Page 24 of A Secret Consequence for the Viscount

‘With me?’

She was not brave enough yet to give him all the truth. ‘As a friend. You were at a loose end and so I accompanied you on day trips.’

The candles against the darkness, the smell of scented wax, his skin under moonlight, her unbound hair draped across the tanned folds of his shadowed arm.

She did not speak of this.

‘Where did we go?’

‘The Vauxhall Gardens. Hyde Park. Bullock’s Museum. Fortnum and Mason. Gunter’s Tea Shop.’

‘Quite the potpourri of establishments.’

‘There were others as well.’

‘All in less than a week? Not a little acquaintance, then?’

She smiled and spoke with more trepidation than she meant to. ‘The thing is, Lord Bromley, I might be able to help you to remember by going back.’

‘Recall by association, you mean?’

‘Memory aided by events that are familiar. I have been reading about amnesia. Hypnosis is one treatment, but so is the quieter option of passing again across what your soul would know and hence allowing a passage for the brain to reconnect.’

She recognised in her words the text she had studied all afternoon at Lackington’s.

‘Why would you do this? For me?’

‘You are my brother’s best friend and Jacob would be more than pleased to see your memory restored.’

* * *

He could not understand her motives. One thing was for certain—they were not quite as she had admitted them, for she had blushed bright red at his question and looked away.

What was it she was saying underneath her words?

‘I truly went to Gunter’s Tea Shop with you?’

That brought a smile into eyes that were anxious.

‘Happily, my lord. You particularly enjoyed the chocolate sorbet in a pewter mould shaped as a pineapple. But then Gunter’s frozen indulgences are all particularly alluring.’

He could not ever remember laughing with a woman as he did with Eleanor Huntingdon.

‘I can see why that memory has been expunged from my recall, Lady Eleanor.’

‘You brought a box of the extravagant pastries home. The almond croissant was your favourite.’

‘To the Bromley town house?’ Had she gone there with him, too? The tea shop was a place she might have accompanied him without being exposed to scandal, but to visit him at home?

As if she had said too much, she retreated into silence.

‘Very well.’ He gave this quietly as she looked across at him. ‘Our first destination is the tea shop on Berkeley Square. I’ll pick you up at two o’clock tomorrow and we shall go and have ice cream.’

‘You are not staying here this evening?’

‘My town house is being readied for me and it will be good to put my head down in a bed that I know.’

The sharp flash of anger that crossed into Eleanor Huntingdon’s face as he said these words were another puzzlement.