Midnight in Your Arms Read Online Free Page A

hadn’t known yet what life really meant. Then, it was all a splendid parlor game, and he a prince at play. Ellen had always thought to be his princess.
    That was quite impossible now, of course, but she had never quite understood that particular message. Perhaps she thought to wear him down. And maybe he should just let her. There were worse things than a pretty, vapid wife who would see to all the entertainments and make sure all the appropriate seasonal sentiments were expressed. She would make certain they went to Town in the correct week, and returned to the country when it was most fashionable to do so. Except that Alaric had no mind ever to go to London again. He was finished with balls and dinner parties, with forays to the opera and the pleasure gardens. He didn’t care to visit the club, or have himself fitted by an exclusive tailor for suits of clothes he would discard after the Season ended. He hadn’t even been bothering to have his hair cut lately—it hung long and thick to his shoulders. It was enough that he remembered to have himself shaved and dressed in a fresh shirt and clean cravat in time for dinner. He better remembered to refill his glass while he moped by the fire, and turn the pages as he read his book. He would be happy to malinger at Stonecross forever if everyone would just leave him in bloody peace.
    They wouldn’t, of course. It was about to be his birthday. He would be thirty. There was to be a party. He didn’t want a bloody party, but what he wanted had very little to do with it. Ellen had her heart set on a party, and an engagement announcement, no doubt. Alaric wondered if he would oblige her. He hadn’t made up his mind yet. Everything would be simpler if he did, in many ways. After all, he couldn’t go on living at Stonecross with him with only his father to chaperone, an ailing man who paid little attention to what was happening around him. It simply wasn’t done.
    Alaric turned from the window, impatient with the view, which never changed. It was always the same black liquid shimmering in moonlight, with the clouds moving too fast over the sky for him to find any recognizable shape. He was impatient, too, thinking about Ellen. She was not the sort of person who took up much space in a well-stocked mind. She was pretty, and intelligible enough. But Alaric’s mind slipped so easily away from her. She would do much better to marry someone else, someone for whom beauty and wealth were more alluring.
    Alaric kept hoping that if he bored her to death on a daily basis, Ellen would decide to leave, and make her own way with the fortune she had come into on her twenty-first birthday. That had been a damnably long time ago. What was she now—twenty-eight or nine? She was getting dangerously close to being left on the shelf. Only her beauty and her fortune stopped people’s tongues wagging—much. An unmarried woman her age with a perfectly eligible bachelor in her daily midst would always set people talking. No doubt people thought them secret lovers, and that he refused to marry her and she had nowhere else to turn, or some scandalous rubbish of that sort. Such things did go on, he knew. Which was why he should perhaps just marry her and have done with it. A gentleman would have done so years ago. She had certainly earned it, living with him as he was for so long, putting her best face on while the ladies of the ton whispered behind their fans.
    Another reason he ought to marry her was that perhaps she actually loved him. Stranger things did happen. She made all the pretty little gestures and unspoken declarations that maidens in love affected. Could it be real?
    He didn’t think so.
    There was a coolness to Ellen, something he thought of as innocence and virtue when they were children. He thought she would warm up when womanhood came upon her, but she never did. There was something calculating about her. She was slightly … serpentine. That was the bare truth of it, and he was