Six years later
JEWEL CLIMBED down the ladder and set it against the wall. Quietly, so her mother wouldn’t hear. Then she squeezed through the door—carefully, carefully—since it was open only a tiny bit, just enough for a slip of a six-year-old pixie to fit through.
She skipped through the kitchen, pausing to grab a warm tart from a fresh-baked pile, then across the great hall and down the corridor to the study. Hesitating, she wiped the crumbs from her rosebud mouth and swept the disheveled ebony hair back from her heart-shaped face. Then she placed a delicate hand on the latch and pushed, bursting into the chamber.
“Papa, come quick! Mama’s burned herself!”
Papa jumped up from behind his desk. “The workshop?” he called out as he darted past her, and Jewel nodded, then retraced her steps, this time at a run at her father’s heels. She hurried to keep up.
“Let it not be bad,” Colin whispered. The blast furnace in the workshop could rise to such incredibly high temperatures. “Please let it not be bad.”
The workshop door was slightly ajar. He pushed it open—scrape, bang—and a deluge of frigid water poured down on him.
Behind him, Jewel dissolved into hysterical giggles. Colin’s wife turned around from her workbench, a knife and wax ring model in her hands.
“She got you,” Amy said. “Again.” Seeing Colin standing there, drenched, his hair plastered to his head and hanging to his shoulders in thick wet tendrils, she burst into laughter.
Colin reached back to pull his still-giggling daughter into the room. With a violent shake of his head, he sprayed droplets of cold water onto her small head and shoulders. “Jewel Edith Chase,” he said with mock severity, “this is getting way out of hand.”
“I owed you. For the lemonade.”
The previous week, Colin had promised Jewel a cool mug of lemonade after a vigorous fencing lesson, but the concoction he’d given her had been double-strength, no sugar. The pucker on her face had been priceless.
He chuckled now, savoring the memory. “That was for the hay,” he protested. “How did you do that hay thing, anyway?”
“I’m not telling. We’re even now.”
“Oh, no, we’re not.” Colin smiled to himself, then narrowed his eyes at Jewel. “Is it not past your bedtime, young lady?”
“Mama said I could cast my ring tonight.”
Amy laughed. “Good try, Jewel, but you spent the evening balancing a bucket of water.”
Colin knelt and hugged his daughter to his side. “You can cast your ring tomorrow.”
“If I go to bed now, will you tell me a story?”
Colin groaned. “What is this, a negotiation?”
“What’s a negotayshun?”
He ruffled her hair. “A negotiation is when—”
“It’s when you bat your pretty eyes at your father”—Amy’s own eyes glittered with mischief—“and he gives you what you want.”
“Amy!” Colin protested.
“Tell me a story, please,” Jewel begged, her eyes sparkling with hope. Those emerald eyes that were exactly like his. Amy was right; he could never deny his daughter when she gazed at him like that. “Please, Papa. Tell me the one about when you were in France for the king, and your coach was stopped by hackneymen.”
“Highwaymen.”
“Whatever. Tell me, please.”
Those eyes. “As you wish. Go get ready for bed, and I’ll come up in a while and tell you the story.”
“Can Hugh hear it, too?”
Jewel’s brother Hugh was a strapping boy of four who followed his father around like a shadow. The next Earl of Greystone.
And then, of course, there was Aidan. Colin glanced at the sleeping child snuggled in the corner of the workshop. At six months, he still needed Amy near. And he would learn his trade here; his future was here.
“Papa…” His gaze moved from the cradle back to Jewel. “Please, Papa. Hugh loves your stories—you know he does.”
“Very well, sweetheart.” Emerald eyes sparkled again, and Colin’s heart melted a bit more. Would he never get over the wonder of these precious beings entrusted to his care? “Now, go. I’ll be along directly,” he told her with a sigh.
She went, skipping out into the kitchen as though she hadn’t a care in the world. Which was true. And Colin hoped he could keep it that way for a long, long time.
Closing the door, he turned to his wife. “Did you see how ingenious that was?” he asked, amazed at his daughter’s creativity. “Look how she connected the bucket’s handle to the door latch with a rope, so it wouldn’t hit me on the head when it fell off the top of the door. Brilliant. Just brilliant.” He shook his head slowly in admiration. “Our daughter is so incredible.”
Trust Colin to equate intelligence with a well executed practical joke, Amy mused, rising from her workbench. She too was convinced their daughter was a genius, but her opinion stemmed from Jewel’s reading ability and thirst for knowledge.
“I know what she did.” Amy pushed the wet hair off Colin’s face and wrapped her arms around his waist. “I was here, working.”
“And you let her do it, anyway.”
“Of course—you deserved it after the lemonade. Besides, she thinks she went unnoticed. She was quiet as a mouse, and I kept my back to her the whole time.”
“So you’re an accessory to the crime,” Colin accused, with that devastating smile that made Amy’s heart turn over, even after all these years.
“I suppose one could conclude that.”
“Which reminds me: How did she manage that hay trick? You must know.”
Amy did know. Jewel and Benchley, whom she’d long ago charmed into acting as her willing accomplice, had placed a board against the open wardrobe and stuffed hay behind it, then closed the door most of the way, pulled the board, and slammed the wardrobe shut. When Colin opened it to hang his shirt on a peg, he’d turned into a human haystack.
Watching from their bed, Amy had laughed herself sick. Jewel had run in, crowing with delight, prompting Colin to initiate a wrestling match that resulted in an explosion of sweet-smelling hay spread all about the chamber. And after Jewel returned to bed, Colin had picked the strands of hay from Amy’s hair, one by one…
Amy shook her head to clear it. No, she hadn’t the right to give away Jewel’s secrets. “I have no idea,” she said coyly. “Jewel doesn’t confide in me.”
But Benchley does, she amended to herself. Benchley was forever boasting about Lady Jewel’s accomplishments. To everyone but Jewel’s father, that was.
Benchley was loyal to a fault.
“Are you quite certain?” Colin asked, his mouth against hers.
“Quite.”
His arms tightened around her, and his lips pressed closer. Amy’s knees turned to pudding, and she felt her pulse quicken. His kiss intensified, claiming her as his alone. Her senses whirled, and her heart pounded so loudly she was certain he could hear it.
She vaguely wondered how she could feel this way—she, a grown lady of twenty-four, with three children. But inside, she felt no older than when Colin first kissed her, so many years ago. And his kisses still affected her the same way, only more so.
“Amy…” Colin murmured into her mouth.
“Hmm?”
He pulled his lips from hers. But he pressed her even closer to him. “How did Jewel pull off the hay trick?”
His lips brushed hers teasingly. And she almost told him…
“Lord Greystone?” A sharp knock came at the door.
Colin jumped away with a groan. “Yes?”
Lydia opened the door and stuck her head in just as Amy smoothed her skirts, her cheeks hot with embarrassment.
“Lady Jewel says you were supposed to tell her a story?”
“Oh…yes…I did promise her a story…didn’t I?” Colin groaned again, but Amy knew he would follow—he’d never disappoint his precious Jewel.
A Chase promise was not given lightly.
“This will be continued,” Colin vowed before going to his daughter. His deep, husky voice held a challenge, and Amy knew he was referring to the hay episode and what he doubtless considered an ingenious, delicious method of inducing her to confess what she knew about it.
But she chose to interpret his words in an entirely different context.
This will be continued. For a long, long, long time.
Forever.