Proud Mary by Lucinda Brant

Author:Lucinda Brant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: 18th, eighteenth, 1700s, england, family saga, drama, roxton, aristocracy, Brandt, saga, series, adventure, sweet Romance, clean Romance, alex wyndham
Publisher: Sprigleaf
Published: 2017-03-31T16:00:00+00:00

EIGHTEEN

OF ALL THE PLACES and times too numerous to count that they had been in each other’s company, it took this place, a woolen mill, and a marriage proposal from another, for Mary to come to the astonishing realization she was in love, and had always been in love with Mr. Christopher Bryce.

From their very first introduction, when he had come to call on her husband, he had stirred within her an indefinable something which niggled and hungered inside her and would not let go. She had done her best to suppress this feeling with every fiber of her being, because she was married. And because she was married, and because her mother had taught her this from a young girl, she believed that to desire a man who was not her husband was wicked, and in a married woman who was a mother, it was also unnatural and abhorrent.

But her mother’s dictum on female desire and marriage left her confused and troubled. For time spent living with her cousin the Duchess of Roxton had shown her a different world, one that contradicted every dictate her mother uttered. She had witnessed the playfulness that existed between the Duke and Duchess, how unselfconscious they were before family. They often held hands, shared a tender kiss, and could sit for hours together, comfortable in each other’s company without saying a word. Above all, they were always kind to one another. It was obvious, even to a girl of Mary’s tender years, that the ducal couple were deeply in love.

But in her marriage to Sir Gerald she had experienced none of these things, leaving her so emotionally and physically cold that she thought herself incapable of enjoying intimacy, and wondering if she was at all desirable. And while her husband was alive she found it effortless to suppress her natural inclinations and feelings.

When she was made a widow she continued along the same path, consumed with her uncertain future, and blind to all possibilities where love and all physical expression of love were concerned. So accustomed was she to the Squire’s presence at Abbeywood that she failed to see him in any other light, any feelings she had for him long ago buried and unlikely ever to surface from the depths of her unresponsive heart.

And then they had shared that kiss in her bedchamber, reigniting the spark of desire she had first felt on that first meeting. And now, in this moment, as she watched Christopher turn and disappear up the stairwell carrying Rory, she knew beyond doubt that she loved him. And she knew that he loved her. He had told her so, but now she believed him. Such thoughts made her tingle with happiness. She wanted to go to him, to tell him, for him to know that his love was reciprocated a hundred times over. And then, from somewhere far off beyond her thoughts she heard a voice calling to her, and the warmth that came with loving and knowing

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