Undoing of a Lady by Nicola Cornick Read Free Book Online Page B

speculation would explode and although none of them would ever spread gossip or scandal, he could not expose Lizzie to such conjecture. No, he would have to sort this out unaided. That was appropriate since the disaster was of his creation. If only he had been stronger, had more self-control, more restraint. If only he had not found Lizzie so damnably physically attractive, if only he did not still ache for her with a devouring carnal need that was as shocking as it was misplaced. But again, if he married her that desire would no longer be inappropriate—or unfulfilled. He could make love to her every night and all day if he wished, as much as he wanted, sating his unexpected lust in the respectable marriage bed.
    Fortune Street at midday on a Saturday was an inappropriate place to be sporting a huge erection. Nat moved the muslin parcel to provide strategic cover. He had to stop thinking about bedding Lizzie until he had secured her hand in marriage. He had to do everything properly. Better late than never.
     
    A FTER M RS . M INCHIN HAD finished having hysterics and Mr. Minchin had finished raging, Flora had summoned the hall boy, the footman and as many of the maids as could be spared, and sent them out with notes for all the wedding guests telling them that thenuptials were canceled and she deeply regretted the inconvenience. She then informed her parents that she was going out for a walk, alone, and such was their stupor at what had happened that they did not oppose her. It was the first time in Flora’s life that she had made them angry and she could tell that they were baffled as well because until now she had never given them a moment’s cause for concern, yet suddenly she had turned into a stranger to them.
    She went out of the house and turned away from the village toward the moors. She did not walk with any particular destination in mind, but simply followed where her feet were taking her. She noticed that it was a beautiful early summer day, perfect for a wedding. The skylarks were calling overhead, their song fading as they rose higher and higher into the blue. The wildflowers bobbed on the verge beside the track. Presently she found herself up on the hill, high above the village. Fortune’s Folly was spread out beneath her with the church spire piercing the sky and the lazy curl of the river and the old abbey ruins and the bridge, and Fortune Row where people strolled and gossiped in the sun. She was beyond the reach of them all, even if they were all talking scandal about her canceled wedding.
    She looked down. Her shoes were ruined. It was so stupid of her to have come out without putting on stout boots for even in summer the tracks were dirty and rutted. She supposed that she could at least afford another pair, or a hundred pairs, since she wasn’tgiving all her money away to Nat Waterhouse anymore. She tried to examine her feelings. She was not sorry that the wedding was canceled. She would have married Nat, of course, and she would have made him a good wife because that was what she had been brought up to believe in. It was what she had thought she was going to do with her life. Yet it was odd, because all along she had known that there had to be if not something more, then something different. A dutiful marriage was one path, true—the path that society in general and her mother in particular had decreed for her and she had not struggled against it. But now…Well, suddenly she felt free and it felt rather strange.
    She sat down on the wall. The sharp corners of the stone dug into her bottom and thighs and she wriggled to try to get comfortable. She was out of breath. The morning was hot and the sun was climbing high in the sky and she had come out without a bonnet or parasol as well as in her flimsy shoes.
    There were men working the fields away to her right. She recognized one of them as Lowell Lister, Lady Vickery’s brother. She had seen him escorting his mother and sister to assemblies in