Midnight in Your Arms Read Online Free

after he had gone to his rest. The problem was that he didn’t much like the idea of saddling a defenseless child with the considerable tonnage of his ancestral home. It did not sit easy on his shoulders, and never had, even before the war. Now, it was well-nigh intolerable. It was worse than a ghost, this house of his. Inside of it, Alaric had the uncanny feeling that he himself was the ghost, that he was haunting his house, and it was just biding its time until his life should be done. The house no longer liked him—it only tolerated him. Stonecross knew he was not the same. His dearest wish was to get away, for good. The only time he had ever managed to do so, other than his time away at school—which was only ever temporary—he had come back maimed for his trouble. He had stayed home ever since. He didn’t have much left to lose, and he wanted to keep to himself what little remained.
    Alaric rose, and fumbled with his glass, shoving it back in place next to the cut crystal decanter that always seemed to sparkle so alluringly on his mantel. He had long left off the pretense of keeping liquor solely in the drawing room for guests and after-dinner relaxation. Everyone knew the master of Stonecross liked his liquor.
    He crossed the room, and stood at the window he liked to keep thrown open, though he knew the housemaids clucked and said he would catch his death. Girls like that, plain and good-hearted, would never understand how a man like him could half want something like that, half hope for the kind of death a cold breeze could bring in from the sea that glimmered in the night like an eye that saw all, and cared little. Sometimes he wished he had been born into a simpler life, like the people who took care of his every comfort.
    Of course, it was a foolish fancy. He knew nothing of the lives of others. He was rich. He was privileged. He was handsome and well respected, though it was a wary sort of respect. People did not feel about him the way they had when he was a boy, golden and gleaming, but they, too, managed to tolerate him admirably. Any unmarried daughter of bon ton would be more than happy to take him if he asked.
    But if he was a ghost, the girls he knew were waifs. They had no substance. No experience. No sense of the great wonder and pain of what it was to be a human animal. They weren’t animals at all; that was by and large the problem with the pampered and ornamented lot of them. None of them had suffered. Alaric had grown to respect the results of suffering on the human soul, if one could suffer sensibly, learn from it, and gain a little wisdom. He wasn’t sure he had managed to do so, but he had an idea that if he was acquainted with a woman who had also suffered, they might, together, learn what to make of it. The girls with whom he was daily surrounded, herded by their ambitious mamas and indulgent papas, draped in jewels, silks, and suitors, were like so many automatons. They were clever marionettes, equipped with all the elegant gestures of well-bred womanhood, the correct demeanors bred into their very bones, but they had no true life-spark of their own. They were only wind-up girls.
    He lived with a woman of that sort, if someone who was still so much a girl could properly be called a woman. Ellen Wright was a distant cousin and his family’s ward. They had been famous friends in childhood, and before he went away to war, he had made a fervent declaration to the little chit that he had almost immediately regretted. Even then, she had changed, morphed from a jolly playmate into an ambitious young debutante. To her credit, she had never married anyone else, and Ellen had a fortune of her own. She could have married a dozen times over, but she hadn’t. Instead, she had remained installed in Stonecross, taking her place as the woman of the house after Alaric’s mother died, as though it was quite within her rights. And perhaps it was. He had said as much, once, when he was young and foolish, and