill in his own voice. He had never been able to inject warmth into it when speaking with his wife. How could one hold a warm conversation with an icicle?

“Thirty-two adults altogether,” she said. “Thirty-three now.”

He winced inwardly. Under different circumstances he might have felt some amusement over the realization that he had made the numbers odd.

Doubtless his wife and his mother-in-law had planned meticulously in order to ensure even numbers. He would even be willing to wager that of the other thirty-two adults sixteen were gentlemen and sixteen ladies, even though normally one would not expect a family to fall into such a neat pattern.

He was surprised when he opened the nursery door and stood to one side to allow his wife to precede him inside. He had expected a hush appropriate for a sleeping baby. Instead there was a noisy, cheerful hubbub. But of course-there must be children as well as adults in her family. There was a vast number of the former, it seemed, all rushing about at play, all talking-or, rather, yelling-at once. A few nurses were supervising, but by no means subduing them.

Several of the children stopped what they were doing to see who was coming in. A few of them came closer, and a copper-haired, freckled little boy demanded to know who Edwin was.

“You must remember to mind your manners, Charles,” Elizabeth said, nevertheless showing a human touch by ruffling the hair of the offender.

“This is your… uncle. Charles is Bertie’s eldest,” she explained, naming her brother. She identified the other children in the group, all of them cousins or the children of cousins.

“What is your name?” Charles asked.

“Charles!” Elizabeth exclaimed, sounding embarrassed.

But Edwin held up a hand. “Have you noticed,” he asked, winking at the boy, “that when a lad does not know something he ought to know, adults invariably tell him he should have asked? Yet when he does ask, he is treated as if he had been impertinent?”

“Ye-e-es!” The children were all in loud agreement, and Edwin grinned at them all.

“He is Uncle… Edwin,” Elizabeth explained.

There was a chorus of requests that Uncle Edwin come and play with them.

He held up a staying hand again, chuckling as he did so. Almost all his closest friends had young families, who for some inexplicable reason always saw him as a potential playmate. His friends claimed that it happened because he was still a child at heart. He liked children.

“Tomorrow,” he promised. “We will play so hard that you will not have to be told to go to bed in the evening. In fact, you will beg your nurses to let you go there.”

There was a swell of derisive denials. Charles, who was obviously something of a leader, snorted.

“It is a promise,” Edwin told them. “But today I have come to see a certain baby by the name of Jeremy, who is mine. Has anyone seen him running around here, by any chance?” He looked around him with a frown of concentration.

“Nah,” a plump little boy told him, the utmost contempt in his voice.

“He’s just a baby.”

“I wanted to play with him,” a little girl added, “but he had to go to sleep. Is he yours? He is Aunt Lizzie’s too.”

Elizabeth led the way to a room beyond the nursery.

“You ought not to have said that about tomorrow,” she said with quiet reproach. “They will be disappointed when you do not keep your promise.

Children do not forget, you know.”

He did not answer. The room was quiet and in semidarkness with the curtains drawn across the window. But the baby was not asleep. Edwin could hear him cooing and could see him waving his fists in the air as he lay on his back in his crib. His eyes focused on his father when Edwin stepped closer. Edwin swallowed hard and was glad that his wife was standing well behind him. He had ached for this moment for almost three months.

Being separated from his child was the most bitter experience of his life. He had considered a number of schemes for bringing him closer, including buying a second house in London for Elizabeth to live in. But there would be too many awkward questions if he and his wife both lived in London but not together. Yet it seemed somehow impossible to set his family up in his own London home, formerly his father’s, even though it was large and tastefully decorated and furnished and well staffed and situated in a fashionable part of town. It was, nevertheless, well known as the home of a prosperous merchant.

“He has grown,” Edwin said.

“Of course. You have not seen him for almost three months.”

Was it an accusation?

“He has lost much of his hair,” he said.

“That is natural,” she told him. “It will grow back.”

“Do you still… nurse him?” He could remember his surprise when her mother and the doctor had been united in their protest against her decision not to hire a wet nurse. It was one issue on which she had held out against her mother’s will.

“Yes.”

She made no move to pick up the child, who admittedly seemed happy enough where he was. Edwin longed to do so himself, but he was afraid even to touch him.

“He looks healthy enough,” he said.

Why was it that with Elizabeth words never came naturally to him, and that the ones he chose to speak were stiff and banal? They had never had a conversation. They had been bedfellows for two weeks he would prefer to forget-she had been a cold, unresponsive, sacrificial lamb beneath him on the bed each night-but they had remained awkward, near-silent strangers.