Secrets of the Heart Read Free Page B

to be sure of him. Surely she, as his wife, should know him the best of all! Rachel felt sure that if Miranda had been in her situation, she would have known exactly what Dev was involved in.
    Rachel sighed as she sat down in front of the vanity and began to brush out her hair. She studied her reflection in the mirror as she did so. She was still an attractive woman, she told herself. Her hair was thick and black, and moonstruck admirers still wrote odes to her green eyes. She had retained the slim figure of her youth, and no wrinkles marred her skin. She was twenty-seven, still young.
    She paused in her brushing for a moment, looking intently into the mirror. Had she changed since the day Michael had met her? But she knew the answer to that question—the change had all been inside her.
    Her hand tightened involuntarily on her brush. She had married as she was supposed to, as Society expected and her father had demanded. But in doing her duty, she had given up her hopes and dreams. She had denied the longings of her heart.
    Rachel could still remember the awful pain of her decision. There had been nothing else she could do, she knew. Her father had been right; had she not married Michael, it would have been scandal and ruin for her family and herself—as well as for Michael, who had been entirely innocent in the whole matter. She had done what she had to do, but in doing so she had condemned her heart to despair. She had married Michael and had said goodbye to the man she loved.

2
    R achel remembered with clarity the evening that she first met Michael. It had been at a rout of Lady Wetherford’s, a boring crush of an affair, attended, it seemed, by half of London Society. She could not remember exactly who had been there; indeed, she only vaguely recalled Lady Wetherford introducing her and her mother to Lord Westhampton. Her first impression of him had been merely that of a tall blond man, several years older than she and good-looking in a rather nondescript way. Knowing Michael as she did now, Rachel felt sure that he had been impeccably but plainly dressed, his clothes dark and formal and nothing that would attract attention. He would have been the perfect picture of an English gentleman, for, indeed, that was what Michael was.
    But Rachel had paid little attention to him, smiling—for that evening she had been able to do little else but smile, so radiant was the feeling inside her—and returning the usual polite chitchat about the weather and the crush of the party and the opera, which she had attended the evening before. All the time they had talked, her senses had been tuned to the rest of the room, seeking out the same person whom she sought at every social occasion, the man who had engendered her radiant joy that night. For she remembered the evening, not because of Michael, but because that was the night when Anthony Birkshaw had told her that he loved her.
    Even now, a faint smile touched Rachel’s face at the memory.
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    Rachel was nineteen, and in the midst of her first Season. It was a year late in coming, a result of her family’s usual state of impecunity. Cleybourne, her older sister’s husband, had given her mother the money for Rachel’s debut the next year, and Rachel was well aware that it was up to her to do her best to recoup the family’s fortunes. Few expected her to attain her sister’s success, for Caroline had married a duke, the highest rung on the ladder of nobility. But Rachel had the Aincourt good looks and a pleasing personality, and her family was one of the best in England—albeit one seemingly incapable of holding on to money. It was generally expected that she, too, would make a good marriage.
    Rachel did not question her role in such plans. It was, after all, the way people of her class married. There were no longer the arranged marriages of old, of course, where a wedding was primarily an alliance of two families for purposes of wealth,