Trenton Lord of Loss (Lonely Lords) Read Online Free

choose. Shall we be seated?” 
    He handed her into a chair at a wrought iron grouping at one end of the veranda, then took a seat beside her. Not across from her, but beside. How was it she’d had such a pleasant sort of neighbor all these years and had never become acquainted with him? 
    “Would you be willing to look over my gardens?” he asked, the chair scraping back as he arranged long legs before him. “I’ve allowed Crossbridge to suffer some neglect in recent months. I’m focused on the crops, the buildings, that sort of thing, but the estate once had lovely grounds.” 
    “Surely you have a head gardener, my lord?” But she wanted to do this. She wanted to make something pretty grow for her quiet, insightful neighbor and maybe make the acquaintance of his wife, if her ladyship were out from Town.
    Friends being in shorter supply than she’d realized. When had she become so isolated—and why? 
    She also wanted to get off her own property and could slip over to Amherst’s gardens without anybody knowing she’d been truant from her grieving post. 
    Anybody but Dane. Ellie wanted to aim her face at the sky and stick her tongue out. 
    “Crossbridge has staff,” Lord Amherst said. “They have much to do simply holding back the march of time. The home wood encroaches on the pastures, for example, and my gardeners are busy clearing the fence rows, cleaning up several years of frost heave, and trimming the hedges. My flowers have been orphaned.” 
    On the third finger of Ellie’s left hand, a fat, shiny diamond caught a beam of summer sun. She took her rings off when she gardened. 
    “Dane left a daughter.” Heat flooded up Ellie’s neck, and she wondered if pregnancy also unhinged the jaw and the common sense. Amherst was a neighbor, true, and he’d likely know about Andy if he bothered to attend services, but he was a stranger.
    A handkerchief appeared in her peripheral vision, snow white, monogrammed in purple, and edged with gold—also laden with his lovely scent. Ellie would not have suspected her slightly rumpled, out-of-fashion, overly lean neighbor of hidden regal tendencies, but his instincts were excellent. 
    “Perishing Halifax.” She snatched the handkerchief and brought it to her eyes, though she hadn’t cried for days. “Forgive me.” 
    “You are not the one who left a daughter,” Amherst replied evenly. “Perhaps the forgiveness is needed elsewhere.” He didn’t pat her hand, didn’t move any closer, didn’t murmur nonsense about time healing and God’s infernal will. He lounged at his ease two feet away and let her have her tears. 
    “Andy is eight.” Ellie blotted her eyes again. “Coriander. She’s young enough to miss her papa sorely. Dane was decent to her.” 
    Amherst still said nothing as Ellie defended Dane’s memory. Dane had been decent to Andy, once Ellie had staged the first and only row of their married life and insisted the child be raised at Deerhaven.
    “People will tell you the grief eases, Lady Rammel, and in some ways, it does. Life tugs you forward, and you add good memories to the store of losses. The losses don’t cease hurting, though, not altogether.” 
    Ellie stopped dabbing at her eyes. “Perhaps you’d better keep a Bible verse or two in your pocket, my lord. Your honesty is particularly bracing.”
    Also curiously welcome. 
    He inclined his head, not smiling. “My apologies. Grief is an old shoe that fits each foot differently, and I shouldn’t prognosticate for others. Keep the handkerchief.”
    “My thanks.” Ellie took a surreptitious sniff of his heavenly scent and signaled the footman tactfully waiting a distance away with the tray. “What shall you have, Lord Amherst? Cold tea, hot tea, sangaree, hock, or lemonade. Alas, no tisanes.” 
    “Good company can be a tisane. I’ll enjoy some lemonade.” He didn’t smile with his mouth so much as he did with dark eyes that crinkled at the corners. Dane would have