A Husband's Wicked Ways Read Online Free PDF Page A

believe. We’d pay it out gladly to her if there was a way of making sure she didn’t know where it came from.”
    Greville made a vague gesture that could have meant anything. “I’ll look into it.” He offered a half salute and left the office.
    On the now dark street, he hailed a passing hackney and directed it to Brook Street. His aunt Agatha, Lady Broughton, was his late mother’s widowed sister. She was a lady of considerable means and very fond of her own way, but otherwise a kindly soul and always delighted to see her nephew, although always somewhat disconcerted at his lack of social activities on his rare visits to town. She would be delighted to host her nephew for an extended period during the delights of the season, he knew, but a bachelor needed his own establishment.
    He entered the hall with a nod of thanks to the butler, who had opened the door, and went straight up to hisown bedchamber, an imposing if somewhat old-fashioned apartment. A fire blazed in the grate, the lamps had been lit, and Greville could appreciate comforts that rarely came his way when he was working. He walked to the window and drew aside the curtain. The gas lamps had been lit on the street, and a private carriage bowled past, its owner presumably on his or her way to an evening of social gaiety, if not outright dissipation.
    It was not his world, any more than it had been Frederick Farnham’s. But Frederick’s wife had given every indication of fitting neatly into it. Not wife, he reminded himself. Widow.
    He frowned into the fizzing yellow light of the lamp below his window. Frederick had talked often of Aurelia…Ellie, he’d called her. One evening in particular…when they’d both been drinking deep of a flagon of hard cider in a barn in Brittany, listening to the sounds of pursuit, the baying dogs, the shouts of the enemy, finally fading into the night.
    You know, Greville, I don’t think Ellie really knows who she is, or what she’s capable of. She has strengths she doesn’t know she has because she’s never had to use them.
    Greville let the curtain drop again over the window. There had been more in that vein, the younger man’s voice redolent with the knowledge that the chances of seeing his wife again were almost too remote to contemplate. They’d grown up together in the same small country village, their neighboring families closely entwined in the way of County families, who made up the aristocracy of the countryside. They had married as a matter of course, fulfilling the expectations of both their families. But Frederick Farnham had recognized something in his wife that no one else had seen. He had followed his country’s call, knowing full well that he would probably never live a normal life again, knowing that he would never have the opportunity to tap those hidden depths in his wife. He hadn’t said it in so many words, but it had been implied in every word he spoke that concerned her.
    How would he have felt if in his absence another man did that?
    It was a startling thought, and Greville knew that it had grown from the recesses of his mind where, without his conscious intent, plans and strategies for his new assignment were breeding. He needed a cover, a front for his present task.
    If Aurelia did indeed have the hidden and unacknowledged depths her husband had believed in, then perhaps she would be willing to help him, if he presented it correctly…if he offered the right incentives. Of course, she had given the impression that afternoon of disliking him intensely, but that was hardly surprising. He’d just told her she’d been living a lie for more than three years, and the man she’d married was not at all the man she’d thought him. Killing the messenger was the natural response. But first impressions couldbe amended. And there were, as he’d just reflected, always incentives.
    Greville knew that he was no courtier. He had none of the smooth skills of flattery and flirtation. Oh, he could