Seducing Mr. Heywood Read Free Page A

eternity.
    Her second husband, though not brutish, was phlegmatic and sickly. He had taken it into his head to visit one of his country estates in Scotland during February and had caught cold and died within a fortnight. They’d been married scarcely two months. She’d had little time, with either match, to provide her husband with an heir.
    The third time around the Marriage Mart, men were looking askance at her. Though Sophia was more beautiful at eighteen than she had been at fifteen, prospective husbands were not forming a queue to become husband number three. Only dear George, Baron Rowley, had been brave enough to risk the curse. His long-barren wife had recently died, and George was desperate to secure an heir. He was the last of his line, a line that went back to the time of the first King Harry.
    A deal was struck: an heir, perhaps two, and Sophia would be free. Wise old George recognized Sophia’s robust health and fertility. He settled a yearly sum on her errant father, pronounced that he would be unwelcome in their home, and concluded a generous financial arrangement for Sophia, payable upon production of said heirs to the Rowley name and fortune.
    Dear George! He’d understood her so well. After the birth of their sons he was content in Yorkshire, while she dazzled the
ton
in London with her beauty, wealth, and elegance, finding virile young men to amuse her. Though she did not have the number of lovers that the
ton
attributed to her, she found that her wild reputation grew no matter what she did or did not do in fact. Her beauty was a magnet for gossip and lies; much as it drew men, it also drew malicious rumors. Society enjoyed painting her as a frivolous lightskirt.
    Scurrilous
on-dits
were out of her control. It was the way of the
beau monde.
Sophia preferred to ignore therumors than to waste her time denying them. If it amused the
beau monde
to label her promiscuous, no protest from her could alter that fiction.
    It was an extremely satisfactory marital arrangement, hers and the baron’s. It worried her that George would hear, and perhaps heed, the gossip, but he never chastised her behavior, save to suggest that she should visit the boys more often than was her wont. That she had ignored her sons these last few years—though she visited them regularly when they were toddlers—brought her twinges of guilt and discomfort. She no longer had a husband who insisted on controlling her behavior, much less one who abused her, but she had been remiss in her maternal duties. She had become mired in an endless round of pleasure, a dizzying tune she called, from country house to town, spa, and back again, and she told herself she was content.
    Until she met Isaac and suddenly, unexpectedly, wanted something more. For the first time ever in her young life, she wondered what it would be like to be the wife of a man she passionately loved, someone she, herself, had chosen. To be, perhaps, Lady Isaac Rebow. After George died, she’d been so certain it would happen. Everyone had thought so! Until that country chit, all big dark eyes and in the full bloom of youth, had appeared on the scene.
    How the
ton
had laughed! It was so very amusing, such rich fodder for
on-dits
! The worldly Lady Sophia trumped by a mere country girl. It had been unbearable. Her world had come tumbling down like the fragile house of cards it was. Isaac had become remote, untouchable. She could not persuade him to come back to her bed. Her practiced charms, her honeyed tongue, had failed her. Sophia could not return now to London after Isaac’s public spurning. How could she ever hold her head high again?
    She was condemned to spend the rest of her life in north Yorkshire, at Rowley Hall. She had no friends or acquaintances in the immediate area and little knowledge of tiny, rustic Rowley Village. In her heart she harboredthe bitter knowledge that London’s
on-dits
had traveled north by the fastest stagecoach route, so that, even here at the