A Christmas Secret by Anne Perry

Author:Anne Perry [Perry, Anne]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780345495648
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2006-11-06T13:00:00+00:00

It was early afternoon when Dominic decided to call again at the manor house. He had to put his trust in someone, or else simply abandon the idea of finding out exactly how the Reverend Wynter had died. It still seemed an absurd idea that anyone could have killed him.

It was below freezing, even at this hour, and his feet crunched on the snow. He walked as quickly as he could, his mind also racing. The decision he made now could affect the rest of his life, and—of more urgent importance to him—Clarice’s life also. She had given up much to marry him, and he wanted passionately that she should never regret that. He found to his surprise that as he learned to know her better with each passing month, he loved her more. She had an honesty of mind that was brighter, more translucent than any he had imagined. He kept thinking he knew her, and then she said or did something that surprised him. She made him laugh, even when he did not want to. She never complained about the lack of money, or about the small, grubby accommodations she had to make to poverty or Spindlewood’s petty officiousness.

Then she would blow up with temper over an injustice, and put into irretrievable words exactly what he had been thinking, only been wise enough not to say. Or was that cowardly enough? Or was he simply older and more acquainted with the infinite possibilities of failure?

He did not want to disappoint her. She was still so much in love with him. He could see it in her eyes, the sudden flush to her skin if she caught him looking at her with his own emotions too naked in his face. Could he ever live up to what she thought of him? Sometimes being handsome was not a blessing. It led people—women—to hope for more from one than one could live up to; it ignited dreams that were too big for the reality of what any man could be.

The manor house loomed up ahead, rising out of the virgin snow as the dark trees of the driveway parted. That was a dream in stone. Did Peter Connaught ever feel the weight of past glory crushing him? Did the ghosts expect too much?

Was Clarice building a drama of murder out of a simple domestic tragedy, weaving together facts into a picture that would create sorrow and injustice, not solve it?

Dominic thought again with a shiver of his earlier acquaintance with her family, and the murder of Unity Bellwood. He had been a curate staying in her father’s house to further his studies. The Reverend Ramsay Parmenter had been a good mentor, but a conventional man of passionately orthodox views. When Unity Bellwood, modern-thinking, pregnant, and unmarried, was pushed down a stairway to her death, the Reverend Parmenter became a major suspect.

But it was Clarice’s beautiful, selfish, and deadly mother who had been at the core of it with her obsessive fantasy that Dominic was as much in love with her as she was with him.

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