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You are invited to do the same. Keep in mind alsothat people are allowed their moments of impoliteness, when warranted, especially between close acquaintances.”
    Her blush was back in full bloom. So was her stiff tone as she stood up to say, “We are barely acquainted, nor will I be here long enough for that to change. I will in fact make an effort to be as unobtrusive as possible while in your house. Now if you will excuse me,
Lord Everett,
I must check on my brother.”
    He sat back with his wineglass in hand, which he swirled once before finishing off. She wanted formality between them, had just stressed it. He wondered how her formality, and her politeness for that matter, would hold up once he had her naked body snuggled next to him in bed. Not very well, he hoped.



Chapter Four
    T HOMAS WAS SETTLED IN AND LETTING M ARA SPOON-FEED him. He didn’t like being treated like a baby. He truly hated it. But during the worst of his fever when he had insisted on feeding himself, he had never finished his meals because he was simply too weak.
    Having caught him in the stubborn lie that he wasn’t hungry, merely because he was too tired to finish on his own, Larissa no longer gave him the choice. He’d be fed or he’d be fed, and those were the only options he had until he was completely well again.
    The room that he had been put in was much largerthan his room at home. So was the bed. He seemed so small in it. But then he was small for his age, both skinnier and shorter than other boys of ten. Their father, a tall man himself, had assured him that he would catch up soon enough, that he hadn’t sprouted himself until he was twelve.
    Thomas might be behind other boys his age in height, but he was far superior in intelligence. If he weren’t so stubborn at times, and prone to a temper tantrum on occasion, Larissa would swear there was a full-grown man inside that little body. His keen observations were often just too adultlike. But his boundless energy, when he wasn’t sick, was a firm reminder that he was still a child.
    His energy, or current lack of it, contributed to his being a really rotten patient, full of complaints. He didn’t like staying in bed, and hated the weakness that had come upon him since the onset of the fevers.
    As she approached the bed, Thomas wouldn’t look up at her, still pouting over the move, as if there had been some way she could have prevented it. She wished she’d had the luxury to do a little pouting of her own, but all she’d been able to do was cry.
    She tried to sound cheerful, however, when she asked, “No chills from that cold ride here?”
    “Cold? You had me so buried in those blankets, Lari, I roasted.”
    “Good, roasting is fine as long as you didn’t catch a chill.”
    Mara tried to hide a smile, unsuccessfully. Thomas glared at them both. Larissa “tsked.”
    Thomas called her Lari only when he was annoyed with her, because he hoped it would annoy her as well, it sounding like a man’s name. When all was right with his world, he called her Rissa, as their father did.
    “Why did we have to come here?” Thomas brought his real complaint out in the open—once again. “This room is like a hotel room.”
    “And how would you know what a hotel room looks like?” Larissa countered.
    “I went with Papa once, to meet that French wine merchant at his hotel.”
    “Oh, well, yes, this house is much bigger than ours, and it does seem very—impersonal, from what I’ve seen of it so far, like a hotel. Baron Windsmoor has no family, though, which I suppose accounts for that.”
    “We won’t have to stay here long, will we?”
    “Not long a’tall,” she assured him. “Just as soon as father returns—”
    “You’ve been saying that for weeks now. When is he going to return?”
    It was hard to remain cheerful when Thomas was asking the very things that she had been asking herself—andhad run out of answers for. Two months was all he was to be gone, which would have