With This Kiss: Part One by Eloisa James Read Free Book Online Page B

peacefulness in that realization. He let it sink in, watching the spider weave its spiral lines. Lily’s light gaiety would never work for him, and all the darkness he carried would drag her down to earth if he married her.
    He had been changed by the war, by the deaths he’d seen and the deaths he’d caused. There was no going back, not when rivers of blood ran through a man’s dreams.
    He folded the letter and put it on the floor at his side. It wasn’t Lily’s fault that her prose suffered so greatly in comparison to her sister’s. When one of Grace’s letters arrived, he could and did spend hours thinking about what she’d described.
    The spider retreated, curling into a ball so small that he hardly saw it. Candlelight gleamed along the gossamer threads, as the spider waited… waited. Colin snuffed the candle and lay there, unwilling to sleep, to risk the dreams that tormented him every night.
    If only the letter had come from Grace…
    It wasn’t Lily’s fault that she wasn’t as intelligent as her sister. Nor as witty and kind. That wasn’t fair: Lily was kind. But she was shallow compared to Grace.
    She was a waltz, and Grace was a hymn. He turned over in bed and went to sleep, thinking about it.
    C olin didn’t realize for another month that there would be no more letters from Grace. After all, sometimes weeks passed between dispatches from the Admiralty.
    He thought nothing of it at first, and not much the second week. But by a fortnight later, he was pacing the deck at night. The fourth week, the West Africa Squadron was still waiting for orders. And there was no escaping the fact that Grace’s letter should have reached him, perhaps two letters arriving at the same time, as they sometimes did.
    It was his own damned fault. He had gone to the house two mornings in a row, but they had told him she was ill. Perhaps there was something wrong with her. She would never have avoided him… not the warm, loving Grace of her letters. She was as dear to him as his own sister; surely she knew that?
    She must be dying, he thought, with a cold thump of his heart. Dying, and no one had told him. Scarlet fever, perhaps. Or her lungs—perhaps they were still weak.
    But then he remembered the way Lily’s eyes had shone during the ball, and the way she’d laughed when he took her for a ride in the park, and the way he grew infatuated with her, so much so that he lost his mind and actually told the duke that he would like to marry her. Lily would never have laughed like that if her sister were dying.
    He had felt a tremendous pulse of relief when the duke said no. He had been a fool, a damned fool.
    Lily, beautiful, laughing Lily, wasn’t the answer to his problems. He shouldn’t have thrown away his resolution to avoid marriage at the first sight of a pretty English lass.
    Of course, she was Lily . He was predisposed to love Lily, given the way she teased him and amused him since she was a young girl. He’d never forgotten that Lily had saved his life when she’d entered his bedroom, realized he was in a fever, and dumped a pitcher of water over his head.
    Now that he was older, he knew that a pitcher of water over the head wouldn’t save anyone’s life. But it was a funny story.
    The frogspawn was another.
    A package for him finally arrived well into the third month after he sailed from England. By then he had reread all the letters Grace had written him, starting with the ones where her handwriting was large and uncertain. He worked his way slowly through the years when she was learning Latin and tried to write him funny sentences in the language, and through her watercolors, which grew more and more intricate and assured. He reread her stories about their two households, looked for a long time at the portrait of his parents kissing under the mistletoe and at the picture of Fred covered with mud after falling off his horse, carefully replacing each one in the waterproof box in which he kept them.
    His whole