Since the Surrender by Julie Anne Long

sodden cavern of his mind. Chase gave a short, sharp, ironic laugh that made Marie-Claude jump. The truth was—and he could thank whiskey for revealing this to him, at least—if Colin had known just how those words sounded to him—if he’d had any inkling of the regret, the inconceivable longing they called up in him—he never would have said them again.
    Colin wasn’t a complete ass.
    Chase plucked Marie-Claude’s hand gently from him and stood, but he had to do it in stages: first he got his torso up, and when his head stopped swimming, he levered the rest of himself up, and when the room stopped turning, he turned, and this was how he noticed for perhaps the first time the bad and yet decidedly erotic painting hanging over the bed.
    A dark-haired angel was blowing something rather more anatomical than a trumpet.
    Everyone in the painting—the angel and the lucky recipient of her attentions—looked quite pleased with the turn of events. She looked quite familiar, this angel. Chase stared and stared at the painting. Marie-Claude thought he was mesmerized for another reason altogether.
    “You want that I should…” She gestured illustratively.
    “No, thank you, Marie-Claude,” he said absently. He paid her for her inconvenience—probably absurdly too much
    —leaving her confused. He would go home and sleep. And he made his way back down the stairs, using the walls and his walking stick for balance, and still thinking.
    Bloody hell.
    He was certain he’d seen that angel before, but at the moment he couldn’t recall where.

    When Rosalind finally returned home, the lamps flanking the door of her narrow, stucco-fronted row house—borrowed from her sister Jenny’s husband—were lit for the evening, and despite everything, she knew a surge of pleasure. The house had a bright red door, which she quite liked, and the window box was filled with bright, thriving-against-the-odds late summer flowers. A maid came in but once a day to do a few maidly things, like fetch in the coal and tend the fires and do the marketing. Servants had done for Rosalind during her marriage, which she thoroughly enjoyed; she’d decided to do for herself in London. She preferred it. Solitude was still an untold luxury after years spent as a colonel’s wife, and before that as surrogate mother to a pair of challenging sisters. She’d just inserted her key into the keyhole when she saw the sheet of paper lying folded at her feet.
    Her hand froze on the doorknob.
    A chill bloomed in the pit of her stomach. And then she sighed, plucked the thing up, got inside, slammed and firmly locked the door.
    She forced herself to casually move about the room, lighting the lamps, a show of bravado, before she deigned to give the thing attention. She shook it roughly open.
    I thought I warned you, Mrs. March.
    Bloody hell.
    The first one had said:
    I wouldn’t if I were you.
    She stared at it, deciding how she felt.
    For God’s sake, if one is going to send a threatening letter, she thought, one ought to make it a good and proper one. With intimations of death and destruction, or perhaps specific threats of harm to loved ones. Not these pallid things.
    Apparently, angry was how she felt about it.
    The sheer incompetence of the threats was irritating, not to mention the fact that someone seemed to want to frighten her—her, Rosalind March! Who’d known poverty and marriage and spies and Waterloo and an illicit, bone-melting, life-altering kiss from arguably England’s most fascinating man! It was laughable, truly. Still.
    She carefully refolded the message and packed it into the humidor, which is where she’d impulsively decided to store the first one. It was in fact less a humidor than a place to store buttons these days, but it still smelled like her late husband Mathew’s foul cigars, which made it a talisman of sorts, she’d decided.
    She closed the humidor lid, locking the messages up like a pair of prisoners.
    And then she marched upstairs