Renegade Player by Dixie Browning Read Free Book Online

lasted almost a year..
    For the first time since she discovered that Luke Styrewall, with whom she had thought herself so deeply in love, had been hired by her father to court her, win her and marry her, Willy felt the protective barrier she had erected around her heart begin to crack and fall away. Her instincts warned her that if she fell in love with a man like Kiel Faulkner she’d be taking her life in her own hands. Kiel had none of Luke’s smooth, well-modulated charm, being a different breed of man altogether.
    Luke’s attentions had started soon after she had come home from school in Switzerland. She had been tall, scrawny and unsure of herself in spite of the efforts on the part of her teachers to turn out a finished product. Perhaps the fact that her father had insisted that she call him by his first name had something to do with it, because it was impossible not to notice the way he seemed figuratively to try to sweep her under the carpet whenever he was entertaining any of his glamorous young friends. And the friends seemed to grow younger all the time, to Willy’s embarrassment, until she felt as if she had wandered into a reunion of her own classmates.
    Luke had come on the scene so smoothly that at first she had paid him no attention, knowing that he would ignore her as did all the other men at her father’s endless social gatherings. But this time it was different; this time, the best-looking man in the house had eyes only for Willy, and in the months it took to convince her that he really cared for her, that he saw beauty in her graceful young innocence—“coltish charm” was a phrase he used more than once—Willy fell in love.
    There was no pressure on her, nothing to indicate that Luke couldn’t restrain his manly impulses, and she thought he was wonderfully forbearing to be so patient. Her own curiosity to sample the delights she had only read about and heard about grew, and when Luke asked her to marry him, she thought she had reached the pinnacle of human happiness. That was the beginning of her blossoming, as if all she had waited for all along was the warmth of his approval and the nourishment of his temperate lovemaking.
    Jasper was planning to take his third wife by then, a divorcée named Breda Coyner, who was only half a dozen or so years older than Willy herself. There had been an instinctive animosity between the two women that built tensions in Jasper’s Hobe Sound villa, where Breda was a more or less permanent guest even before the wedding.
    It came to a question of whose wedding would take place first, Breda’s and Jasper’s or hers and Luke’s, and since Luke was beginning to show signs of wanting more than the tepid engagement, Willy rather thought she might be the first to walk down the aisle. But then she overheard a conversation that was not meant for her ears.
    She had taken off her engagement ring to practice the violin earlier in the day, because the slightly ostentatious diamond kept slipping on her finger and distracting her, and she remembered it as she was ready to go to bed. She didn’t bother with slippers or a robe, thinking there was no one downstairs at that time of night, but she was wrong; her father and Luke were in the study and the door was partly open so that when she heard her own name mentioned as she passed, it was only natural that she slowed her steps.
    “Why don’t we say sometime within the month, Luke, and a settlement of, say . . . fifty thousand on your wedding day?”
    “Make it seventy-five, Jas. Willy’s not the only heiress on the market, you know, and there’s—”
    “Luke,” her father had interrupted impatiently, “I’ve paid you enough to found an empire already! You’ve got an assured income for as long as the marriage lasts, so don’t try to . . .”
    Willy had not stayed around to hear more. The flight of stairs that swept around one end of the foyer seemed as vast and unscalable as the highest mountain, but at last she