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Page 401

| The rest was in trust for the children's education. Bianca had depended on Sasha and Ashton to give her son a home filled with love, and an education. |

| And so it was coming to passall of it. |

| "It is so very lovely, Ashton," Sasha murmured. "So often I think I am imagining it all and that I will suddenly find myself barefoot and hungry again." |

| "Never," Ashton growled. |

| Sasha gazed at the parlor with its gold wainscoting, damask curtains, and a serpentine-front Hepplewhite sofa. Chairs with slender, crane-necked elbows on their arms, and outlined with carved reeding, sat on each side of the fireplace. In her mind's eye she pictured the other roomsa fireplace was in every room, with fine paneling and molding. In the bedroom there was a four-poster bed with its rolling pin headboard, dressed in crewel-work linen, handwoven and embroidered in India. |

| In the family room, a settle was pulled up to the cooking fireplace, a tin kitchen partly obscuring the opening for the lower oven, and a collection of rat-tail cooking utensils hanging above it. Just over the fireplace was a swing-out drying rack. A pair of cupboards with butterfly shelves was built symmetrically on either side of the fireplace, within them a pair of Minton ironstone-covered serving dishes flanking an inlaid mahogany knife box. Above it hung a gilt wood mantel mirror, a massive chandelier reflected in it. |

| Everything seemed perfect. Paulette was sweet and precious and healthy. Tobias was their son in every sense of the word, except . . . |

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