Bound by Love by Edith Layton

Author:Edith Layton [Layton, Edith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Regency Romance
Publisher: Untreed Reads
Published: 2017-08-29T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

Jared was the earl of Alveston. Everyone in the room with him acknowledged it. The room was lavishly furnished, in the heart of London, and filled with some of the most influential men and women in all England. A beautiful woman, promised to him since birth, stood at his side; his lost brother was grown up, alive and well, and smiling at him in the same room, where he stood with the girl Jared had thought of as his sister since he’d met her. Her father, the man who had bought him out of bondage, was there, too, smiling encouragement at him. And Jared himself was grown tall and strong, and he was dressed elegantly. His breeches alone cost more than most men’s weekly wages.

But the most amazing thing was that no matter how hot the food he ate or how tight his new shoes or how often he secretly pinched his own arm, nothing woke him from this dream. This must be real, he thought in a daze of happiness. He doubted it only because it was so much more glorious than his dream had been.

There were flaws in the realization of the dream, of course, if only because it was no longer a dream, but only one flaw he could think of right now: Fiona was his brother’s fiancée. Yet tonight, the way she laughed with him and hung on his arm and smiled at him as she introduced him proudly around the room, even that relationship seemed flexible, as capable of change as anything else in a dream would be. And yet this was reality. No, it was better than reality—it was happiness. He hadn’t known much of it in his life. He’d never guessed how good this would feel; there was more to it than he could have imagined, because there were more triumphs in life than a poor abused boy could have known about and included in his dreams of glory.

For example, Jared thought with pleasure, Dr. Franklin, the most famous man in the Colonies, stood only steps away, with his son, holding court. Jared knew both of them from home—from the place he’d been exiled to and had come to think of as home, he corrected himself. Jared straddled both worlds. He knew the unofficial guest of honor and he was meeting the finest gentlemen and fairest ladies in Mrs. Comely’s elegant assembly rooms, the most fashionable place to be in all of London at the moment. And all of them were waiting breathlessly for his every word, hoping for a clever saying they could repeat the next day, as if he were the celebrated Benjamin Franklin himself.

The gentleman from Philadelphia had been the rage in London for three years, ever since he’d come here on some mission from the Colonies and stayed on. But the new earl of Alveston was the latest rage. Jared was interested by the first fact, but was overwhelmed by the other. All he wanted to do now was to share the joy of it.

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