Tied With a Bow

damp, and ice had melted under her collar. She would have to herd the children back inside soon before they all caught cold.
    A burst of women’s laughter floated like snow on the air, followed by the rumble of men’s voices. Aimée glanced toward the house. A line of bonnets and top hats bobbed along the balustrade—the house party, coming to invade her snowy sanctuary.
    Howard. A chill trickled down her spine.
    And Mr. Hartfell.
    Her heart beat faster. She knew him at once, his powerful body and chiseled profile making him stand out from the other gentlemen.
    But it was more than his golden good looks that drew her. Something about him teased at her memory or imagination like the refrain of a familiar song, like a scent from childhood, beloved and familiar. As if her body recognized him, as if her soul responded to his.
    Lucien Hartfell.
    Julia’s suitor.
    Who believed she was encouraging Howard’s attentions.
    She gave herself a mental shake.
    “Peter! Harriet! It’s time to go in.”
    Predictably, the children protested and delayed. Aimée managed to cajole them toward shore as the adults ambled toward the frozen pond. Hoisting Lottie onto the bank, Aimée turned to give a hand to Peter.
    “There’s Mama,” Lottie observed, keeping hold of Aimée’s skirts.
    “And Papa.” Peter dropped Aimée’s hand and lurched unaided up the slope.
    “Mama! Look at me!” Harriet called, wobbling on her skates.
    But the adults milling in the open summerhouse either could not or chose not to hear.
    Harriet’s face drooped. “Why don’t they come see us?”
    Aimée’s heart squeezed. She understood—too well—the little girl’s disappointment. After her own arrival at Moulton, Aimée had quickly learned that Lady Basing had little time or attention for her own children, let alone the demands of a penniless orphaned relation. Lady Basing’s daughter Susan was obviously cut from the same maternal cloth.
    “Come,” Aimée said quietly. “I will ask your maman to visit the nursery before dinner.”
    Peter sneered with an older brother’s superiority. “She won’t come see us.”
    Aimée feared he was right. The one time Susan had sent for the children, she had returned them to the nursery a half hour later, complaining their noise made her head ache.
    Harriet scowled. “Why not?”
    “Because you’re ugly,” Peter said cheerfully. “Your nose is all red.”
    “It is not!”
    “Peter . . .” Aimée warned.
    He was old enough to have accepted his parents’ neglect. Lottie, perhaps, was too young to have noticed. But Harriet . . .
    “Look at me, Mama!” she cried. “I’m skating!”
    She took two bold strides out onto the ice.
    Aimée started down the bank, only to be stopped by Lottie’s grip on her pelisse. “Harriet!”
    Several heads turned.
    Buoyed by her success in attracting the adults’ attention, Harriet skated faster, flailing her arms, headed for the smoother ice in the center of the pond. “I can skate! You can’t stop me!”
    “Take your sister,” Aimée ordered, thrusting Lottie at Peter.
    The five-year-old wailed as Aimée stumbled onto the ice.
    Too late.
    The ice cracked with a sound like a falling branch. Aimée watched in horror as Harriet flung up her hands and collapsed in a billow of blue skirts through the fractured surface of the pond.
    Aimée’s heart froze in fear.
    A woman screamed.
    A man leaped the low bench in front of the summerhouse and rushed down the hill. A tall, blond man in a long black coat that he tore off as he ran.
    Once again that sense of almost-recognition brushed through Aimée’s mind like wings. Lucien.
    He launched himself onto the ice.
    Her stomach jumped into her throat. “Careful!” she cried. “The ice won’t hold you.”
    “The air will,” he said, she thought he said, or maybe that was the roaring in her ears.
    Three longs strides and then he stretched out on the ice, reaching for the girl in the water.
    Aimée scanned desperately for something to help him, a fence rail or a fallen branch, but the manicured landscape was bare.
    She spotted Freddy Keasdon, running with the other guests down the slope, and shouted, “The house! Get help!”
    He stared at her, mouth ajar in his white face, a boy not much older than Peter.
    “Run!” she yelled.
    He bolted for the steps.
    She turned back to Lucien. Somehow he’d managed to grab hold of Harriet’s arm and the back of her coat. With his arms fully extended over his head, he