Read Again, My Lord: A Twist Series Novel for Free Online

village of Swinly was so tiny and out of the way that its only inn was far from fashionable. Richard had counted on that, of course. A fashionable inn would have cost him more. Worse, she might accidentally encounter someone from the high society he had never taken her into since their wedding, and he could not allow that.
    Yet she had anyway. She had encountered the one person she least wished to ever see again.
    She looked about the plain room in which the gorgeous Goddess of Love was the only hint of luxury. An earl’s daughter—an earl’s
sister
—and she had come to this—this debased penury, this continual hidden shame, this pale, cold, hard woman with circles beneath her eyes and bruises on her body in places no one but she ever saw.
    “You are a horrid liar,” she said to the Aphrodite statue. Then, thinking of the man in the taproom downstairs, she said with pinched lips, “And a cruel tease.”
    Unbuttoning her gown, petticoat and stays, she used the water in the pitcher on the table to wash the worst of the mud from the skirts. Then she hung the damp clothing and stockings before the grate upon which the coals were already dying, doused the candle, and crawled beneath the coverlet.
    Tomorrow she would return home to the man who two months earlier had begun to lay his hand not only on her, but also on her son.
    “Tomorrow I will find a solution,” she whispered to the rain beating on the window and roof of her little room. During the long, solitary ride home she would devise a plan that would free her son from Richard without bringing shame upon her mother, sister, brothers, or anybody else. Ian was only now beginning to wrest their family’s name from the dirt their father had dragged it through. She would not follow her father’s model. The Chance name and title would never be stained because of her. No one would ever know.
    Pride was all she had left.
    “Tomorrow,” she said, and it felt like both a promise and a prayer.

 

Chapter Two
    Calista jolted up in bed , the toll of an enormous bell crashing through her sleep. Clapping palms over her ears, she cast her eyes into the murkiness.
    She was in her bedchamber in the inn. Her traveling case sat on the dressing table, the Aphrodite statue beside it, and rain pattered against the window as the bell’s ring faded into silence.
    Barely a moment of peace passed before it boomed a second time. It sounded like it was beside her ear. Climbing out of bed as the bell’s third toll made the candleholder jitter on the dressing table, she darted across the chilly floor and peered out the window. Through the rain slashing over the rear yard of the inn, she saw a massive stone tower that even in the reluctant light of winter dawn was unmistakably a church. In the downpour last night she had not noticed it.
    The tolls ceased at seven. Mumbling a curse, she stared longingly at the bed. Sleep was a luxury Calista Holland was never permitted, apparently not even in escape.
    Except that at home, since Richard’s gout had come on so severely four months earlier, she had been sleeping in the guest bedchamber. There her son often found her as dawn peeked through the draperies. Climbing under the blankets, he would cuddle his warm little body up to her and she would allow herself another thirty minutes of dozing until she had to leave him to see to his father’s demands and the rest of the household.
    She missed him already. How would she endure a month without his little hand firmly in hers, his arms around her neck as he hugged her, and his sincere eyes as he told her about his day spent following the maid on her rounds of the house when Calista could not be with him? She could barely endure a single night.
    Dressing in clothes that had not dried entirely and were stiff with cold, she buttoned her pelisse up tightly over her growling belly while staring at the Aphrodite statue. Like a ghost, it was pale white in the light of the rainy dawn, its body as supply