WidowsWickedWish by Lynne Barron Read Free Book Online Page A

Palmerton. He’d
thought of little else since he’d read Simon’s letter more than a year ago and
learned that Olivia was a widow.
    She had stolen his future from him. In one careless, jealous
moment, sixteen-year-old Lady Olivia had set in motion events that had
destroyed his dreams.
    Why?
    The question had plagued him for more than a decade. He had
spent five of those years married to a selfish, greedy, reckless wife who had
cared nothing for him or her daughter. To be followed by seven more years of
trying to make a life for that motherless daughter. And all the while he’d been
learning all he could of the mining business his father had begun that would
one day be his. Years of investing every extra sovereign at his disposal so
that he finally had a small fortune of his own, a small manor house in
Sedgefield where Justine could ride and roam and be happy. Now, a dozen years
after his life had been obstructed, he was ready to marry again and go about
the business of filling his nursery. With children of his own.
    Elizabeth had come to him almost three months gone with
child upon their marriage. Regardless of what Society had believed, Jack had
gotten no further with the wanton Elizabeth Portman than a few kisses and a
quick peek at her small, pert breasts. He shouldn’t have been forced to marry
the girl. It was common enough knowledge that she’d lain with any number of
young gentlemen.
    But because Jack Bentley wasn’t a true gentleman, an
education at Eton and Cambridge could not turn the son of a miner and a
shepherdess into a gentleman, he had always felt the need to prove himself
better, nobler, more honorable than any son of a peer. So he’d married the scheming
harlot and lived to regret it.
    Not that he did not love Justine. He did. Justine was the
only good thing to come of his hellish marriage. Since the moment the squalling
infant had been placed into his arms, he had loved her, vowing to treat her as
if she were the child of his own loins. He’d vowed to love her so well that she
would never feel the lack of her mother’s love.
    Elizabeth had been incapable of love, had not even loved
herself, instead searching out new men to conquer in an unending need to be
desired. When she had died in a carriage accident on the way to meet one of her
lovers, Jack had not mourned her. He had felt only a deep well of relief that
finally, finally he would have a quiet life uninterrupted by her wild bouts of
fury and his worry that tales of her exploits would somehow reach his
daughter’s ears.
    And during all that time Jack had nursed a smoldering anger,
a banked resentment against the woman now lying so quiet and still beside him.
He recognized that Olivia was only partly to blame for the nightmare he had
endured with Elizabeth. She had been at that most dangerous of ages, no longer
a child but not yet an adult, too young to understand what she saw but old
enough to allow jealousy to rule her. Jack had known that she fancied herself
in love with him, he’d felt her worshipful eyes upon him as she followed him
about. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.
    Jack accepted his fair share of blame for the events of that
fateful day. He’d had no business kissing a gently bred lady, as Elizabeth had
screamed at him within the first week of their marriage. Who was he to reach so
high? It hadn’t been Jack she had been hoping to find that long-ago day. Bad
timing and even worse luck had Jack walking into the stables to find her
standing in a beam of sunlight, her blonde ringlets disheveled becomingly, her
bare hands beckoning him. She’d thought only to play with him, to demonstrate
her desirability, until she could sink her claws into a more worthy gentleman.
    They had both gotten a bad bargain, but while Jack had been
determined to make the best of a barely tolerable situation, Elizabeth had
spent the next five years railing at the fate that had befallen her. Marriage
to a miner’s son who had dragged her kicking