It wasn’t that he’d given up, precisely. He had been hard at work since soon after moonrise and it was now long after moonset, but as he had nothing better to do and no company at all, he had every intention of continuing with his reading until he couldn’t stay awake anymore. But some awkward part of his mind had had other ideas, ever since he’d learned that Lady Glostrum was spending the evening with Lord Angstrun instead of studying side-by-side with him as she usually did. Particularly since he had realised that she wasn’t coming home until the next day. What that meant did not take a great deal of intellect to decipher. When he had heard light footsteps crossing the floor of the study, his grey misery had lifted with the brief hope that Eva had come back after all. But when he looked up, he saw a complete stranger. She wasn’t as tall as Eva, but she was larger in every other sense. Her hair was chestnut brown and her complexion was a shade of brown he’d never seen before.
