The Light in the Darkness Read Online Free Page A

Grey was willing to admit, even to himself. “I don’t doubt you’ll get the French pox,” he said sharply. “And it will be no less than you deserve.”
    “Good Lord, man, I have no intention of sharing a bed with her. Do you think I want a bedraggled, vermin-infested urchin cluttering up my bed?”
    “Surely she is not so filthy that the dirt has become ingrained. At any rate, if you intend to marry her, bedding her is the accepted custom. But, Grey,” Kayne added, “think what you are committing yourself to. What if you ever fall in love with another woman? You’ll be trapped in this farce of a marriage.”
    “I will never fall in love,” Grey stated flatly. There was a hard edge to his voice that said that this conversation was over, but Kayne ignored it.
    “You can’t know that,” he persisted. “After all, you are only thirty—hardly in your dotage. Perhaps someday—”
    “
Never,
” Grey said with absolute finality.
    Inwardly, Grey knew Kayne was genuinely trying to help him see reason. Awakening this morning with a splitting headache, and contemplating his impossibly rash actions of the night before in the clear light that streamed in through the window, he had wondered if perhaps he had not gone entirely mad. He recalled the pitiful creature he had betrothed himself to, her thick lower-class accent, her greasy, stringy hair, her tattered, outgrown gown, and he had to suppress a shudder. His excesses had led him, not for the first time, into folly.
    And yet he refused to go back on his word, for a number of reasons. The first was that his honor was at stake. He had already committed himself. No doubt the girl’s uncle would be willing to forget the bargain as long as Grey permitted him to keep the stallion, but his word was his word. Once given, he could not go back on it. The second reason was the amusing thought of how outraged Catherine would be. That timid, filthy, uneducated child would be the mistress of Greyhaven. It would be worth the cost ofhis stallion just to see Catherine’s fury. After all, she had goaded him into this.
    He recalled the expression of fear, buried far beneath the surface, he had seen in the wench’s eyes, but he suppressed the fleeting memory easily. He was certain that he was not motivated by pity. There was no room in his dark soul for such an emotion.
    Annoyed by his friend’s criticisms, as well as by his own self-doubt, he caught up the cut-glass decanter of apple brandy sitting on the open mahogany desk and poured himself another glass. Kayne eyed him with open distaste. “That’s always your answer, isn’t it?”
    Grey lifted a questioning black eyebrow in a characteristic gesture and gulped a mouthful of the brandy. “My answer to what?”
    “To everything. Whenever you want to forget, you drink.” A moderate man by nature, Kayne could not approve of his friend’s excesses. “And you want to forget every minute of every day.”
    Grey drank the rest of the brandy in a gulp and fixed the older man with an angry, almost savage look. “I can never forget,” he growled. “I don’t want to forget. Every minute of every day, I
remember—
”
    He turned his head away and stared blindly at the wall. Kayne said gently, “Don’t you think it’s unfair to marry, feeling as you do? Perhaps it’s true that she’s unhappy in her current situation. But mightn’t she be just as unhappy, married to a man who despises her because she can’t be what he wants her to be?”
    “Who I want her to be, you mean.”
    “Perhaps,” Kayne agreed softly.
    There was a silence in the room. Then Grey turned his head away from the wall and smiled at his friend. It was a genuinely warm smile, quite unlike his usual sardonic snarl, and it transformed his chiseled features to an astonishing degree. For a moment he looked like the contented young man Kayne had met ten years before, rather than the sullenly temperamental man he had become.
    “I appreciate your concern,” he