Read Online Love's Reward by Jean R. Ewing - Free Book Online Page B

trailing up the edge of the stone fireplace. They were battered and blunted by time, the veining blurred, the stems chipped away.
    “It’s all absurd. I was not abducted. I left with your brother of my own accord.”
    “The law is often absurd, and Quentin has broken it. To carry off an heiress is a hanging offense, whether you claim you were willing or not. We have two earls determined to press charges. Your father to save your reputation. Mine to force me into marriage at any cost. Once the charges have been made, the law will grind out its inexorable course. No one will be interested in your opinion.”
    Joanna knew that she was defeated. She could not stand alone against the force of all of them: her father, the Black Earl, and most of all this man with his spoiled, sarcastic humor.
    “So what are we to do?”
    He laughed with a reckless lack of restraint.
    “Why, we shall marry, of course, like the dutiful children we are, and thus I shall save your reputation. It will be the first honorable act toward a lady that I have been seen to commit in a long time. We shall set up a splendid pretense at housekeeping in my house near town, and receive the well-wishers with smiles and a sham of wedded bliss. Privately you won’t ever need to see me. I have my own pursuits.”
    Why should it wound, when she had no desire to marry him? Yet it did.
    “Involving women, I suppose,” she said tartly.
    He grinned. “Of course. I shall make no demands on you. You may live as you please. As I shall continue with my own life. I have urgent business in town at this moment, which interests me far more than taking an unwilling bride.”
    The painting above the mantel was a watercolor, not badly done, of a riverbank and a rustic cottage.
    “I should want a studio.”
    “Very well. You may have an entire floor, if you wish. In fact, you may do any damned thing you please with the house. I don’t imagine I shall be there much. So, you see, marriage to me will bring you what you have been longing for, freedom to paint. Ironic, isn’t it?”
    She felt the force of his dismissal pierce like an arrowhead. It settled somewhere inside her rib cage, threatening to fester.
    But I have never wanted to marry. And he is offering me my heart’s desire, more clearly than my own plans for Harefell. It doesn’t even matter whether or not he means it. Because if he breaks trust, Richard and Harry will retaliate, and—like Quentin’s wife—once I am married, I can always run away. A married woman is free of her father, at least.
    “You don’t want children?” she asked.
    He took up the poker to rearrange the coals. Joanna’s attention snapped back to him. His hands were lovely, square and strong, yet with elegant, blunt-ended fingers.
    “I most particularly don’t want children. There’s no other revenge I can have on my father for this, except to deprive him of the grandson from my loins that he so desperately craves.”
    “In that case, Quentin’s wife will be the mother of the next earl.”
    The dark eyes glanced up, implacable, but with just that hint of derision.
    “Exactly. You will not again be subjected to my unwanted attentions. I have enough females to satisfy my natural male needs. Once we are married, you may take whatever lovers you please, as long as you’re discreet and produce no bastards. So let that one kiss be the first and last expression of lust between us. Even if you invite me, Lady Joanna, it will never happen again.”
     

Chapter 5
     
    Fitzroy accepted the brandy from Lord Grantley with a polite bow of the head.
    A rattle of carriages and a splashing of horses’ hooves could be faintly heard in the street outside, broken by the steady tolling of church bells. It was raining. The light seeping through the tall windows into Lord Grantley’s study in Whitehall was dull and flat, leaving the room washed in tones of gray.
    “We were wrong, sir,” Fitzroy said. “It is not Lady Carhill. Greeks and Trojans mean