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something bound to raise her spirits. Asher hooked his spectacles back around his ears and peered at the letter.
    Many people still didn’t bother with the expense of an envelope, but Hannah came from money, from people with pretensions to class in so far as the United States boasted of same. Still, the man penning this letter hadn’t bothered to limit his sentiments to the inside of the folded paper, but rather, had scratched his message so the last of it could be read on the outside.
    “You have disgraced your family, and the only solution remaining is to situate you where you might never again bring shame down upon my house, where you are firmly established as some other man’s problem. This is your last chance, Stepdaughter. I suggest you make the most of it.”
    What had Hannah Cooper done to invite such an admonition? Smiled at some beamish farm boy? Leaned a little too closely on a widower’s arm? Cheered too loudly at a race meet? He could not see the woman now contentedly reading one floor above him disgracing herself in any meaningful sense.
    Even if she did have the most erotically appealing feet it had ever been Asher’s torment to hold.
    He stuffed that thought back into the dark closet from whence it had escaped, and took the little epistle to Miss Cooper’s sitting room.
    She looked up at him, setting Copperfield face down in her lap. “To what do I owe the pleasure, sir?”
    She had her feet up on a hassock, and an afghan swaddling both legs. Asher had the sense she’d taken to the comfort like the feline in his study, instinctively seeking warmth and ease to save against the times when there would be none.
    “I bring you an epistle from home,” he said, making no move to pass her the letter. “Have you enough light to read it?”
    “If it’s from Grandmother, she doesn’t write cursive, so yes, I have adequate light.”
    He settled on the hearth, blocking some of that light.
    “I gather it isn’t from your grandmother.” He passed her the letter and watched the eager light in her eyes wink out like a snuffed candle.
    “Step-papa, then.” She took the letter and slit it open, glancing at the contents. “A little sermon, lest I forget his many attempts to guide me into the arms of the suitors of his choice.”
    “You’re finicky. Somehow, one might guess this about you.” And she was bitterly disappointed not to hear from this old granny of hers.
    “I’m female. We’re given to odd notions.” She set the letter aside unread—Asher suspected the missive would shortly end up in the fire—and made as if to resume disporting with Master Copperfield.
    “Odd notions such as?”
    She returned the book to her lap and gazed past him, into the fire. “I would like to be held in affection by my spouse, not merely tolerated for my fortune, for one thing.”
    “Affection doesn’t strike me as too odd a notion.” Though affection for her? A fellow would have to scale the battlements of her disappointment and self-sufficiency, bare his soul, and place his heart entirely in her hands.
    But what a lucky fellow he’d be, if she surrendered her heart in return.
    “I would like my spouse to take me to wife whether I’ve a great fortune or only a modest dowry.”
    “Many men marry women with modest dowries.” Many men with modest expectations, or personal fortunes of their own. Perhaps those were in short supply in Boston.
    “Men generally only marry women of modest means when the fellow’s heart is engaged.”
    “Affection and means of his own, then,” Asher said, and he wanted to add some deprecating little aside, except Boston wasn’t being unreasonable at all. Affection in a marriage would be… wonderful.
    It had been wonderful.
    “Does that smile suggest you are laughing at me, sir?”
    “Was I smiling? I thought I was agreeing with you. Is your stepfather so easily disappointed that your modest requirements foiled his ambitions for you?”
    “He presented me several choices, all