Affair of the Heart Read Online Free PDF Page B

“I’m ready. Let’s go.” And she swung up into the saddle.
    * * * *
    Caroline had come close to marrying two men in her life; had in fact been engaged to both of them. The first was Clifford Van Leuven, a law student at the University of Virginia, where Caroline had gotten her undergraduate degree. She had been a junior when she met Cliff, and in her senior year they got engaged and moved in together. He was graduating from law school at the same time she would finish college, and they planned an autumn wedding.
    Both Nancy and Ambassador Carruthers had been broad-minded about Caroline’s living arrangements. They liked Cliff, who came from an old and moneyed family.
    Caroline had broken their engagement a week before her graduation. It upset everyone: Cliff, his parents, her parents, and not least of all herself. She liked Cliff very much. He was a first-class person, and she knew it. She knew that any girl who landed him could count herself lucky. And he loved her; she knew that as well. She had told herself that her liking was bound to turn into something stronger, that once she went to bed with him the spark that had never quite lit for her would take fire.
    It hadn’t. And as time went by she realized that it never would. It just wasn’t there for her, and reluctantly she had come to the conclusion that she would have to break the engagement off.
    Deep inside her cool, sophisticated exterior, Caroline was waiting for her prince, for the man who would sweep her off her feet and turn her world upside down. A year ago she had thought she had found him in Gerald FitzMaurice, Earl of Clontarf. She had been on vacation in Ireland staying with some friends of her father’s, and she met him at a hunt meet. She was dazzled by his charm, his aristocratic elegance, his house, his horses, his title, and the fact that he had clearly fallen for her. When he asked her to marry him she said yes, taken up by visions of being Lady Clontarf and enjoying a life of hunting in the beautiful Irish countryside.
    But Gerald, the man, failed to sweep her off her feet. As a lover he proved to be skillful, tender, and passionate, but for some reason Caroline felt something lacking. She was furious with herself. What more could she possibly want out of life? she kept asking herself. Half the girls in the British Isles would give their eyeteeth to marry Gerald.
    But in the end she had broken their engagement, again upsetting both their families and hurting him deeply. Her father had been extremely annoyed with her. “What on earth’s the matter with you, Caroline?” he had demanded. “If you’re not going to go through with the marriage, will you for God’s sake refrain from getting engaged? Nancy even had invitations printed up this time.”
    “I’m sorry, Daddy,” was all she could say. “I thought I loved him, but I don’t. I’m sorry.”
    “What kind of man are you waiting for, anyway?” her father had snapped in irritation. “If Cliff and Clontarf aren’t good enough? A prince?”
    She rode alongside her stepbrother through the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming and looked at him through her lashes. He wasn’t remotely like a prince. He was a tough, arrogant man who had made it perfectly clear that he didn’t like her. But the mere touch of his hand on hers had been more erotic than the intimate caresses of her two fiancés. She knew, with all her feminine instincts, that this was the man who could sweep her off her feet. But she liked him as little as he liked her. She bit her lip and stared resolutely ahead. He spelled danger, she thought, and the best defense would be to keep as far away from him as she possibly could. She would go back to Washington.
    “And how come you aren’t married?” she asked, her voice cool and husky. “I should think you’d want an army of sons to come after you here.”
    The look he gave her was cold and unsmiling. “I’m thinking about it,” he said.
    “Oh? In the abstract or the