Read Online To Have and to Hold by Patricia Gaffney - Free Book Online

or taking his pleasure with the ladies at Ascot—or the girls at Mrs. Fielding's. Instead he rode his horse over his twenty thousand acres of field, pasture, orchard, and forest, meeting his tenants and measuring his hay crop; and at night he perused seed catalogs and books on wool marketing and ram sperm.
    Captain Carnock was a gentleman farmer when he wasn't being a magistrate. Sebastian invited him to dinner and picked his brain on the minutiae of corn pricing, dairy improvements, and tenant cottage construction. But his true mentor was William Holyoake. There was very little about estate management the taciturn bailiff didn't know, and he was infinitely more willing to share that expertise than to gossip about ten-year-old neighborhood scandals. They spent hours in conversation together, and Sebastian couldn't deny that it was warming to see William's estimation of him go up a little, day by day. The bailiff hadn't thought much of him when they'd first met. Not that he'd ever said anything; no, he hadn't raised so much as a disrespectful eyebrow. But Sebastian knew. What he didn't know was why Holyoake's good opinion of him mattered one way or the other. But it did.
    The other reason he stayed in the country was because he hadn't seduced Mrs. Wade yet. Hadn't had the chance. She glided around the house like a ghost, never seeming to speak—although she must, to someone if not to him, because his household was running smooth as a top with precious little help from him. Precisely the state of affairs he'd been hoping for when he'd hired her. But she was a slippery fish and she had a pure genius for avoiding him; he had to be quick just to catch a glimpse of her these days. So he'd recently contrived an ingenious ritual, ostensibly to keep up with domestic a&irs: he made her come into his study every morning at nine o'clock and "report" to him on matters about which he couldn't have cared less—tradesmen's bills, menus, spring cleaning, the hiring of a new laundry maid.
    At first he enjoyed making her stand while he lounged at ease behind his big desk. Why? Because that master-servant simulation had piquant sexual overtones he found stimulating. But after a day or two, he started inviting her to sit, because then he got to keep her longer, and their brief conversations could more naturally blend and merge into subjects unrelated to housekeeping.
    She'd obeyed his command and bought a new dress. It was black, anything but stylish, obviously cheap; still, it was a huge improvement over the old one. Beauty wasn't what had attracted him to Mrs. Wade and made him hire her that day in the town hall, but here she was, looking . . , if not beautiful, then striking in her plain wool gown, high-necked and tight-sleeved, with a dainty white apron he'd have called coy on another kind of woman. After a few days of seeing her in her new dress, he'd told her he liked it but he didn't want to see it all the time. Get another one, get two more, he instructed, and this time defy housekeeper tradition and don't get black. Anything but black. The next day she appeared in his study wearing her second new dress: brown. Dark brown. But, strangely enough, it suited her, looked almost pretty on her, probably because it matched her hair, and so he hadn't complained.
    She was by no means blooming, and yet she had come a long way from the silent, downcast spectre at the magistrates' hearing. She must be eating better; she'd lost her alarming pallor and even some of the angularity in her figure. She always wore her hair pinned up under a cap, and the shortest strands escaped and hung about her neck in a becoming way that came close to looking youthful. But she was still solemn as the grave, spoke only when spoken to, and never, ever smiled.
    Holyoake's astonishing revelations had raised Sebastian's already keen curiosity about her to a new and salacious plane. He wanted very much to know what her one-week marriage had been like, and exactly what had