Amanda Rose Read Free Page B

England that he could choose to run to, it seemed unlikely that he would pick her own small stretch of beach. No, she had more pressing worries on her mind than a madman who was probably hundreds of miles away. Only last evening she had received word from her half brother, Edward, the sixth Duke of Brookshire, that he had made final the arrangements for her marriage—arrangements that had been undertaken with nary a word to her. In four months’ time, he had written to her, just a week to the day before her eighteenth birthday, she would become the bride of Lord Robert Turnbull, a plumpish, balding forty-year-old, nephew to Edward’s late mother, the first wife of Amanda’s father, and cousin to Edward himself.
    She would not do it. Oh, she knew she had to marry, and marry well. There was no other course open to a lady of her background and breeding, and she had long since come to accept its inevitability. But not to Lord Robert. Why, he was old and fat, and had already buried one wife—who had been a considerable heiress, if she remembered correctly. Amanda knew that she would, upon her marriage—if that marriage met with Edward’s approval—come into a tidy fortune of her own. With that as her dowry and her own not-inconsiderable charms, she had thought to be able to look as high for a husband as she chose. She had always imagined she would be allowed to select a man from among the list of eligibles who would no doubt pay her court after her come-out. For years she had dreamed of a brilliant season—she would, of course, take the ton by storm and be the year’s reigning belle—and of a handsome, wealthy young man of impeccable lineage who would fall madly in love with her and beg her to be his bride. There would be other gentlemen ready to die for the sake of her beaux yeux, of course, but she would have no one but him. At the end of the season there would be a dazzlingly lovely wedding, and she would waltz into the future with her adoring husband to protect and cherish her. But now Edward was going to spoil it all—as he had always tried to spoil everything for her—by insisting that she wed this cousin of his before any other gentleman had ever seen her, and make her bow to society as Lady Robert Turnbull.
    Edward had always hated her, just as he had hated her mother. His sisters, Lilian and Charlotte, hated her too. No matter that she was their half sister. They bitterly resented the bond of blood that tied her to them, and never let her forget that her mother had been, of all things, on the stage, and a “scheming, immoral creature” who had caught the eye of their widowed father when he was in his dotage. No matter that the fifth duke had adored Isabelle, his beautiful young second wife, and their child, Amanda, who was Isabelle’s mirror image. No matter that he had never fully recovered from his grief when Isabelle died when Amanda was only ten. No matter that he had loved Amanda dearly until his own death three years later.
    The fifth duke had scarcely been cold in his grave when Edward, a ponderous frown on his face, had summoned Amanda to his study—her father’s study—and told her that she was to be sent away to school. She had been pampered and indulged beyond belief all her life, he said, and there was to be no more of it. She was to learn humility and obedience and respect for her elders and betters. Amanda, still in shock from the loss of her beloved father, had born Edward’s tirade in drooping silence until he had dared to call her mother a painted whore. Even at the tender age of thirteen she had recognized fighting words when she heard them. Flooded with the fiery temper that went with the color of her hair, she had flown at Edward, kicking him soundly in the shins. The next morning she had been packed off to Our Lady of the Sorrows Convent, where the sisters of the Order of the Magdalene operated a school for young ladies from some of England’s best families who for one reason or