Read Online Pleasures of a Tempted Lady by Jennifer Haymore - Free Book Online Page B

rooms—one for Meg and Jake and another for Will. Jake had been quiet and well behaved. She hadn’t quite known what to expect from him—he wasn’t used to long carriage rides through green countrysides, but he’d surprised her with his relative calm. She supposed she shouldn’t have been surprised. Until now, Jake had liveda life of unpredictability—he, as well as his mother and Meg, had never remained in one place for more than a few months at a time. Always, Caversham would take them somewhere new—somewhere they wouldn’t be found.
    She lay beside Jake now on the inn’s narrow bed, stroking his back and humming low, as she did every night.
    “Meg?”
    “Hm?”
    “I miss Mama.”
    She sighed. “I know, darling. So do I.”
    Poor, sweet Sarah. She was a fisherman’s daughter from Maine. Utterly beautiful, with raven-dark hair and obsidian eyes but skin as pale as ivory. Mesmerized by her beauty, Caversham had asked her father for her hand in marriage. When the man—a fair judge of character—had refused to give his approval, Caversham had kidnapped her by force. No one said no to Caversham and got away with it. Meg had learned that lesson quickly.
    Caversham had found an ordained minister who, when presented with enough money, had agreed to marry him to Sarah. When Caversham had discovered Meg floating in the ocean a year later, Sarah was seventeen, just a bit younger than Meg. But there was an enormous difference between the two young women. Despite her innate beauty, Sarah was a rough country girl who’d had little schooling and was nearly illiterate. Meg, though circumstances had forced her family into genteel poverty, was an English lady. Her grandfather had been a viscount, her aunt was a countess, and her mother had ensured her daughters were raised to be proper young debutantes.
    When she’d recovered from her ordeal at sea, Meg had begged Caversham to return her home to Antigua. But assoon as she opened her mouth and the cultured English accent emerged, an idea had formed in Caversham’s head.
    He’d wanted a lady wife, but no real English lady would ever have him. He dreamed of bringing Sarah back to England and parading her about like a prize. She was beautiful, that was true. But the moment she opened her mouth, her rough American drawl would give her away as what she truly was—a nobody.
    So he assigned Meg the task of turning his wife into a proper lady. She was to educate Sarah and instruct her on the etiquette of London society.
    Sarah tried, but she’d never understood the point of Meg’s teachings. It wasn’t natural for her to curtsy or titter like a well-bred English girl, and her forthright American nature would forever set her apart from the ton .
    “You won’t leave me like Mama did, will you, Meg?” Jake asked, yanking Meg out of her memories.
    Meg slipped her arm around the boy’s thin waist. “Your mama didn’t want to leave you, Jake. She was sick and she died. She wanted nothing more than to be with you until you were big and strong and could take care of yourself, but God decided to take her early. Only He knows why.”
    Jake didn’t seem convinced. “I don’t think she wanted to take care of me. Not like you do.”
    Meg flinched. There was some truth to his words. Sarah had spent the last years of her life in a haze of pain and fear. While Jake’s birth had given Meg a reason to fight and be strong against Caversham, it had seemed to deplete Sarah. When Jake was a toddler, she’d become thin and sallow, and days went by in which she didn’t get out of bed. When she finally died—of unhappiness evenmore so than the fever, Meg thought—she was just a shell of the girl she once was.
    “Remember how I told you that different people love in different ways?” she said to Jake. “Well, that’s the way it was with your mama. She showed you love every time she smiled at you. Don’t you remember?”
    Meg did. Sarah had the widest, most beautiful smile of anyone