A Forbidden Love Read Free

the stamina to engage in such dissolute ways.”
    “Why all the censure? You’re supposed to be my sister, remember? Kindly recall where your loyalty should lie.”
    “My loyalty is above reproach. Do you know the number of tales that have reached my ears concerning my rake of a brother? Had I mentioned even a fraction of them, I assure you, our parents would have had an apoplexy by now.”
    A skeptical look came her way.
    “All right,” Ashley amended with a shrug of her slender shoulders. “Only Mama would have had an apoplexy. But loyalty does not mean compliance, and I’ll rebuke your sordid past whenever I get the chance.”
    But she didn’t get the chance, much to Anthony’s relief. The door burst open then, and in hopped Edith with her father and baby Myra following closely behind.
    “So here you all are,” Daniel Winthrop called out in his usual jovial spirit. He handed his gurgling daughter over to her mother and planted his lips to his wife’s cheek. “How abominable of all of you to be hiding at such a merry time.”
    “Who said anything about hiding?” Ashley rested a fussing Myra over her shoulder and lightly tapped the infant’s back. “We were only recuperating.”
    Daniel cracked a wide grin at his wife’s response and dropped into a nearby chair. “Recuperating, eh?”
    In the meantime, a rambunctious Edith had squirmed her way into her uncle’s lap and shoved a hyacinth right under his nose. “Smell this,” the four-year-old instructed.
    Anthony set his tea aside and did as ordered, inhaling deeply. “Smells divine.”
    Smiling, Edith tucked the white bloom into his breast pocket, then patted his coat. “There, that looks better.”
    “I have one, too.” Daniel pointed to his own blossom, veering out of his jacket pocket. “It adds a certain air of refinement, wouldn’t you agree?”
    “Most definitely,” Anthony harmonized. “Brings out the gentleman in us all.”
    Ashley only grinned at the two indulgent men before asking her eldest daughter how her walk in the garden fared.
    “It was dull,” Edith said baldly. “Look at my shoes.” She shot her small foot out from under her dress so her uncle and mother could inspect its virtually spotless appearances. “Papa wouldn’t let me go near a bit of dirt.” And then she buried her face in the crook of Anthony’s neck and sighed.
    “You poor thing,” her uncle consoled, wrapping his burly arms tightly around the little creature and stroking her blond ringlets.
    Daniel lifted his hands in defeat. “There is no possible solution to this predicament. If my daughter sets foot in the house with a single smudge on her clothes or person, my wife is upset. And if I don’t allow my daughter to get a single smudge on her clothes or person, then she is upset. What is a man to do?”
    “The dilemma you face, my dear,” his wife remarked in mock pathos, still tapping a fidgety Myra.
    “It most certainly is,” Daniel affirmed, “since the affections of one of my girls will always be alien to me.”
    The solitude Anthony and Ashley had initially come in search of was eradicated by a door hurling open and an anxious Cecilia bounding into the parlor. “What are all of you doing in here?”
    “Recuperating,” Daniel supplied, only to receive a scolding look from his wife for his facetious remark.
    Averting his eyes from his brother-in-law to suppress his mirth, Anthony slowly rose, allowing a giggling Edith to slide down the length of his arms, and then moved over to greet his youngest sister.
    “Good afternoon, Cecilia.”
    Anthony bent down and gave her a kiss on her flushed cheek. Since arriving on the estate a few days past, he’d seen Cecilia on no more than two occasions, she being utterly preoccupied with the arrangements to her début ball, which happened to coincide with her seventeenth birthday. But the estrangement benefited both siblings. Seven years apart, Anthony and Cecilia had never been close and had very little