Page 38

M iss Amethyst de Petras took a deep breath and tried not to recall all the memories that swarmed her mind at the scent of the garden.

“Let go—”

“It was my toy first—”

“Mama! Mama, he’s—”

Amethyst forced down a smile. It had been only a few years since her reconciliation with her extended family; it would certainly not do to laugh at her…

well, they were her cousins’ children, so what did that make them?

Nieces and nephews? Second nieces and nephews—no, that couldn’t have been right. Were they removed in some way?

“—cannot play nicely, I shall simply take the toy away!” came Coral’s stern voice.

This time, Amethyst did not bother hiding her smile.

The Duchess of Glaenarm, as her cousin Coral had become upon her marriage, was a force to be reckoned with—but here, in the country estate of the de Petrases, where they had just arrived after a long and sticky carriage journey from London, she did allow herself to be teased.

Sometimes.

“What a journey,” muttered Sapphire Gresley, the Countess of Maltravers, brushing the dust of the road off her skirts. “Lemonade on the terrace, Amy? Then it’ll be naps for everyone, adults included after that long journey.”

Amethyst swallowed as the shrieks of her now eight nieces and nephews—or whatever they were—filled the driveaway of Cabochon House.

Micah and his wife were attempting to force two of their boys apart, Emerald was cajoling her eldest daughter to get down out of the carriage and stop reading her book, and somewhere close by, there was a baby crying. It did not make for a restful scene.

“No, I think—I think I’ll walk down to the lake,” Amethyst said with a wry smile. “Some peace and quiet. No offence, Sapphy.”

Her youngest cousin, Sapphire, resplendent in a dark-blue gown and haphazardly unpinned chestnut hair with a six-week-old babe in her arms, grinned. “We are rather a lot, aren’t we?”

“Did you say lemonade? Oh, I’m gasping,” called over Opal de Petras, the true matriarch of the family, her silvery hair shimmering in the baking sunshine. “Come, Jasper. Let’s see if we can corral some of the younger—come on, sweet, you can read that book on the terrace—”

“I’ll be back soon,” Amethyst said swiftly as another one of Emerald’s daughters started to bicker with a cousin, the heat not helping much with the frayed tempers.

Sapphire raised an eyebrow. “So we’ll see you for dinner, then?”

Three boys of various parentages rushed past them, yelling something indistinct about raiding the larder.

Amethyst smiled weakly. “Something like that, yes.”

It wasn’t that she did not like her family. She did—and more importantly, she told herself firmly as she accepted a parasol from her cousin Micah, who was rubbing his chin stubble in deep negotiation with a toddler who had decided he wanted to eat gravel, Amethyst was grateful.

She was grateful that this branch of the de Petras family had taken her in. Grateful that they had not blamed her for her side of the family’s conniving. Grateful that they had accepted her and loved her over the last ten years.

But still, there was something…something lonely about being a part of the family as a cousin and not a sibling.

The cries and shouts and screams and laughter of the family faded into the background as Amethyst walked sedately—walking at any harsher pace in this heat would have been murderous—around the side of Cabochon House and past the terrace, where servants in brilliant-green livery were carefully setting out lemonade, tea, coffee, and cakes.

The lawn was resplendent before the refreshments and the garden was only wilting a smidgeon, which, considering the heat, was rather impressive.

With each footstep that Amethyst took, the sounds of the rabble—her family, she corrected herself with a wry smile—faded, and she was lost instead in the brilliance of Cabochon House.

Her aunt had purchased it what, eight years ago?

There had been some consternation in the village which it bordered; the de Petras family was not only a family grown rich by trade and marriage with nobility, but it was a matriarchy.

Amethyst chuckled at the memory of their nearest neighbors, the Petersons, attempting to understand.

“You mean to say,” Lady Peterson had said at their first dinner eight years ago, in a sort of hushed horror, “that…that it is Mrs. Opal de Petras who is the head of household?”

Stepping off the lawn and into the rose garden, gravel crunching underneath her feet, Amethyst smiled.

It was rather odd, but it had been the de Petras way for generations.

It was only her misfortune to be the daughter of a son, which meant that it was her cousin Coral, and not herself, who would be the next matriarch of the family.

“And a good thing too,” Amethyst muttered under her breath, fingertips brushing the soft petals of the roses. “For you, Miss Amethyst de Petras, would hardly be a good matriarch. You are unmarried, for a start.”

It was a foolish habit to get into, this talking to herself—but with each of her cousins married, and happily, and with more children than they seemed to know what to do with, Amethyst so often found herself alone.

It was, she could not help but think as she stepped into the small woodland that bordered the formal gardens and swept downhill toward the lake, a little lonely.

A little lonely?

“Don’t think about it,” Amethyst told herself firmly as her footsteps led her, as she had known they would, around the curve of the woodland to—

The lake.

It had always been her favorite part of Cabochon House, even when her Aunt Opal had first purchased it. Hidden from the house by the gardens and woodland, utterly unapproachable through any public footpath, it had seemed like the ocean when Amethyst had first seen it. Wide, and deep, and peaceful.

How many hours had she spent here, wandering up and down its banks?

“Too many,” Amethyst muttered, slipping off her shoes and luxuriating in the fine sand, an oddity and another wonderful feature of the lake that her cousin Emerald had attempted to explain to her once in a long lecture.

Her toes scrunched in the sand and for the first time since she had stepped out of the slightly crowded carriage—next time, they would have to stretch to five carriages, not four—Amethyst allowed herself to breathe out fully.

Her eyelashes closed. Another summer at Cabochon House, she told herself, and she was not going to spend a minute of it thinking about…about him. About what could have been. About what should have been.

Except for this minute, obviously.

“Fine,” Amethyst whispered under her breath, eyes closed and face warm in the summer heat, despite the parasol. “Just this minute. Sixty seconds to think about him, and no more.”

It was perhaps sixty seconds too many. Thinking about him, after all, was not only painful, but deeply warming. There had been fire in those kisses, heat and need in those embraces, but to where and to what had they led?

“Nowhere,” muttered Amethyst, scrunching her eyes closed tighter. “Nothing.”

If she concentrated, she could still see him in her mind’s eye, even though it had been two years since she had been in his presence.

Robert Peterson.

Amethyst forced herself to swallow. Now, that was quite enough. She was here to be with her family, not pine after some long-lost love who probably never gave her a spare thought in his whole day.

Exhaling slowly and telling herself sternly that she had spent her sixty seconds unwisely but would now not think about him for the rest of her time here at Cabochon House, Amethyst opened her eyes.

And dropped her parasol.

“Amethyst,” said Robert Peterson, staring at her and blinking slowly, his handsome brow furrowed.