That Summer In Maine. Muriel Jensen

good. The boys had been tall and blond like their father, with his tendency to take themselves seriously yet laugh at everything else. She’d found her husband and her boys endlessly fascinating.

      Her parents had loved them, too, and when her mother died five years ago, her father had stayed with them for a month, trying to figure out how to go on.

      Now that she’d experienced the same loss, she couldn’t imagine how he’d managed.

      She looked at herself in the mirror and saw Lady Bellows, the role she’d played for the past eighteen months. She wore designer suits, though at the moment it was a pale-orange peignoir set, wore her hair in a chignon and held her chin in the air. Her staff adored her, but her butler feared her sexual appeal.

      Good. She would hide in character as long as she was able.

      She walked into the kitchen to find Duffy and Eponine sharing a bottle of wine and a plate of broiled shrimp. They were laughing together, and she was surprised to feel a twinge of jealousy. Not for the alliance they seemed to have formed, she told herself, but for the laughter.

      “Seems I’ve been given a month’s leave from the play,” she said, taking a chair opposite Duffy and smiling blandly at him as she reached for a shrimp. Eponine poured wine into the empty glass at her place. “You wouldn’t know anything about that?”

      He met her gaze with innocence in his. “Now, how could I have accomplished that while drinking wine with Eponine?”

      “I don’t know,” she replied, then nipped the shrimp in two.

      “Though you did manage to find me in a remote spot in the Pyrenees. You appear to be a resourceful man.”

      “But I had the French army on my side then.”

      She glanced at her housekeeper, who also returned her a look of suspicious innocence. “Eponine has a lot in common with the French army.”

      “So, this means we’ll be flying back together?” he asked.

      She admitted defeat, if only to herself. She had to see her father, and putting it off until July would have served no purpose anyway.

      “I’m not sure I’ll be able to pay my way,” she reminded him. “I’ll go to the bank in the morning, but with all my credit cards missing, and most of my assets in stocks and real estate, I may not be able to get much cash.”

      “You can owe me,” he said with a grin.

      That was precisely what she didn’t want to do.