Not Quite a Husband by Sherry Thomas Read Free Book Online

of neglect and desperate loneliness.
    “And Sir Robert, is he well?”
    He is the finest young man I know, and you without question, the stupidest woman
, Leo’s godfather had coldly informed Bryony on the eve of the granting of the annulment.
    “Quite well. It’s a good time to be a banker with all the gold wealth pouring in from South Africa.”
    She nodded. In time, a good chunk of that wealth would go to Leo. Would she still have had the courage to propose to him had she known of his place in his godfather’s will, known that he didn’t really need the money she’d bring to the marriage? Yes, probably. Once he’d kissed her, all she could think about was kissing him again and again—and doing everything else that had, until then, seemed ridiculous on paper, acts that ought to cause civilized people to die of embarrassment.
    “You should have saved a few of your questions,” he said, biting into the stump of the pear. “We will have nothing to say to each other for the rest of the trip.”
    She looked at him, looked at her now-empty hands, and realized that he’d given all the goodpieces of the pear to her, that he himself hadn’t eaten any until now.
    And she suddenly had one more question—because it was far easier to tell him that he no longer existed for her than to actually make it so. Because the tides of her heart demanded it.
    “And how have
you
been?”
    He tossed away the core of the pear. “What do you care?”
    She compressed her lips. And shrugged.
    “Ah, I forgot, you are but conversing,” he said, with a tilt of his lips that wasn’t a smile. “I would say I have done exceptionally well. I have traveled the world, met interesting men and beautiful women, and been feted and toasted wherever I went.”
    She could very well believe that: a simple return to his glamorous bachelor life.
    He wiped his hands with a handkerchief. Stowing the handkerchief back in his pocket, he braced his hands on either side of him. The hand closest to her rested in the shadow cast by his own person. Out of the direct reach of the light, the cuts and bruises on his knuckles weren’t so prominent, only the elegant shape of his fingers.
    During their extremely brief engagement, he’d called on her every Sunday afternoon. And whenever they were left alone in her father’s drawing room, hewould set those long, tapered fingers upon her person. She’d let him hold her hand, but his fingers always stole further north. On his last Sunday call, he’d managed to not only unbutton her sleeve, but kiss her on the tender inside of her elbow. And she, trembling with newly awakened desire, had not been able to sleep a wink that night.
    “And you, how have
you
been?” he asked, as if it were an afterthought.
    Outwardly, other than her hair, she had not changed much. She was still more or less the same cool, aloof woman who garnered more respect than affection. On the inside, however, it had been impossible to return to the person she used to be.
    She’d been content. She had not wanted to marry. Nor had she much interest in the largely empty rituals of Society. Medicine was a demanding god and she a busy acolyte in its vast temple.
    Then he had come into her life. And it was as if she’d been struck by lightning. Or a team of archaeologists had dug up the familiar scenes of her mind to reveal a large, ancient warren of unmet hunger and frustrated hope.
    It took her some time, after leaving him, to realize that she could never go back to the staid, narrow obliviousness that had characterized much of her twenties, when she’d been blithely unaware of all thesecrets and upheavals just beneath the surface of her heart.
    But except for a curious restlessness that had her pack her bags and move to the opposite end of the globe every year or so, she’d coped—if she hadn’t been at peace, then at least she wasn’t at war with herself.
    Until he’d abruptly reappeared in her life.
    “I don’t know,” she said at last.