Read Online ROOK AND RAVEN: The Celtic Kingdom Trilogy Book One by Julie Harvey Delcourt - Free Book Online

rationalized it to myself anyway.  Hasn’t always been easy being your friend.”
    “We were intimate,” Sebastian said abruptly as if it pained him.
    “I know,” David answered simply.
    Sebastian looked up in surprise with a glint of alarm in his golden eyes.
    “Just how much do you know?”
    “Pretty much everything, except why you disappeared.”
    He looked at his friend with a strange new consideration.  “You let me live.  I am sitting here in your house, you neither poisoned the brandy nor tried to run me through,” he seemed to wrestle with some new knowledge. “You love me!”  He blurted out with a deep inner sense of shock.
    David bolted up in righteous indignation, “I am not a molly and you damn well know it!” his face rather red.
    “No! No! I don’t mean it like that!  It came out all wrong.  Sit down!  I don’t want to have to punch you in self-defense,” he laughed.  “I just mean that I’ve always known what a great friend you are, tried not to think too much about how hard it was for you to love Jessy and still stand by me too.  But this!  I’m not sure I’m worthy.  I haven’t always been so great have I?” he said with a certain bitter twist to his lips.
    “You’re my brother,” David said simply. “At least the closest to one I have ever had. You could have been gone twice the years and my door would still have been open for you.”
    And everything Sebastian had agonized over for the first two years, and then the double life he had led the next five, came pouring out.
    CHAPTER SIX
     
    She stood at the top of the ballroom stairs and looked down upon the room.  Her hand rested on that of her escort, the Duke of Tamworth.  In the not so distant past, she had thought never to be accepted among such a gathering.  The casual assurance of her place in the world had been ripped from her at the age of eighteen.  Her parent’s deaths, one closely following the other, had kept her from having a season. She hadn’t wanted one but her mother had wanted one for her.  When next she had seen London she was no longer fit for a season and less than a year after that she had been a widow.  
    But now, here she stood with one of the highest peers of the realm.  Not for the first time, she thought life the most twisted road anyone could ever travel. It was rare, but not unknown for an actress to find a place in the Upper Ten Thousand, but usually only after marriage, not before.  Her background, real widowhood and careful preservation of a respectable character had allowed this to happen.
    Of course, it was all another role. If these people knew all her story the doors would close, unless she was the wife of a powerful man.  Sometimes, she was not so certain that she would really care.  The dual life she led became increasingly tiresome and it was not clear to her just where it was leading. 
    Sebastian’s reappearance had turned everything on its head.  
    The Duke had asked her yet again to marry him and yet again she had turned the question aside.  Not a no, not a yes.  He was a kind man only ten years her senior; handsome in his distinguished way and not without humor, but love was an elusive thing.  She knew quite surely that she did not love him and privately feared she would never love again.  Marriage in this world was rarely about love and Tamworth did not really expect her to love him like a giddy schoolgirl, but she couldn’t quite face the idea of spending life with a man without loving him.  She had thought maybe she could come to truly care for him and respect him at least.  It was the best most society marriages managed.  
    She had almost made up her mind to accept Tamworth and draw him into her confidence; until this evening.  She had almost convinced herself that the security and companionship would be enough and that at last her answer would be yes.  She felt she knew Edward well enough to reveal her past, and all its ramifications, with a chance