The Admiral's Penniless Bride by Carla Kelly

Author:Carla Kelly
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2011-12-02T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

Sophie slowed her steps as she approached the Brusteins’ manor. Her face still felt hot from the embarrassment of Starkey seeing them like that. Or was it from the flush that flooded her chest after positively enjoying Admiral Bright’s kiss? Andrew had been a slight man, frail, almost, especially in the last few months of his ordeal with Admiralty House. Clasping the admiral in her arms had been a new experience. He was a bigger man and she had found herself enjoying the weight of his upper body as he had begun to press down on her. It was a new sensation.

‘Oh, Lord,’ she whispered, putting her hands to her face. Sally Bright, thank goodness you did not press up against him and sleep in his arms last night, she thought. Considering their arrangement, so calmly worked out in that pew at St Andrew’s Church, that would have been the outer limits of the role her husband had carefully outlined. True, she had patted him back to sleep, but anyone with half a brain would have done that.

She closed her eyes against the feeling that had taken such possession of her with that impulsive kiss. It had to be impulsive; surely he had no design to do such a thing. And why on earth did she kiss him back? Look where it led! All she had wanted to do then was undo that knot on his shabby robe and tug up his nightshirt.

She tried to consider the whole sequence rationally. It had been actually more than five years since she had been refreshed by a man. In the last year of his too-short life, Andrew had been too distracted to consider her a source of consolation. She didn’t want to think about the admiral, because she felt herself growing warm in places where she had felt warm so little in recent years. Was it just that she wanted a man, or did she want that man?

Instinctively, she put her legs closer together until her knees touched, then managed a small laugh. ‘You are such an idiot,’ she reminded herself, keeping her voice low. At least I did not throw myself on him last night, Sophie thought, as she crossed the road and started down the much tidier lane to the Brustein manor. That is a relief.

The same cat was luxuriating in the same front window when she knocked. The housekeeper smiled to see her this time, though, and Jacob Brustein clapped his hands together like a child when she said she had come to read to Rivka Brustein.

‘We were both hoping you were serious when you suggested that very thing,’ he told her, as they walked upstairs. ‘Your husband is elsewhere occupied?’

She told the old gentleman about Charles’s sisters. ‘They have wanted to manage him to the furthest degree, since he retired from the navy,’ she said, as they went into Rivka’s room. ‘I believe he is trying to delicately manoeuvre them out of the house now.’

‘And you thought it politic to be elsewhere,’ Brustein said.

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