Truly Yours Read Free Page A

when he had the energy to visit the prisons, to see for himself if the accused were truly guilty.
    He had thought Rex would help him when the boy got home. Rescuing the innocent from a harsh justice system seemed a worthy crusade for a retired young warrior, especially one who could tell in an instant when the witnesses were lying, when the prosecutors were supplying false evidence. Rex had not been interested, preferring his bone-numbing, brooding excursions.
    Such solitude was not good for the lad, Lord Royce knew. How could the earl not know, having spent almost half of his own life alone? Such loneliness sapped a man’s strength and sometimes even made him wish for an end to the aching sorrow. Lord Royce brushed a bit of traitorous dampness from his cheek as he remembered the empty space in his own life, the empty rooms attached to his where his countess should have slept. He quickly replaced those memories, as always, with the image of the beautiful little blue-eyed sprite who used to laugh and giggle and bounce on his lap. It was too late for him, but the earl could not let his heir, his beloved boy, dwindle into a broken, bitter old man like himself. No, he would not, not while he had breath in his body.
    The earl reached for the letter on the table by his side and smoothed out the creases. Maybe this piece of paper held the answer.
     
This could not be happening to her.
    How many hundreds of prisoners had cried out the same thing? Two or ten thousand, Amanda did not care. This simply could not be happening, not to her. God have mercy, for she had not done anything wrong!
    Well, she had, if one could call stupidity a crime. And she had, indeed, argued with Sir Frederick Hawley. Of course she had; he was a bounder of the blackest sort. Amanda and her stepfather had argued frequently since her mother’s death five years ago. How else was Amanda to see that the servants were paid, that his own young son and daughter were properly cared for, that their house did not fall down around their ears? Sir Frederick was a miser, a mean, dirty-tempered, dirt-in-his-pores dastard. And he was dead.
    He’d been all too alive that morning when they had fought over Amanda’s latest suitor. The heir to a barony was going to call to ask for her hand in marriage—and Sir Frederick said he was going to refuse, again. It was not that Amanda loved Mr. Charles Ashway, but he was a pleasant gentleman who would have made a decent husband, and a husband was her only chance of escaping Sir Frederick’s clutches. At twenty-two years of age, she had long since given up on girlish dreams of finding true love and was ready to settle on a kind, caring man. She respected and admired Mr. Ashway, who seemed to offer her respect and admiration in return, two things sadly lacking since Amanda’s mother had wed Sir Frederick ten years ago.
    Her mother had been lonely, two years a widow. Amanda could well understand that. She could understand, too, how her mother could feel sorry for Sir Frederick’s motherless children, Edwin and Elaine. What she could not understand was how her mother could not see Sir Frederick for what he was.
    Not three months after the wedding, he had dismissed Amanda’s beloved governess, claiming that since his spinster sister was well educated enough to teach his own children, she would be adequate for Amanda. Amanda’s nursemaid went next. She was too old, he claimed. And what need for Amanda’s pony, in the city?
    Then, when Sir Frederick realized that instead of his being elevated to his wife’s social position, the former Lady Alissa Carville was demoted to the fringes of the polite world that he inhabited, she became nothing but a burden to him. Amanda’s mother was a frail burden, moreover, too sickly for his baser needs. Worse, her widow’s annuity ended at her marriage, and the bulk of her wealth was in trust for Amanda.
    Sir Frederick should have looked a little harder before he leaped, too. It was a bad