Beloved Enemy by Jane Feather Read Free Book Online

surface, had had little to complain of in his fifteen-year-old
bride. She was attractive, wealthy, and well versed in her duties. She was
also, however, indecorously independent, and Giles, accustomed to women who
spoke to their menfolk only when spoken to, had suffered acute embarrassment
when he had brought his bride, supposedly in triumph, to Courtney Manor.
    Ginny, in spite of her intense dislike of this man with his
pompous bearing and sense of self-consequence, and of her dismay at finding
herself away from her beloved Isle of Wight, landlocked on a stifling mainland,
had tried to be open and friendly to his family. She had realized soon enough
that open friendliness was considered undisciplined discourtesy. Lady Courtney
had ruled the female members of the household with a matriarch's iron fist, and
her son's bride had been expected to obey orders and to keep silent. She
had been accorded less consideration than her husband's unmarried sisters, and
Giles, accustomed to the worshiping care of his womenfolk— a care that kept him, all unrecognizing, in total submission— h ad offered her no support.
    He had been a clumsy inexperienced lover . . . Lover? Ginny
laughed mirthlessly as she sat on her rock. If there had been any of loving in
that hasty satisfaction of his need, she had missed it. It had been a sordid,
sweaty business of grunts and discomfort as her unprepared body received the
invasion. Sometimes she had prayed that she would conceive and for nine months
be free of the nightly rape. Giles would never have endangered his heir, and if
she had carried his child, then her position in the household would surely have
changed. But m ostly the thought had filled her with
revulsion, and she had accepted the monthly bleedings with relief, although her
continued barrenness had brought her yet more unkindness from her inlaws. But
how could one possible bear in love the child of a man one despised?
    In that entire year, Giles had kissed her perhaps a dozen
times— a perfunctory peck before he had
pushed her nightgown to her waist. Soon he had ignored even such minor
acknowledgments of her emotional presence in the body that he had used as if it
were no more than the chamber pot beneath the bed. In childhood she and Edmund
kissed occasionally as the hormones of puberty had burgeoned, but they had been
experimenting as children did, keeping close the guilty secrets of their growing bodies and turbulent emotions.
    But when Alex Marshall had kissed her, something had happened
that bore no relation to her previous experiences. Her body had responded of
its own accord, every nerve seeming to flicker in expectation of stimulation— w hether of pain or joy, it mattered not. And it had
been joy. Yet she knew almost nothing of the man himself, only what she had
gleaned from Peter and deduced for herself. A man of unremitting purpose,
steadfast and determined. What then had happened to him, to cause him to break
every rule in his book, to consort with a prisoner and an enemy who held
principles and beliefs abhorrent to him?  
    Ginny sat on her rock, dunking her thought s as dusk became full night, and she
could now only hear the sea curling onto the sand
and retreating with a wet slurp. Clouds obscured the wedge of the three-quarter
moon and the stars. She could smell the threat of the impending summer storm in
the strengthening wind, hear it in the crash of a breaker on the Needle Rocks.
The colonel's men would have a miserable time of it in their tents in the
orchard.
    Lightning forked in the sky, and automatically Ginny counted
the seconds until the thunderclap. The storm was about five miles away. It was
time she returned to the house. The colonel and his officers had presumably
provided themselves with dinner in the absence of their cook, and an apple and
a piece of cheese would satisfy her own meager appetite.
    As she made her way across the soft sand to the steep path,
Ginny glanced upward. The entire cliff top was