Joan Wolf Read Online Free

brief silence as he watched her, measuringly. She did not care for his look and let go of the post, standing up straight, unconscious of her nightgown and loose hair. “You can tell me the truth,” she said firmly. “Is he badly hurt?”
    Nicholas hesitated, but her eyes on him never wavered. “He’s dead,” Nicholas said. “It wasn’t the accident itself that injured him, but the shock of it was too much for his heart. He was, after all, an old man.” He came no closer to her. “Get back into bed,” he repeated. “You have a concussion. You shouldn’t have been left alone. I’ll send Cousin Lucy to you.”
    She didn’t answer but obediently turned toward the bed. He was putting his hand on the doorknob when he glanced back, briefly. He was just in time to see her pitch forward, soundlessly, to the carpeted floor. He swore and moved quickly to bend over her. Her eyes were closed, the dark lashes lying still on too-pale cheeks. He bent and picked her up. She weighed hardly more than a child, but he knew that already. He had been the one to carry her upstairs. He put her carefully on the bed and pulled the covers over her, then he went to fetch Lady Moreton.
    They wouldn’t allow her to attend the funeral. She had been unconscious for almost eight hours and the doctor insisted that she stay in bed for a few days. When she was allowed up she was very quiet, keeping mostly to her room. Lady Moreton was very kind. Nicholas she hardly saw, except at dinner. She was painfully aware of him when he did appear. He was so large; she was not used to men as big as he was. He spoke quietly enough to her, but there was an atmosphere of contained force about him that made her shy away. It was there in the hard, arrogant line of cheek and jaw, in the graceful, catlike way he moved. In a way she could not explain, she felt he threatened her. But she was also painfully aware that Winslow now belonged to him and that she was there as his uninvited guest.
    Those days of almost complete solitude gave her an uncomfortable amount of time to think. Her grandfather, the only anchor left in her life, was gone. She had no clue as to what would happen to her next. All her life Margarita had been surrounded by wealth and the security of a family who loved her. She now faced the fact that she was penniless and dependent on the good will of relations whom she did not know.
    She worried about the future but no coherent thoughts would come. The problem, she realized dully, was that she did not greatly care what happened to her. There was a frozen sea inside her where once there had been warmth and laughter and love. She ate, she talked, she answered questions, but it was only the outside shell of her that acted. The core was dead.
    Five days after the funeral, the earl’s lawyer arrived from London. Nicholas, the new earl, had awaited his coming with considerable apprehension. He knew that Winslow was his; it was entailed, there was no choice involved in its disposal. But the means to run Winslow, to bring it back from the neglect of too many years, of this he was not sure.
    There had been no love lost between Nicholas Beauchamp and his uncle. Nicholas had been conscious all his life that the earl resented him, resented that it was Christopher’s son and not his own who would inherit Winslow. Christopher was home only rarely, and the earl stood to Nicholas in the position of a father, but they never got along. Lord Winslow had not liked Nicholas’s mother, either. He could not forget that her father’s money came from manufacture, even though he was glad enough to see Christopher spend it. When she ran away with the young historian John Hamilton, who had been doing research at Winslow, the earl had felt justified in his opinion of her.
    The earl’s insatiable buying of art had been a subtle way to punish him, of that Nicholas was sure. The money that he took out of Winslow he put into his own private collection—a collection that was now