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braid your hair?”
    As the room gradually became more comfortable, they managed Hannah’s hair. The maid was running the warmer over the sheets again when another maid appeared, tray in hand.
    “His lordship says you missed supper,” the second maid explained. “He said you wasn’t to get cranky and peckish.”
    Hot chocolate sprinkled with cinnamon sat near a pair of rum buns.
    If reading Dickens to her hadn’t won a bit of her heart, the offerings on the tray surely did.
    Hannah propped up her pillows and lay back on her warmed sheets. She took a nibble of delicious rum bun, wrapped her hands around the mug of hot chocolate, and wondered if all the titled, handsome gentlemen she’d meet here would be possessed of such good manners.
    And such warm hands.

Three
    “A bloody damned bit of snow isn’t going to keep me from leaving the house.”
    Asher directed his foul language at no one in particular, for at this time of the morning the study was empty of living creatures save himself and a large black-and-orange house cat curled up on a hassock near the fire.
    The specter of Uncle Fen’s disapproving presence hung close by though, as close as Asher’s elbow, where the baron’s latest epistle sat on the massive desk, its meek appearance belying its vituperative content.
    “You will make all haste for London, the ladies being your responsibility to see suitably housed, attired, and introduced.”
    The last word was the stinging tail of the lash: introduced … As if Asher himself had more than nominal and begrudging entrée among the baron’s titled peers and cronies. Asher and the Cooper women would be the socially blind leading the blind.
    Or the lame. After two days in bed, Miss Hannah Cooper was much recovered from her injury, recovered enough he need not haul her about in his arms.
    Asher was not recovered. Not from the sight of her helpless and in pain, not from the sense of having failed in so simple a task as escorting a lady, and not—God help him—from the realization that holding a woman’s foot could be intensely erotic when it wasn’t supposed to be.
    He knew about women’s feet—phalanges and metatarsals, peroneous tertius , brevis , and longus —but he also knew about women purely in the sense a man appreciates the Creator’s more refined effort. Knew about their ears and napes and fingers and bellies, and all the luscious parts of them that could be turned to the service of their arousal and Asher’s pleasure. Yes, feet could be erotic, but they were supposed to mind their mundane business until Asher recruited them for the business of seduction.
    Not even seduction, for he’d never had to seduce a woman, not since he’d turned fifteen and the ladies had started seducing him.
    But here he was, haunted by the feel of a lady’s foot, soft and cool against the callused palms of his hands. He’d long since accepted that grief did not permanently inoculate a man against arousal, but this, this fascination for a woman who wanted no part of England, Scotland, and the fellows to be found there—
    “Bah!”
    The cat opened unblinking green eyes.
    “I’m to haul them to London, weather be damned, and believe me, cat, the weather will be evil. Every God’s blessed aspect of this misadventure will bend to the baron’s need to see his heir suffering and miserable.”
    The cat squeezed her eyes closed in a display of feline indifference.
    “Maybe I should make you come with us.”
    More indifference, reminding Asher of the elders among whom he’d been raised. They weren’t indifferent, though, so much as stoic. Anybody who could withstand sixty Canadian winters with nothing but a longhouse and a meager fire between them and the elements had stoicism running in their veins.
    And those were his people too.
    Asher leafed through the rest of the mail delivered that morning. One thin missive had crossed the Atlantic mere days after its intended recipient: Hannah Cooper had a letter from home,