Read Online The Demon's Mistress by Jo Beverley - Free Book Online Page A

Despite the mild words, there was something ferocious in Sarah’s manner.
    â€œHe’s such a disturbed young man. Are you being fair?”
    â€œIt isn’t—”
    â€œA woman of your age should be wise for both, not . . . not use someone!”
    Maria knew she was coloring. “I’m not using him, Sarah,” she said, praying there wouldn’t be a scene. “I’m marrying him. And if you think he doesn’t want to—”
    â€œOf course he wants to,” Sarah hissed. “You’re rich as Croesus. But what else can you offer him? You’re old and barren.”
    It was so cruel that Maria froze. But then she realized that Sarah was thinking of her lost son, a man of the same age. She was reacting as if Maria had trapped Dare. She hadn’t trapped anyone, but the thought of herself and Dare, whom she’d known when he was a gap-toothed child, made her shrivel with shame.
    She longed to explain, but she didn’t want to reveal Maurice’s sin to anyone. Perhaps she was more like him than she’d thought, always trying to keep the facade in place.
    â€œWe suit,” she said rigidly. “He’s excellent company.”
    Sarah was hectically red. “You met him less than a week ago! Gravenham should never have introduced you.”
    Maria had to stifle laughter at this reversal of Gravenham’s discreet warning, but she ached for her cousin’s pain.
    â€œYou must release him,” Sarah said. “You know he cannot draw back.”
    Nor can I. “But we suit very well.”
    Sarah stared at her as if she were a worm, and walked away.
    Maria let out a breath, praying that her cousin not make this a public estrangement.
    Vandeimen came over. “You look upset.”
    She forced a smile. “The duchess still mourns her son. She sometimes says things she doesn’t mean.”
    â€œWe all mourned Lord Darius. He had the gift of merriment.”
    She looked at him. “She said you and your friends were kind to him.”
    â€œA despairing sort of kindness, though his joie de vivre was a gift just then, before Waterloo. But you don’t want to speak of war. Come, the abbey choir is about to sing ‘Palestrina.’”
    She went, mainly because it would remove any need to talk for a while. She suspected that was his idea, too.
    To her, it was as if something pleasant had suddenly been spoiled. It surprised her that it had been pleasant, but she had begun to enjoy the season in the past few days. Her wasps had flown after other jam pots, but the true magic was that she’d enjoyed Vandeimen’s company.
    He was unfailingly courteous and an excellent, efficient escort. He wasn’t a wit, but he held up his end of a conversation. He knew how to acceptably flirt with the ladies and joke with the gentlemen. People were slowly looking past the shocking match and his reputation, and beginning to accept him as simply a gentleman, which he clearly was.
    Now, however, the thought of Dare rose up to corrode everything. Her family had regularly visited Long Chart, the Duke of Yeovil’s seat, and she could remember Dare still in a toddler’s skirts. She’d only been eleven, but that picture stuck because he’d managed to escape his nurse and climb a tree, causing pandemonium.
    He must have been eight when he’d recruited most of the children in the area to dig a moat around the castle folly in the grounds. The duke had been impressed enough to complete the job, but at sixteen and on her dignity, Maria had thought him a grubby menace.
    She’d last met him when he was a lanky, grinning youth passing through London on his way to Cambridge.
    She’d been married a few years by then, a matron and mistress of her own home. She’d also been a veteran of awareness that she’d been duped by an imaginary love, and suspicion that she was barren. She had faced a difficult, dutiful life,