Wicked Loving Lies

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Her golden eyes stared mesmerized into his sleepy gray ones with dark pupils that seemed to contract as recognition flared in them.

“You!” Suddenly he held her pinned down by the shoulders, his face staring down into hers. “How did you contrive it? Did you put one of your gypsy spells on poor Donald and my ship, as well? No wonder we’ve had such a bad voyage—a woman aboard ship always brings bad luck! What are you doing here?”

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After he’d left her that night, bruised and bleeding from the force of his assault on her body, he thought he had cowed her forever. And then, a scant month later, she had announced to him quite calmly across the breakfast table, “I think you’ll be happy to know, my lord, that I am expecting a child.” Then, as he half rose, she must have read the ugly resolve in his eyes for she continued in the same even voice, “I could not bear not to confide our happy news to Mrs. Gordon and some of the other ladies whose husbands are your closest friends. They all wish us well, of course.”

At least the child she bore was no progeny of an Indian savage—but he could not be thankful for that; for if it had been, he would have had the excuse and a reason to strangle it. No, she had produced a grey-eyed, black-haired brat who looked like her and might, by the slimmest margin of possibility, be his. And she had never, no matter how he threatened or bullied her, confessed to having been the mistress of that half-French American, even after he came back into her life.

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