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and he had an innate reluctance to reveal something so deeply painful even to those who loved him. Being a family rather given to odd fits and starts, no one had really questioned his abandoning the home he had bought, but he suspected that returning there out of the blue would set up just the sort of questions that he wanted to avoid. Selling the house would, he hoped, be the sort of logical, boring business matter that no one in his family would want to hear more about.
    That much was true. His mistake, he knew, had been bringing the matter up at the breakfast table. He had hoped that only his father and mother, or perhaps his sister Thisbe and her husband, Desmond, might be there, all of whom had little curiosity about matters outside their chosen fields and who would accept his explanation for his sudden departure with few questions.
    Unfortunately, when he had arrived in the breakfast room somewhat later than was his custom, he had found it a scene of great activity. His brother, Theo, Thisbe’s twin and the heir to the family title and estate, had been home for almost six months now and was apparently growing restless again, and he had arisen early that morning for a ride in the park and was just then sitting down to breakfast. His sister Kyria and her husband, Rafe, had recently returned from their honeymoon in Europe, which had extended itself into two years and a tour of Rafe’s native United States, as well, bringing with them their six-month-old baby, a strawberry-blond beauty named Emily. His other sister Olivia and her husband, Stephen, had come to London with their own toddler, John, when Kyria and Rafe returned, and they had come over early this morning to visit.
    And shortly after Reed walked in, the twelve-year-old twins, Alexander and Constantine, had come charging into the room, their hair sticking out all over their heads and smelling faintly singed, to chatter excitedly about the experiment with electricity that they had conducted under Thisbe’s supervision.
    At that point, Reed knew, he should have kept his mouth shut and told his father later, in the duke’s workshop, where he puttered about with his beloved objects of antiquity. But, foolishly, he had opened his mouth and stated his intention to return to Winterset to sell the house. Theo, who knew about Anna, had narrowed his eyes as he looked at Reed, and asked him one or two piercing questions.
    Then Kyria had declared that perhaps she and Rafe would be interested in buying the place themselves, as they were considering establishing a country home in England. Before he knew what had happened, Theo had suggested that Rafe and Kyria should accompany Reed on his trip to Gloucestershire and look at the house, and after that, the twins had begged to be allowed to come along, too. As Con and Alex were once again without a tutor, the last one having left in a huff when the twins’ boa constrictor had mysteriously wound up in his bed one evening, the duchess had seized upon this suggestion with a great deal of warmth, saying that it would give her time to find a more suitable tutor. Then Kyria had decided that she would bring her friend Rosemary Farrington with her, as she had a remarkably good eye for interiors.
    Reed had groaned inwardly, sure that Miss Farrington had been thrown into the mix in another one of Kyria’s valiant attempts to find him a wife, as he had never before noticed that Kyria had trouble deciding on anything on her own. Kyria had always been an inveterate matchmaker, and marriage seemed only to have made her worse.
    He had argued valiantly that he intended to leave as soon as possible, but Kyria had countered that after two years of traveling, she was an expert at packing quickly, and the twins, of course, were ready to go at a moment’s notice, needing only to extract a promise from Thisbe and Desmond that they would make sure that the parrot and boa and the rest of the twins’ menagerie were well taken care of. As for