Miss Lottie's Christmas Protector. Sophia James

what are they?’

      ‘That the woman is more important to you than you make out she is and that you are running away from anything that might add up to commitment.’

      ‘Meghan?’

      ‘Yes, Jasper?’

      ‘Have another brandy and tell me about Sarah.’

      Of all the topics in the world this was the one that always succeeded in shifting Meghan from one thought across to the next.

      ‘She is almost taking a step—did I tell you that? She was leaning on the big floral chair in my sitting room and I turned away and the next moment I saw her let go and hover there, trying to understand the motion…’

      Half an hour later his sister was gone, hurrying back to her house to see the child who was the love of her life. Jasper frowned at the way she almost never mentioned her husband in his company and wondered if things were as rosy with Stephen as she had once painted them. Meghan had her secrets, too, but at least she had a daughter whose very existence lit up her world and for that he was glad.

      The rain still fell outside and the fire in the grate was burning bright. He watched the sparks at the back of the chimney flare and die and then reappear elsewhere. He wondered if Charlotte Fairclough was warm enough in the big and draughty Fairclough Foundation building on Howick Place. He remembered it as austere and spartan, any luxury stripped from the place in the overriding need to provide for so many desperate people. The family had had a small abode at the back of the place in the days when he knew Silas, but it had been as humble and sparse as the main building.

      God, the woman had got under his skin and that was unusual. He’d never met someone so infuriating and so vulnerable all at the same time.

      Verity Chambers had sent yet another note and this one had caught him at a time when he had deigned to open it, their shared hopes from the past spilling out on paper and her own apology at such appalling behaviour.

      Once he might have drunk the words like a man does water lost in a desert, but now all he could feel was the hurt, pain and guilt. She had crucified him with her easy deceit and he would never allow anyone to do so again.

      The clock in the corner boomed out the hour of seven and far off he could see flashes of lightning, the undulating outline of the distant hills of Surrey showing up. He counted the seconds until the thunder came. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. A long way off, then.

      He wished for a moment he might have had a dog to sit by the hearth with him, a warm and breathing body that he could love. But his life was too nomadic, too uncertain and he could not abandon an animal like that into the care of his servants for months at a time as he travelled the country. Still, the idea stuck as he imagined a loyal haughty Newfoundland or a finely bred English bloodhound sitting there watching him. It would be well behaved…unlike Miss Fairclough.

      Today had been an adventure and the sort of day he would remember for a long time. As he dozed he pictured fine brown curls and golden-brown eyes and he smiled. It had been a while since he had felt this happy.

      Hours later Jasper was sweating when he jolted himself awake, his heart beating at twice its normal speed and the cramps in his right leg making him nauseous. He had not had such intense and inescapable dreams for a while now, the blackness all around and the depraved imaginings fuelled by his experiences with laudanum, opium and morphine. He’d spent two years after his accident in the opium dens trying any sort of narcotic that became available to banish the pain in his thigh: lost years, debauched years, years of misery and ruin. He was not proud of such a fall. Sex, violence and excess were the codes of his life until he had fallen into a coma and Meghan had brought him home.

      He owed his sister his life. His new life. The life of strict principles and few vices. He hadn’t even been fully present for the last month of his father’s existence much to his eternal regret, the cocktail of drugs taking him away.

      He needed water, but couldn’t make himself get up and he did not want to ring for a servant. So he sat there breathing deeply and trying to find a steadiness and a normality.

      He couldn’t understand why the dreams were back with such a force.

      Fear, perhaps, or the knowledge of some fundamental change within him. His sister’s words were there, too, tangled in honesty, snarling with truth.

       ‘I worry that you are too alone, too isolated and too hardened…’

      He was, but he couldn’t get back, couldn’t make himself care about much of anything.

      A knock at the library door ten minutes later found him sitting and he pulled his leg down from the ottoman on which it rested.

      His butler, Larkin, stood there with yet another message in his hands.

      ‘If it is from Miss Verity Chambers, take it away.’

      ‘It is not, sir. The man who delivered the missive said he came under the instructions of a Mr Twigg from Old Pye Street.’

      That had Jasper interested and he held out his hand even as he saw the curiosity of his servant.

      ‘That will be all.’

      The message was simple.

       The man you be wanting is Viscount Harcourt. He came in to the pub briefly last evening with a friend of his and I recognised the crest on the carriage and asked after his name.

      Jasper did not know the fellow at all, but he was suddenly mindful of an invitation he had received ten or so days ago. A colleague he’d known once, Nigel Payne, was to be married to a girl who was Harcourt’s niece and had asked Jasper to a celebration party in three days’ time. He’d placed the invitation in a drawer, having no intention at all of attending, but now he knew it to be a great opportunity to find out more about Viscount Harcourt.