The Magic of You Read Free

when the real reason he’d wanted to put an everlasting end to James Malory was because James had compromised Georgina and publicly announced that fact at a gathering that had included half of their hometown of Bridgeport, Connecticut.
    Yes, Warren was much to blame for the animosity that still existed between her husband and her brothers. But James was not faultless either; he had, in fact, instigated all of the original hostility with his acerbic tongue. And come to find out, after he’d carted her off to England, that it had all been deliberate on his part, to get her brothers to force him to marry her, which they’d done quick enough; but that had not put an end to the talk of hanging, at least not from Warren.
    And yet she understood Warren’s side of it, too. Her brothers had despised the English even before the War of 1812, because of the English blockade of Europe that had cost the Skylark line so many of their established trade routes. Then there were also the numerous Skylark ships that had been stopped and boarded when the English were arbitrarily searching for deserters to fill their ranks. Warren bore a small scar on his left cheek from one of those forced boardings, when the English had insisted on confiscating several of his crew and he’d tried to prevent it.

    No, none of her brothers bore any love for the English, and the war had just made those sentiments worse. So it was no wonder they felt that James Malory, an English viscount, once the most notorious rake in London, and an ex-pirate, wasn’t good enough for their only sister. If she didn’t love her husband to distraction, they would never have left her in his care when they finally located them in London. And James knew that, which was just another reason he’d never be completely amicable to her brothers.
    But she and James weren’t going to speak of it anymore tonight. It was a very touchy subject just now, and James and Georgina had learned to keep touchy subjects out of the bedroom. Not that they couldn’t have a rousing fight in that particular room, or in any other room for that matter. But in the bedroom they tended to get distracted, which sort of took the steam out of a good argument.
    They’d just finished being distracted, very pleasantly so, and James was still holding Georgina in his arms and every so often nibbling on a patch of bare skin, which promised they would soon be distracted again. She found it amusing, outrageously funny actually, that James and his brother Anthony, both reformed rakes of the worst sort, both told to abstain from lovemaking in the last stages of their wives’ pregnancies, both found it a delightful joke to let it be assumed by friend and familyalike that they were following doctor’s orders, but abhorring the deprivation.
    Even James’s son, Jeremy, had been fooled and was heard to offer the supportive words, “Well, hell’s bells, what’s two weeks when we used to be at sea for much longer between ports?”
    What was funniest about that was that Jeremy, fast following in his father’s footsteps, ought to know better. He should have realized that two such masters of all things sensual, as both James and Anthony were, would know how to get around the doctor’s dictate to satisfy themselves and their wives in other ways.
    James had enjoyed the pretense, however, of appearing touchy in the extreme, just as Anthony had before him, at least until the letter arrived from America. Now there was no pretense at all to James’s black mood, which no one was immune to, not when his satirical wit could lacerate so indiscriminately and with such deadly accuracy. Georgina had felt a few barbs herself, but she’d long ago figured out the perfect way to retaliate, by not retaliating at all, which drove her dear husband mad with vexation.
    He wasn’t vexed at the moment. He wasn’t even thinking of the impending arrival of his in-laws, which would have totally destroyed his presently mellow mood. James was a