Candace Camp Read Online Free PDF

wracked by coughs and worried because his mother had written him, describing her loneliness in heart-wrenching words and adding a long list of things she needed to have done for her. Eleanor, alarmed at the state of his health and furious at Lady Scarbrough’s selfishness, had been struck at last by the solution to the problem.
    She had decided to marry Sir Edmund. As his wife, she could whip the household and his finances into shape, and see to it that he slept and ate properly. Most of all, she could shield him from his mother.
    Of course, she did not love him in the way that a woman loved a man. Theirs would be, truly, a marriage of convenience. But Eleanor did not care about that. She had long ago decided that the sort of marriage other girls dreamed about was not for her. The men who had pursued her were generally only interested in her fortune, and she was too clever and realistic to be fooled by their honeyed words. And the sort of men who were not interested in her wealth did not court her. They might be drawn by her beauty, but she had found that they quickly abandoned the chase.
    She was too headstrong, her stepmother Lydia had told her, too stubborn and too capable. A man wanted a more willing wife, a softer woman, the sort who turned to him to solve problems for her instead of charging in herself to solve not only her own problems, but those of everyone else, as well.
    Eleanor, frankly, had had no interest in marrying the sort of man who wanted that sort of woman for a wife. She had found most of the men who pursued her to be foolish or greedy or entirely too domineering—sometimes all three. She had no desire to become a wife who was subject to her husband’s decisions, giving up control of her money and her life to him. At twenty-six, she considered herself a confirmed spinster and did not regard the prospect with dismay. She had come to believe that the romantic love other women swooned over was something they simply made up in their heads.
    Marrying Sir Edmund had suited her perfectly. She would be able to take care of him and nurture his tremendous talent. She would make it possible for the world to be blessed by his music. And she would take great enjoyment in once again setting a life in order.
    Edmund had been equally willing. He admired Eleanor’s strength and determination, and loved her as much as he was capable of loving anything besides his music. He was a passive creature, his strongest passions reserved for his art, and he was delighted to have Eleanor shoulder the burdens that had plagued him and kept him from his primary love.
    Everything had worked out as she had planned. Edmund had moved into her well-ordered and smoothly-running household, and devoted himself to composing. Eleanor had seen to it that his finances and his health were both improved, and she had taken on his mother. The result, of course, was that Lady Scarbrough despised her, but Eleanor did not care for that. They had moved to Naples, and in the warm climate there, Sir Edmund had grown better daily. Eleanor had been quite pleased with what she had done.
    And then Sir Edmund had died.
    Tears sprang into Eleanor’s eyes, and she ran her hand lovingly over the shining wood of the piano. It seemed too cruel a twist of fate that she had made such strides with Edmund’s health, only to have him fall prey to a foolish boating accident.
    She turned and went to the carved wooden box where her husband’s ashes lay. Unconsciously, she smoothed her forefinger over the intricately carved patterns. She had spent the past six months making sure that Edmund’s last work, the glorious opera he had written, had been produced with all the care and dignity it deserved. But now that it was over, now that she had made sure Edmund’s memory would be preserved in the music he had written, she felt empty and at loose ends.
    The sadness she had helped to keep at bay with work had seeped in, and on the long voyage back to England, often alone in