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of yours? God! Have you been making a fool of me?”
    Worse obscenities slipped from his lips. “We are standing in the road, Geoff!” – and on the edge of the village – anyone might hear him, and see him manhandling her like she was a common slut. They were making a fine exhibit.
    His hands let her go, falling away at the same moment she stepped back. But his gaze became threatening and his voice dropped in pitch but not in intensity. “You are not casting me off, Violet. I’ll not go. Do you understand? I don’t believe you do not care for me. I am not leaving you here. I love you.”
    Violet’s heart leapt and then beat at an aggressive pace.

Part Three
    Violet watched Geoff take off his hat and put it on a table in the hall. Then he took off his gloves too and dropped them on top of it.
    She’d told Janet to leave the house for an hour or two. The maid had looked at Violet and then glanced at Geoff with a question in her eyes before disappearing. Violet’s reputation in this village would be shredded. This was not London. People would not turn a blind eye to such things. The gossip would spread within hours. She was entertaining a man alone – and when it was a man of Geoff’s quality, well.
    She did not offer him tea, she did not wish him to stay, she had only proposed they come here to take their argument off the street so others might not hear him rail and swear at her.
    Her heart lurched as he began unbuttoning his greatcoat. He had such long-fingered, masculine hands.
    When she had seen him standing there with the sun behind him, placing him in silhouette, her heart had burst with joy and love, and an overwhelming sensation of recognition. Her heart knew and wanted him. She’d never felt like this before. And now, as he started stripping off his outdoor coat, she was intensely aware of the body she knew beneath his clothes too.
    He’d said, I love you? “You are not staying,” she whispered as he slipped the third button free. Her body and her heart might want him, but her head had more common sense. There was the child.

    “I am not going,” he answered with a brutal depth. “You are not throwing me out, Vi. You’ll have to find someone to do it physically if you wish to. I am not moving.”
    Oh Lord . “Geoffrey…” Her heart raced. What did I love you mean anyway? Did it change anything between them? How could it though?
    “Geoffrey, what, Violet? What is going on?”
    She turned and walked into the parlour leaving him in the stone-flagged hallway. She had no way to make him go. When she turned back she saw him slip off his coat and turn to hang it on a peg near the door, as though he belonged here. He did not. But he had become a constant presence back in London and her body ached to step into his arms.
    Her chin tilted up, when he turned again and entered the parlour.
    “Why the blacks, Vi? Has someone died? I didn’t think you had any family left…” His words ran dry and he looked at her blankly for a moment then his gaze flashed hard and sharp. “Mayer was you maiden name wasn’t it? Your father’s name?”
    He clearly knew more about her than she’d told him. She’d never spoken of her childhood to him. He was aristocracy and she had come from a family who had made their money from sugar plantations in the colonies. It was another reason he would not wish to marry her and not something she cared to discuss publicly, but there were those who remembered. Those who he had obviously been talking to behind her back. But had he been talking because he cared, or because he was prying…
    “Did someone die?”
    She didn’t know how to answer and so she did not, just stared at him.
    “Let me take your cloak?”
    He moved forwards. She stepped back, struggling to find the persona of the merry widow and some way to put Geoff off.

    “Violet? What is going on?”
    She turned away from him, her fingers trembling as they lifted to untie the ribbons of her bonnet. She did not answer