Just One Taste by Maggie Robinson Page B

think they are insured with Lloyd’s. The policy is in the safe in my study, unless you’ve moved things around.”
    “I didn’t even know there was a safe.” She hadn’t known anything about the house for ages. Jack’s Aunt Elizabeth had continued on as its chatelaine, as she’d had the role for almost twenty-five years. Delia couldn’t object, since everything ran like clockwork and the woman was kindness itself. Delia was a seventeen-year-old ignorant nitwit, and soon she was suffering from such ghastly morning sickness she couldn’t get out of bed.
    “That’s odd. Arthur should have told you.”
    She shut her eyes. When she opened them, she wished Jack didn’t appear so sympathetic. So very handsome. “It’s Arthur I want to talk to you about.”
    Jack grinned. “What’s my wretched cousin done now? Stolen the earring?”
    “No. But he has it.”
    “Why?”
    She couldn’t face him, she just couldn’t. She stared at the cutwork on the linen tablecloth, the chased flowers on the heavy silverware. “I went to see him in his rooms.” Surely she didn’t have to spell it out for him. Proper women didn’t visit gentlemen in their homes, even if it was a new century.
    Delia had made the biggest mistake of her life. It was bad enough when she thought she was a widow. But then to discover her husband was alive after all—
    “Do you love him?”
    Startled, Delia looked up to meet his eyes. “No!”
    “Good to know,” he murmured. “How long have you been having an affair with him?”
    “It isn’t an affair. It was just the once,” she said miserably. “And it was awful. We didn’t even f-finish. I couldn’t bear it—you must believe me! And then the very next day you came home, and I—oh, Jack, I’m so sorry. He plans to tell you a pack of lies, that we were carrying on while he lived here unless I go to him again, but I swear to you on Johnny’s life that isn’t true.”
    “Is Johnny my child?”
    The fork slipped from her fingers and bounced to the carpet. This was worse than she ever expected. Her throat closed, making words impossible.
    “I know he looks like me, the hair anyway,” Jack continued, “but he’s little more than an infant. Children change. Even from the photographs you showed me in the album, he’s changed a great deal already.”
    Delia had been meticulous having Johnny’s babyhood professionally recorded. She’d even purchased a Brownie box camera and taken some blurry pictures herself.
    “Of course he’s yours,” she whispered.
    She had broken her own happiness into a thousand sharp pieces. Delia could have ignored Arthur’s overtures—she’d been rebuffing him for months, pretending not to understand what he wanted while he still lived under her roof. But when his mother died and he moved out, he’d become more insistent on his daily visits “to see if she was all right.”
    She hadn’t been—she was lonelier than ever.
    Now she’d never have a second chance with her husband.
    She rose and smoothed the folds of her lilac gown. “I’m sorry about dinner. I’ll tell Cook to prepare trays for us in our rooms.”
    “Sorry about dinner ?” Jack’s voice was so low she could barely hear him.
    “S-sorry about everything. I wish things could have been different.”
    “So do I, Delia,” he said, sounding weary. “So do I.”

Chapter 4
    H is wife had been unfaithful .
    But he’d been dead, hadn’t he, so perhaps the word was incorrect. You couldn’t cheat on a ghost.
    Jack was too exhausted to get up from the dining room chair. Delia had disappeared in a lavender cloud. She’d been stunning, even without diamonds twinkling against her long white neck.
    No wonder Arthur had wanted her. Any man would.
    What had she said? It was awful. We couldn’t even finish . Every inch of her had trembled in revulsion.
    Not something Arthur was apt to be bragging about.
    His cousin had wanted Jack’s toys when they were children. Now it seemed the stakes had