Saving Grace by Michele Paige Holmes Read Free Book Online

better than being out in the rain.”
    “I suppose.” Grace found it more difficult to bemoan her circumstances a few minutes later as her head sank into a feather pillow. She ached all over. She was both cold and hot, and she was oh, so tired …
    Sleep came easily but was not restful. She tossed and turned in the unfamiliar bed, while one troubling scenario after another paraded before her closed eyes, haunting her.
    Sir Lidgate had found a way into her room and was after her. She couldn’t understand why, when she’d gone to such lengths to dissuade him, even purposely injuring herself in a manner that would lead him to believe she could never produce the heir he so desperately wanted.
    Grace rolled onto her side and felt the bruise on her hip proving that the escapade — getting herself thrown from a horse — had not been imagined.
    “Go away,” she muttered, waving her arms above her, banishing the image of Sir Lidgate and his overly friendly advances.
    At last he left. She slept briefly then dreamt again, this time to discover that Lord Crosby had her trapped in his drawing room and was listing all of the qualities he found so important in a wife. His condescending manner and absurd expectations had her seething, and it was all she could do to keep herself from jumping onto the settee and shouting at him. But there were others in the room, men who knew her father, who would report her behavior to him. So she bit her tongue until it nearly bled.
    But inside, her mind — she possessed one, contrary to Lord Crosby’s belief — was whirring. He didn’t really want a wife. He was looking for a trophy or piece of expensive art, something docile and lovely to sit on a shelf and purr for him on occasions he took it down to admire it.
    Grace did not wish to be put on a shelf or admired or made to hold her tongue for the rest of her life. She had thoughts and opinions. She was not delicate, but strong and determined.
    What more could I have done to dissuade him? Why does he still bother me? He’d asked her to leave after the hunt, hadn’t he? Yet his image, complete with grating voice and pompous manner, continued to harass her through the predawn hours.
    The nightmares continued, one after the other. Some were products of her imagination, others reenactments of humiliations she’d suffered since her father had so cruelly sent her “out to pasture again,” as he put it.
    She didn’t want to be in the pasture. She wasn’t a cow meant for breeding. She didn’t want to marry. She’d known a life of freedom, and, if only the inheritance from Grandfather would come through, she and Helen and Christopher would have enough to live on.
    If only the new duke hadn’t contested the will. And if only they could get Father’s gambling under control. Thinking of that, of the list of debts owed that he’d presented to her days after the duke’s passing, and especially of Father’s solution that Helen be married off to a wealthy man, a feeling of utter hopelessness and desperation came over Grace.
    She had to marry — and soon — or their father would force Helen to. Helen, who was barely eighteen and shy as a church mouse. Helen, so soft spoken she could rarely be heard. Helen, so exquisitely beautiful that a man likeLidgate would have devoured her instantly.
    Grace gave sleep up for good and lay still, contemplating the last several days and the previous night’s events, the horror and then the shame of realizing that she’d been in a man’s bed — with him.
    The barest hint of dawn peeked through a seam in the heavy tapestries. She tried to find hope in that tiny ray of light, remembering how her mother had always told her that everything seemed better, brighter in the morning.
    The solutions to our troubles oft come with the morning light, she’d said. But Grace could see no solution to her problem. In spite of Miranda’s reassurances that the servants would not talk, Grace knew otherwise. She’d spent the