To Kiss a Thief Read Free Page B

imagined the scene with which his father had been confronted, he shuddered.
    â€œDon’t think on it.” His stepmother patted his hand consolingly. “What matters is that you’re free now—free to bestow your heart where you wish.”
    His heart ? His stepmother of all people should have known he had no heart to give.
    Love was for the weak and the foolish. He had learned that long ago. Even had he been prone to such weakness, such foolishness, what had his heart to do with his marriage? How could he allow himself to fall in love with the wife his father had all but forced upon him? Sarah Pevensey had been too meek by half, undeniably plain, utterly passionless.
    In their two weeks of married life he had been tempted at times to believe he might have misjudged her. And in the end, she had proved him right. The woman he had thought he’d known had lacked the nerve to do what his wife had done. Brice had seen something in her, known something of her that he, her husband, had quite overlooked.
    At the time, the revelation of her true nature had been oddly liberating. Her behavior on the night of the nuptial ball had confirmed both his father’s poor choice and his own belief that love was a risk not worth taking. It had provided the perfect excuse for St. John to keep himself at arm’s length from his wife. Now, Sarah was gone and, as his stepmother said, he was free. Free to do as he pleased.
    He jerked to his feet and began to pace.
    Why didn’t he feel free?
    â€œOh, bother.” His stepmother was rummaging through her lap desk. “Would you be a dear and fetch me some paper? I’ll send ’round a note to Eliza and invite her to tea.”
    It seemed an unlikely bond had formed between the two women in his absence. As Eliza apparently came for tea every day, he very much doubted she required an invitation. But he strode across the room to his stepmother’s escritoire, if only to put some distance between them.
    â€œMiddle drawer,” she called after him.
    The morning’s post was strewn across the desktop. A stack of bills caught his eye: winter ball gowns, feminine fripperies, a new chaise for a sitting room where no one ever sat. None of it was surprising. Money had always run through his stepmother’s fingers like water.
    What rankled now was the knowledge that those were the sorts of uses to which Sarah’s dowry was being put.
    As he had married only to secure the family estate, St. John had willingly turned over the money to that purpose. The mistake had been ceding the management of it to his father in his absence. He shuddered to think what might have been made of those thirty thousand pounds in the hands of a man with a head for business—someone decidedly unlike his father, who had allowed his wife to squander a fortune and then informed his son and heir it was his duty to marry the daughter of a cit to save his family from drowning in their debts.
    His hand curled around the carved rail of the escritoire’s delicate chair until he heard something crack. His time under the Caribbean sun ought to have burned off some of his anger toward the man, but clearly live embers still crackled in the darker recesses of his soul.
    â€œFairfax, dear, I’m waiting.”
    â€œComing, Mama,” he said, pushing the address past a clenched jaw—although to be fair, she had never been the one to insist upon it. Did his father regret even some of the choices he had made?
    He fingered the teardrop-shaped pull and tugged gently, but the drawer gave at best half an inch. More force made little headway. He jiggled the drawer from side to side, hoping to dislodge whatever obstructed its movement. After three tries, a small strip of crumpled paper fluttered to the floor at the back of the desk. He knelt to snatch it up, then opened the drawer, which slid easily now, and pulled out several sheets of writing paper to take to his