Countesses didn‟t hide in damp woods from handsome baronets, Serena Cambray told herself sternly. Once she had been
too proud to hide from anyone—how her current cowardice would have been reviled. Well, people changed, and the widowed Lady
Summerton perhaps more than most, Serena informed herself stoutly, and tried to sit as still and cool as an ice-sculpture on her
slightly damp tree stump. Even as she tried to tell herself she was quite calm, her thoughts drifted to the man she was avoiding so
assiduously. If only she had seen beneath his youthful arrogance and that annoying air of omnipotence to the man he would one day
become, how different her life might have been.
The first time she had met Adam Langthorne he had threatened to tan her hide and send her home to her father, with a
message informing him that his daughter would never be permitted contact with his sister again.
„Only my grandfather‟s sense of chivalry prevents me from packing you off right now, even if you have to travel all night,‟
he had told her, and looked down his nose at her from the superiority of his lanky height and his new commission in His Majesty‟s
army.
Serena had glared back at him and refused to admit she had anything to apologise for—even if she and Rachel Langthorne
had been within a whisker of causing a scandal and had put themselves in deadly peril. To be labelled ungovernable hoydens given to
outrageous pranks like dressing up as coachman and postilion and stealing his grandfather‟s carriage to go to a mill would have
blighted their reputations for life, even though they had only been fourteen at the time, but how she had hated him that day, she
recalled with a wry smile. Probably all the more so because she had known he was right. It struck her that if he had published her
infamy to the world, George Cambray would never have tainted his great name with such a hoydenish wife. Only think of the danger
of passing on such bad blood to the docile and dutiful daughters he had expected her to bear him as the inevitable side effect of
breeding his heirs.
Shaking off such unwelcome thoughts, she listened for Sir Adam‟s soft footfall on the unpromising surface of the ancient
woodland floor and wondered about that first meeting. Even at fourteen to his nineteen had she already been secretly in thrall to the
tall ensign of dragoons? If so, she‟d stoutly refused to allow the idea room in her silly head—and that would have been one secret she
would never have confided in her best friend even if she‟d known it herself. So much as a whiff of a match between Serena and her
adored elder brother would have turned Rachel into a hardened matchmaker on the spot. In fact, now she came to think about
it…Could that explain Sir Adam‟s uncanny knack of knowing where Serena was before she‟d hardly thought of being there herself?
She shook her head absently and acquitted her friend of such perfidy; Rachel knew everything about her but that one
almost unformed secret, and wouldn‟t serve Sir Adam such a backhand turn even if she had a suspicion of it. Yet Serena‟s stubborn
thoughts lingered on what might have been, and she drifted into a fantasy of meeting the by then Lieutenant Langthorne at her comeout
ball instead of the rather awesome Earl of Summerton. If only that dashing and dangerous gentleman had presented himself to be
danced with, dined with, and even perhaps mildly flirted with, could she have seen a truly nobleman from the outward pattern of one?
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