Portrait of My Heart Read Free

nature.”
    Jeremy, thoroughly embarrassed now, muttered into his beer, “Well, being a duke certainly doesn’t make that kind of thing any easier. I mean, my God, I can’t even marry whom I choose! I have to marry a woman who’d make a decent duchess.”
    “True,” Edward said. “But that doesn’t necessarily follow that it’s impossible for one to find marital bliss with the kind of woman who’d make a decent duchess.” Thoughtfully, he lifted his tankard. “I managed to do it, after all.”
    “Too bad my father wasn’t as discriminating,” Jeremy
commented bitterly. “Of a pair of sisters, he managed to pick the one who’d eventually end up getting him killed.”
    Edward cleared his throat uncomfortably as he set the tankard down again. “Yes, well. Pegeen was only ten years old, I believe, when John first came calling on your mother, so I don’t believe she was much in the running.” Then, as if remembering something, Edward leaned forward and said, in a completely different tone of voice, “You’re not to tell your aunt why it was you were sent down this time, Jerry.”
    “As if I would,” Jeremy said bitterly. “The last thing I’d want is for Aunt Pegeen to know. But she’s bound to find out anyway. It will probably make the papers.”
    “Certainly it will make the papers,” Edward said with a curt nod. “That’s different, however, than you coming straight out and admitting it. That’s the only way Pegeen’d ever believe you were capable of murder.”
    “Right,” Jeremy agreed, with a smile every bit as cynical as his uncle’s had been earlier. “Me, the boy who cried for hours after his first hunt, because he felt so sorry for the fox.”
    “You didn’t cry for all that long,” Edward said, shifting in his seat, a little uncomfortable at the memory of that fateful day. “But you’re right. It’s hard to reconcile what you were then to what you are now.”
    Jeremy’s gaze was still sarcastic. “And what am I now, Uncle?”
    “That’s up to you, isn’t it?” Edward took another sip of his beer, then asked, “What sort of man do you want to be?”
    “One who isn’t a duke,” Jeremy responded promptly.
    “But that,” Edward said, “isn’t possible.”
    Jeremy nodded as if this were the response he’d expected. Without another word, he started to slide from the settle. Edward looked up at him, surprised. “Where are you going?” he asked.
    “To the devil,” Jeremy informed him casually.
    “Ah,” Edward said with a nod. He settled more deeply into his seat, and lifted his tankard in a solemn toast to his nephew’s departing back. “Be home in time for dinner, then.”

Chapter 2

    “Oh, Maggie!” Lady Edward Rawlings cried, as she brushed aside the tissue paper surrounding the small canvas. “Oh! Oh, it’s lovely!”
    Maggie Herbert, her freckled nose wrinkled skeptically, looked down at the painting from where she stood behind Pegeen’s chair. Too much green, she thought. Yes, entirely too much green in the background. As she scrutinized the painting, a white blossom spiraled down from the branches stretched overhead, and settled upon the freshly dried canvas. Maggie thought the petal an improvement, but Pegeen impatiently swept it away.
    “Oh, I can’t wait to show it to Edward,” Pegeen declared, her gaze still locked upon the painting. “He simply won’t believe it. I don’t think any of the other portraits we’ve had done of the children captures them quite as accurately as this one—”
    “Really?” Maggie’s tone was mildly incredulous. She narrowed her eyes until the image on the canvas blurred, but she could still see only a series of shapes and colors she’d laid down the day before, and not the whole of the painting that Pegeen was raving over. And too much green.
    “Oh, yes,” Pegeen assured her. “Why, it’s as if you were able to capture their little souls!”
    Maggie laughed. “Oh, hardly! If I’d done that, Lizzie would