Redeeming the Roguish Rake by Liz Tyner

Author:Liz Tyner [Tyner, Liz]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2017-11-06T19:07:27+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

Foxworthy didn’t leave her bed in the night. No reason to traipse across the way to the master’s chambers.

His jaw ached. He’d been trying to take such care in lovemaking that he’d almost injured himself holding back.

He propped himself on one elbow, watching her sleep. He reached out and with a thumb and forefinger circled her wrist. Perhaps too slender. But soon he’d have someone assembling a staff. Someone to hire a cook who could tempt her to enjoy the meals.

He slid back onto the bed, staring at the ceiling. She’d not have to clean or do any duties but pamper herself. He was thankful he’d not been born a female. That would be such a boring life. Hair being curled into ringlets. Layers of clothing. Choosing meals and trying to pick out just the right cloth for the new dress and nattering on with the servants about this and that and then teas with friends and then more of the same.

What a pitiful way to spend the day. It sounded much like drinking the same wine, singing the same song, visiting the same clubs, and repeating the same story appearing in the same newsprint.

He was fortunate. He knew it. Extremely.

And extremely boring. True, he could make people laugh and sing, and that was a skill of sorts. A good work, if you will. But even as everyone around him laughed at his humour, he bored himself. Perhaps that was why he married.

It was and it wasn’t.

That irritation that she and her father felt he wasn’t good enough had festered during that three weeks. Even his own father had muttered that perhaps Fox should reconsider as Rebecca was a decent sort and the earl did not like feeling that he’d... And then he’d stopped grumbling and left the room.

Fox knew—to be told he couldn’t have something only made him determined to have it. Perhaps that had more to do with those other proposals than he realised. The women were married, and he liked the half-second look in their eyes that told him more than they dared say aloud.

He rolled to look again at his sleeping bride. The innocent.

The vicar had once confided to the earl that Rebecca had awoken crying, upset she was not good enough to be the daughter of her parents. She’d dreamed that they had tossed her in a rubbish heap because she had been playing with her doll instead of giving the toy to a little girl who didn’t have one.

Oh, he had reserved a front-row seat in hell. He only wished he had not brought her along with him.

Her hand lay sprawled on the covers, the gold ring on her finger invisible in the darkness. Already he felt it choking him.

* * *

Rebecca woke and stared up at the ceiling, trying to place it. It was the first time in her life she’d awoken not in her house.

She dressed in her second-best dress, but even the curtains mocked her clothing. The fleur-de-lis woven into the fabric seemed shaped like laughing faces.

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