Lady Maggie's Secret Scandal
Page 31
She hunched over again, more tightly this time, and made a sound, a wretched, undignified sound, but Ben wasn’t finished. “It is the behavior of a woman who holds herself to ducal standards. The dukes of old led armies, Maggie, but you had only yourself, and yet you prevailed.”
She was shaking now, her eyes closed, her hand cutting off the circulation to Ben’s fingers, but he could not stop.
“I love you, Maggie Windham. I love your courage, I love your independence, I love your determination, and I want it for my own.” He paused and gathered his own courage. “I want—I pray—that our children take after their mother.”
The words took an instant to penetrate the emotion wracking the woman beside him, a silent, fraught moment during which Ben’s hopes and dreams, his very heart and soul hung suspended between the light of hope and the shadow of despair.
“Benjamin.” She pitched into him, right there in the sunshine, sobbing and clinging and bawling for all the world to see. “Hold me, please. Hold me and never let me go, not ever. Not for anything.”
He held her, but he did shift so he was on his knees before her, his arms wrapped around her while she shed more tears and clung for more long, lovely minutes as Ben fished for his handkerchief and thanked a merciful God for a woman brave enough to know when she was loved.
“I wanted to tell you.” Maggie was smiling now, and when he pulled back enough to appreciate that fact, she started toying with the hair at his nape.
“Tell me what?”
Her fingers went still. “You never miss a detail, Benjamin. Surely you knew when I nearly fainted at Lady Dandridge’s…?”
He rose and dusted off his knees, then resumed his place beside her—right smack beside her. “You’d been wandering in the rain for God knows how long, missing sleep, and likely doing without proper sustenance. If every woman who laced her stays too tightly were carrying, the population would shortly double.”
“Benjamin, we are going to have a baby. I should have told you this sooner, but I did not want you to feel trapped.”
She was back to smoothing her skirts and gripping his hand, suggesting she hadn’t composed herself quite as quickly as appearances might indicate.
“Maggie, do you feel trapped?” It was a sincere question, the sort of sincere question that kept a sincere man up late of a night and might cause him more than one pang in years to come.
“By the child? Of course not.”
Or it might not. “You want this child?”
“Gracious God, Benjamin. I spent years dealing with Cecily because Bridget was mine to love. I’ve protected my ducal family because they were mine to love. This child is mine to love, and you are mine to love. How could you think I’d feel otherwise?”
“We are going to have to watch this tendency of yours to protect all whom you love.”
She smiled a little sheepishly. “I want a big family, but we’re getting a rather late start on things.”
“Then we’ll just have to be diligent about it.”
His Maggie—his brave, independent, determined, and very loving Maggie—blushed.
And then he had to kiss her. He scooped her across his lap, planted his mouth on hers, and there before God, the birds, and probably the duke, the duchess, assorted siblings, and a few dozen servants spying from various windows, he kissed his future countess in the bright sunshine for all to see.
Read on for a sneak preview of
Grace Burrowes’s
Lady Louisa’s
Christmas Knight
Coming October 2012
From Sourcebooks Casablanca
Sir Joseph Carrington acquired two boon companions after doing his part to rout the Corsican. Carrington was accounted by no one to be a stupid man, and he understood the comfort of the flask—his first source of consolation—to be a dubious variety of friendship.
His second more sanguine source of company was the Lady Ophelia, whose acquaintance Carrington had made shortly after mustering out. She, of the kind eyes and patient silences, had provided him much wise counsel and comfort, and that she consistently had litters of at least ten piglets both spring and autumn could only endear her to him further.
“I don’t see why you should be the one moping.” Sir Joseph scratched the place behind Lady Opie’s left ear that made her go calm and quiet beneath his hand. “You may remain here in the country, leading poor Roland on the mating dance while I must away to London.”
Where Sir Joseph would be the one being led on that same blighted dance. Thank God for the enthusiasm of local hunt. It preserved a man from at least a few weeks of the collective lunacy that was Polite Society as the Yuletide holidays approached.
“I’ll be back by Christmas, and perhaps this year Father Christmas will leave me a wife to take my own little dears in hand.”
He took a nip of his flask—a small nip. Unless he spent hours in the saddle or hours tramping the woods with his fowling piece, or a snow storm was approaching, or a cold snap, his leg did not pain him too awfully much—usually.
***
“The little season is a great pain in my backside.”
Lady Louisa Windham didn’t bother keeping her voice down. She was riding in at the back of the third flight along with her sister Genevieve, to whom it was always safe to grumble.
“We’ve missed all but the last two weeks of it,” Jenny pointed out. “Thank God for Papa and his hunt madness.”
From Jenny, that was an admission that she too did not look forward to the impending, though blessedly brief, remove back to Town.
“It’s like hunting grouse,” Louisa said, letting her mount drop back farther from the other riders ambling toward the hunt breakfast. “Lent ends, and the husband hunting begins, the mamas beating their charges forward into the waiting guns virtually until Town empties out for the holidays. I don’t know how many more years of this I can take, Jenny.”
“I don’t relish two weeks in Town either,” Jenny said at length. “We sit about in the same parlors we sat about in all spring, trying to pretend we’re only a little envious of the ladies now married or engaged who were not spoken for in the spring. And yet, in some way, we are only a little envious when we’re supposed to be torn up with it.”
“I am torn up with the entire pretense.”
“You’ve been at it a little longer than Evie or I. You’re entitled.”
Jenny could be counted on for such kindness. She was truly good, truly kind, things Louisa had long since stopped aspiring to. Jenny had willowy blond good looks to go with her sunny disposition, while Louisa, appropriately enough, had throw-back dark hair to go with eyes closer to agate than green.
“Ladies.”
Sir Joseph Carrington came up on Louisa’s left mounted on a raw-boned black gelding, one suited to the rider’s own dark coloring and somber turnout.
Louisa and Jenny greeted him civilly. He was a neighbor, after all and he’d served on the Peninsula with their brothers Devlin St. Just and the late Lord Bartholomew Windham. Just because the man sported a mere knighthood and raised pigs was no excuse to be rude.
“Louisa, Sir Joseph, if you’ll excuse me, I promised to help with the breakfast.”
Lady Jenny smiled at Sir Joseph and cantered off, abandoning her sister to the pig farmer’s company without a backward glance.
Even the truly good had limits to their generosity.
“I’ve a question for you, Lady Louisa.”
Acknowledgments
Writing is usually a solitary activity. Not only does an author spend months drafting material while sitting alone before the computer, but she also spends long hours walking the countryside, driving from coast to coast, and making burnt offerings to the gods of external conflict, all without much companionship.
And while I have a great capacity for enjoying solitude, I am never lonely as a writer, because the team at Sourcebooks, from our publisher Dominique Raccah, to my editor Deb Werksman, to all the “book people”—Skye, Susi
e, Cat, Danielle, Madam Copy Editor, Madam Proofreader, my fellow Casablanca authors, and countless others—is just a phone call or email away and sometimes closer than that.
These are not my books, and the Windham siblings’ stories are not my stories. These stories belong to you, as the reader, and they belong to the Sourcebooks publishing team members, without whom these tales would never see the light of day. I think this sense of cooperative endeavor informs the mutual regard my characters feel toward each other and is reflected in the writing in intangible ways.
In any case, I’m grateful to be part of such a team. Writing is a pleasure. Writing with that much capable support is a pleasure and a privilege.
About the Author
New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Grace Burrowes hit the bestseller lists with both her debut, The Heir, and her second book in The Duke’s Obsession trilogy, The Soldier. Both books received extensive praise and glowing reviews from Publishers Weekly and Booklist. The Heir was also named a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2010, and The Soldier was named a Publishers Weekly Best Spring Romance of 2011. She is hard at work on stories for the five Windham sisters, the first of which, Lady Sophie’s Christmas Wish, is already on the shelves, along with The Virtuoso, the story of Valentine, the third Windham brother. Grace is a practicing attorney specializing in family law and lives in rural Maryland.
Grace loves to hear from her readers and can be reached through her website at www.graceburrowes.com.
Table of Contents
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Windham Family Tree
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
A Sneak Preview of Lady Louisa’s Christmas Knight
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Back Cover