Night in Eden by Candice Proctor Read Free Book Online

breeze laden with moist, salty air caressed her face as she clattered down the two cracked stone steps that led to the yard. A gull screeched. Bryony flung back her head to watch as it floated above the house's weathered gray slate roof, then dipped toward the sea.
    She hurried across the cobbled yard, past low-walled beds of struggling, pathetic-looking herbs and vegetables, and followed the weed-choked path of crushed seashells that led up a small rise.
    She crested the hill and stopped. The great blue sweep of the sea opened up below her.
    Bryony loved the sea. She loved its restless, primitive pull, and the way the sea winds buffeted her ears and whipped at her skirts. She breathed deeply, filling her lungs with the essence of sweet heather and tangy brine and the mysterious scents of faraway, wondrous and unknown places.
    Once Bryony had assumed that Cadgwith Cove House would always be her home. Then had come the unbearably gray, misty morning when they'd buried her mother and father. The day her uncle, Sir Edward Peyton, had come for her. He'd taken her away from the sea, to live in his dark, joyless house in the middle of the moors. At the time it had seemed to Bryony that all the sunshine and laughter had gone out of her life forever. She'd endured three miserable years of endless disapproval and lectures and beatings.
    And then she'd met Oliver Wentworth.
    He'd been twenty-one at the time, handsome and charming and always laughing. Late one night, she'd crept out of that dark, miserable house and married him.
    Under the terms of Captain Peyton's will, control of Cadgwith Cove House had passed upon her marriage to Bryony—or rather, to Bryony's new husband. But Oliver saw the property as a source of income rather than as a livelihood. And now he was talking about selling the house and its adjoining land. He said it was because he'd rather live in London, but Bryony suspected the real reason was because he needed the money for his endless gambling debts. She was desperately afraid that one of these days he would go ahead and sell it, whether she wanted him to or not. It was a thought that tore at her insides and suffocated her with panic and fury and a deep, abiding sense of failure.
    The ominous loneliness she'd felt earlier returned, tinged now with despair. She turned and walked along the cliffside path, watching the first stars wink at her from out of the purpling sky.
    She loved Oliver still, but it was in a different, diminished way. There was little in it of trust or respect, or even of passion. Sometimes she thought her love for Oliver was like the indulgent love of a woman for a spoiled but engaging and affectionate child. It was not the kind of love a woman wanted to feel for her husband.
    Yet Oliver was her husband, and he always would be.
    In the cove some hundred feet below her, dark green waves swelled and rolled, then dashed themselves to foam against the rocks at the base of the cliff. The air was heavy with salty spray and the endless, rhythmic boom and hiss of the sea.
    Then she heard another sound, the high-pitched trill of a woman's laughter, coming from behind the mass of boulders that lay off the path ahead, to her right.
    "Lawdy, Mr. Oliver," giggled the woman. "Do that again."
    Oliver's familiar voice answered, pitched low and husky. "You like that, do you?"
    Bryony's heart raced fast and painfully hard, sending the blood drumming in her ears and narrowing her vision with a red haze of sickened fury. She paused for a moment, her hand to her thudding chest, then left the path and circled around the rocks.
    She saw the woman first, and recognized her as Flory Dickens, the wife of one of the village cottagers. Flory had an unmistakable mass of flame-red curls that tumbled from beneath her mobcap, and a plump, heaving bosom barely restrained by the low-cut bodice of her tawdry gown. She sat with her dirty skirts hiked up to her waist, her knees spread wide, straddling Oliver as he lay flat on his