Page 75 of Forget Me Not

Lucy had her quickly dressed and presentable. The long curls her abigail had left loose from her chignon bounced as Julia hurried to find the gathered gentlemen. They were precisely where she’d guessed. All eyes turned to her. A chorus of welcomes greeted her, and she was waved in.

“We thought you might never wake,” Digby said with a friendly smile.

“And,” Kes added, “Lucas threatened to shoot the lot of us if you woke on our account.”

Digby nodded solemnly. “It has been a most unnerving first half of the day. It was all I could do not to fret my handkerchief into a most unbecoming twist.”

Though she acknowledged their jesting with a quick and indulgent smile, she did not pause until she reached Lucas’s side. He gently took her hands and pressed a light kiss to her forehead. “Are you feeling better, sweetheart?”

“Quite.”

He set his arm around her, so easily and comfortably affectionate. How very different their time together was from what it had been weeks earlier.

She turned to look at their gathered friends. “Has your tyrannical host kept you imprisoned in here all morning?”

“Oui.” Henri shook his head in mock misery. “No matter that the sun is shining, we have seen none of it.”

Lucas shooed away that argument. “Plenty enough sneaks in through the windows. That is more than sufficient.”

“Who is acting the role of monarch now?” Kes said beneath his breath.

“The jester is stealing your crown,” Julia said to Digby. “Does that not worry you?”

“We have our ways of reclaiming it.” The devilment in his eyes only made him even more impossibly handsome. This gentleman, no doubt, had broken hearts all over the kingdom and likely beyond.

All the Gents were intriguing and congenial in their own ways. What a fascinating group they made. Having them in her home made it more appealing as well. She had a role, a promise of laughter and smiles. Looking up at Lucas, she could see that he, too, was pleased with the gathering. No sedate, empty homes for her husband. He, she suspected, thrived on a cacophony of voices and the chaos of people sharing the space he did.

But do I?She’d been on her own for so much of her life that she couldn’t be certain. Before the last eight years, before she’d been left entirely alone, her life in Collingham could not have been described any differently. And she had loved it. She had cherished it. Those days of madness had breathed life into her existence, a feeling that had eluded her ever since.

“Have we any plans for today?” she asked Lucas. “Mountaineering? Entertaining Pooka? Parlor games?”

“The ground took a soaking all night, so we would do best to leave the mountain to itself today, but I am in favor of anything else you’d like to propose.”

“Careful there, Jonquil,” Aldric said. “You’ll find yourself committed to something humiliating, with no honorable means of avoiding it.”

Lucas flashed her a smile that melted her as surely as his kiss had the night before. “Julia imagined up the very best larks when we were children. Stanley and I readily abandoned whatever comparatively dull adventures we’d thought of when she proposed something. I’m more than willing to defer to her on the matter of entertaining our guests.”

The Gents watched her, intrigued and friendly.

Niles broke the temporary silence. “What is it to be, Our Julia? Your wish is our command.”

To her delight, she wasn’t the least intimidated or nervous at being handed so unexpected a responsibility. Indeed, she felt more like her twelve-year-old self than she had since the day Lucas had left Lampton Park.

“I believe I would like to play the games Lucas and I enjoyed most as children. Hide-and-seek. Chase. I’m not certain I could climb a tree at this point, fashion being the limitation it is. I would enjoy a game of riddles or yes-and-no.”

“And jokes revolving around inappropriate noises?” Kes asked. “I’ve been told that was a staple of your early years together.”

Julia grinned. “We may be reliving our childhood, but we have to do so withsomedecorum.”

“I would like to formally state my preference for hide-and-seek,” Lucas said. “Gentlemen’sfashions do not easily lend themselves to those other activities either. We’d best not press our luck too far, too quickly.”

“What say you, Gents?” she asked the others. “Care to indulge yourselves in a very sophisticated game of hide-and-seek?”

“A game of strategy? Yes, please.” The General appeared entirely in his element.

The others agreed just as readily. It was not an activity she would have suggested to the attendees of grand Society functions nor to most of the finer families near Collingham—indeed, those two groups would warrant entirely different suggestions—but this gathering, she knew, was perfectly primed for a hilariously unsophisticated afternoon.

“We shall play one seeker and the rest hiding,” Julia suggested. “Once discovered, hiders become seekers. The last to be found is the winner.”

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