Adam's Promise Read Online Free Page B

was.
    â€œIs that farmland down there?” she asked.
    At least she was willing to make an effort. He supposed he should do the same.
    â€œThey’re salt marshes. Everything down there is dyked.”
    She stared in silence at the velvet green vistas below and the dark spruce forests on the uplands. Above them, white clouds sailed quickly across the vast blue sky.
    â€œYour sons must be a help to you,” she said.
    â€œI couldn’t do it without them.”
    He turned his gaze to her feminine profile and stared at her for a long moment. Her cheeks were delicately carved, her lips full. Her eyes had the look of girlish fascination at the unfamiliar world around her. She was such a child, yet she had left her home and crossed an ocean with the expectation of becoming his wife. His wife! Diana’s baby sister. She had thought she would meet his sons as their future stepmother.
    Good Lord. Did she know that Jacob, his stepson, was only four years younger than she?
    With that thought, a tremor of uneasiness coursed through him. She couldn’t actually be brokenhearted, could she? In a sense, he had rejected her romantically, and told everyone within hearing range that she was not the one he’d wanted. He considered saying something about it—offering an apology perhaps?—then he decided that it would just be rubbing salt in both of their wounds, and he should leave it be. Therewas no point dwelling on it. He would let her enjoy the view.
    At least there had been no true, deep-rooted romance between them. In fact, she was probably relieved to be spared marrying a man she hardly knew. A man almost twice her age.
    Yes, what was done was done, and there was no sense dragging the uncomfortable circumstances on any longer. All this would be straightened out soon enough, for he was not yet ready to give up on Diana.
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    Madeline sat back in the rolling carriage, gazing in a detached way at the windswept landscape she had thought would be her home. It was everything she had dreamed of, ripe for an adventure, and the reality of that only made her feel worse—as if her dreams had been mangled and mashed in front of her eyes and now all she could do was accept it.
    Adam drove the carriage down the slope of the ridge and into the thick spruce forest where all was shaded and quiet and sheltered from the wind. Little more than a narrow bridle path was all they had for a road, and only the sounds of the horse’s hooves thumping and the carriage wheels rolling over the ground, snapping twigs, filled the silence.
    An uneasy feeling closed in around Madeline. What would become of her? She was an ocean away from her familiar world of moors and dales and meandering stone walls, and she knew no one here except for Adam and the people from the ship. She had no family.
    Not that she’d had any family that she could depend upon back in Yorkshire, either, but at least she knew the country. Here, she could get lost in these deep, unfathomable forests or swallowed by a bear, God forbid. She squeezed her pink-and-silver guinea purse into a ball in her hands. Partly in fear, partly in fury.
    â€œAre you all right, Miss Oxley?” Adam asked, surprising her.
    She’d thought she was more proficient at hiding her feelings. She would have to do better.
    â€œI’m fine, Mr. Coates.”
    â€œYou don’t look fine.”
    She took a deep breath, not sure how to reply. “I was just thinking about my future and where I will go after this.” And I’ve never felt more alone in my life.
    â€œI think the best thing is for you to return to your father in Yorkshire.”
    â€œI would rather not.”
    He was quiet a moment. “Do you think that’s wise?”
    How was she to explain that she’d left Yorkshire because she’d been ruined by an outrageous, unfounded sham of a scandal, and her father had never made any effort to defend her?
    After this little debacle, she