Simply Magic by Mary Balogh Read Free Book Online Page A

disciplined life as a schoolteacher, and she did indeed love her job—she had spoken the truth about that. But her dreams were rich with romance—with love and marriage and motherhood.
    All those things she would never experience in the real world.
    As if I had stepped into a moment that was simply magic.
    She had wanted to weep when he spoke those words, so meaningless to him, so achingly evocative to her. How she longed for the magic of someone to love more than anyone or anything else in life. Of someone to love her in the same way.
    For an unguarded moment she pictured herself waltzing with Viscount Whitleaf, those laughing violet eyes softened by tenderness as they gazed into her own.
    But she shuddered slightly as she shook off the image and reached for a ginger biscuit. She must certainly not begin sullying the splendor of her dreams by imposing
his
image on them.
    And then she thought of something else he had said.
    You wounded me to the heart—to that chest organ, that mundane pump.
    She almost ruined her aversion to him by chuckling aloud with amusement.
    Frances would think she had taken leave of her senses.
    And then she thought again of Sidley Park. She had lived until the age of twelve only a few miles away from it, though she had never actually been there. She had known it as the home of
Viscountess Whitleaf,
though she had always known too that the young viscount lived there as well as his five sisters, who bore the name of Edgeworth. She recalled that when she had first heard Frances speak of the Earl of Edgecombe she had had a nasty turn, wondering if he was of the same family—until she had realized that the names were not identical.
    But apart from that, she had done a good job of holding the memories at bay. They were just too excruciatingly painful. She had heard that some people blocked painful memories so effectively that they completely forgot them. She sometimes wished that could have happened to her.
    A specific memory came back to her then. She must have been five or six years old at the time and was playing close to the lake with Edith Markham when they had been joined by a young boy a few years older than they. He had asked them with great good humor and open interest what they were doing and had squatted next to Susanna on the bank to see if there was a fish on the end of her makeshift fishing line.
    â€œOh, hard luck!” he had said when he had seen that there was not. “I daresay the fish are not biting today. Sometimes they do not—or so I have heard. My mama will not let me go fishing. She is afraid I will fall in or catch a chill—instead of a fish, ha-ha. Did you get it? Catching a chill instead of a fish? Does your mama fuss you all the time? Oh, I say! You have the greenest eyes, don’t you? I have never seen eyes of just that color before. They are very fine, and they look very well with your red hair. I daresay you will be pretty when you grow up. Not that you are not pretty now. I do beg your pardon—I forgot my manners for a moment. A gentleman
never
lets a lady believe that perhaps she is not pretty. May I hold the rod? Perhaps I will have better luck than you though I daresay you have had more practice.”
    But no sooner had he seated himself on the bank and taken the rod from her, looking bright and happy and friendly, than an older girl had appeared and told him in a hushed, rather shocked voice that he ought not to be playing with
that
little girl, and then another girl, even older, had come rushing up to catch him by the hand and pull him firmly away from the bank and tell him that he must never,
never
go so close to the water again. He would fall in and die, she had said, and
then
what would they all do to console themselves?
    Edith had gone off with them, and later Susanna had learned that they had come from Sidley Park on an afternoon visit—Viscountess Whitleaf with the young viscount, her son, and her daughters.
    Susanna had