Read Only a Promise for Free Online

sun. Her skin would surely burn horribly. Yet she was wearing no bonnet.
    He was surprised to notice now that he was looking fully at her that she was rather good looking, even beautiful in a unique sort of way. Her eyes were large and decidedly green. Her nose was straight and the perfectlength to fit her oval face. Her cheekbones were well defined, her lips full and well shaped, her mouth on the wide side. With her hair down . . .
    But she had asked him a question—an impertinent, intrusively personal question. He answered it nevertheless.
    “I begged and pleaded with my father to no avail,” he told her, “and my mother was firmly and tearfully on his side. My grandmother threatened to have me whipped—
horse
whipped, to use her exact words. I suppose she thought I had outgrown spankings. But my grandfather surprised us all and incensed everyone but me. It had been his boyhood dream, it seemed, to be a military officer, a
general
no less, but of course it had not been allowed because he was a duke’s heir and had no brothers. His own son had been a disappointment to him—yes, he said it in the hearing of my father, who was the epitome of the dutiful heir. Let the boy have his way, then, he said of me. Let him follow his dream of glory. I was eighteen years old and just getting finished with school. I was as innocent and as ignorant as a newborn babe. But the word of the Duke of Worthingham was law to his family. And so he purchased my commission in the very best regiment as well as all the finest trappings money could buy.”
    “But your dream was soon shattered,” she said softly.
    What did she know about it? He looked stonily at her before turning his head away sharply. Should he stride off toward the river and trust she would not come trotting after him to offer her company and her conversation again? Or should he stride back to the house and rely upon outpacing her?
    He hesitated a moment too long.
    “I could not help but overhear your conversation with Her Grace last evening,” she said. “I was not deliberately eavesdropping.”
    His eyes returned to hers. He removed his hand from the trunk and leaned his shoulder against it. She must think a gale was blowing. She had a death grip on the corners of her shawl.
    “I understand,” she said, “that you do not wish to marry but that you must.”
    He crossed his arms over his chest and raised one eyebrow. Her impertinence knew no bounds. Though she was quite correct—she had not been eavesdropping. She had been in the drawing room by right of the fact that she was a guest here.
    “I do not believe it is
just
your youth, is it?” she asked.
    He raised the other eyebrow to join the first.
    “That makes you reluctant, I mean,” she said. “It is not just that you are young and wish for more time to sow some wild oats before you settle down. It is not, is it?”
    He felt a curious mixture of urges. One part of him wanted to bellow with laughter. Another part wanted to explode with fury.
    “I believe,” she continued when he remained silent, “it is as you told the duchess. You have nothing to offer beyond what almost every single girl in the land and her mama want. I am not expressing myself very well, am I? But I know what I mean, and you know. There is nothing left inside you to offer, is there? Something has taken it all away. War, perhaps. And you are empty.”
    He had turned cold. It was still quite early morning,of course, and he was standing in the shade of the tree away from what heat there was in the sun. But it was not that. It was not an outer coldness.
    “You presume to know me inside and out, do you, Miss Muirhead,” he said, his voice matching his feelings, “after . . . what is it? An eighteen-hour acquaintance?”
    “I do not know you at all,” she said. “I believe you have made yourself unknowable.”
    “But you have concluded that I am empty.” He looked contemptuously at her. She did not even have the decency to look