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certainly have spent their first night at The King’s Arms. Felicity could catch news of them there, perhaps even intercept them if they did not get back on the road at too early an hour.
    The coachman scrambled up to his perch, and, a moment later, Lady Lyte’s elegant traveling carriage rolled off toward Bristol Road. Inside, Felicity smiled to herself in the darkness. She could picture the astonished look on Thorn’s face when she arrived back in Bath tomorrow evening with his chastened little sister in tow.
    When she tried to stop picturing Thorn’s face, however, she encountered considerable difficulty.
    Unbidden images of him plagued her. Thorn appearing at her bedroom door in search of his sister, his dishevelled state rather endearing. Thorn hovering over her when she’d stirred from her foolish swoon, a warm air of concern radiating from him. Thorn, angrier than she had ever seen him, full dark brows brooding like thunderheads on the horizon. No sooner did Felicity banish one memory of Thorn Greenwood than another rose to take its place.
    Perhaps it was just as well she’d been forced to make this break with him now, before the unsettling influence he exerted upon her grew stronger.
    As the horses settled into a steady, mile-eating trot,Felicity pulled her cloak tighter and wedged herself into one corner of the carriage. Resting her head against the smooth fabric of the upholstered seat, she tried to elude all thoughts of Thorn Greenwood by fleeing into dreams.
    When that didn’t work, she decided to concentrate her mind on one subject sure to divert her from anything else.
    Her baby.
    Under her cloak, Felicity passed a hand over her flat belly in a gesture at once tender and fiercely protective. Despite all evidence, she still had trouble believing there could be a baby growing inside her.
    How many times, during the early years of her marriage, had she prayed for this very thing, only to be cruelly disappointed again and again? Meanwhile, Percy’s tribe of merry-begotten offspring had grown apace. Each one an added insult, proof of his virility, to be cared for and educated by the bounty of her fortune.
    How many odious cures had she endured for her barrenness? Sometimes downright painful, always humiliating.
    Year after year, she had watched the lack of an heir eat away at her husband and at her marriage. Until she could no longer bear to look him in the face because she knew what he must be thinking. Why had he married this tradesman’s daughter, to refill the empty coffers of his noble family with her fortune, when she could not produce a child to inherit what he’d sacrificed so much to restore?
    As Lady Lyte’s carriage drove through the tranquil shadowy countryside of Sommerset, a queer soundlike the bastard spawn of a sigh and a bitter chuckle echoed within, too quiet for either the driver or the footman to hear from their outside perches.
    Who had been the more gullible goose, Felicity asked herself—she or Percy? How could neither of them have suspected his mistresses might’ve had other lovers to sire their children? Foisting their maintenance off upon him because he had the wealth to provide for them and because he was so pitifully eager to prove his virility by claiming them as his own.
    Now here she was, with child at last. By a man she had no intention of marrying.
    Would Thorn Greenwood ever have consented to become her lover if he’d thought there was any danger of her conceiving? Felicity knew the answer to that, for Thorn had raised the question himself when she first approached him with her scandalous proposition.
    He’d blushed and stammered with an awkwardness she’d found endearing in such a consummate gentleman. It had taken two or three tries before he could frame his query in blunt enough terms for her to understand what he was asking.
    She had almost abandoned the whole undertaking then and there, rather than expose her painful past. Then some baffling compulsion, deeper