Edith Layton Read Online Free PDF Page B

the best one for myself.”
    “Why isn’t he married? Something deep and dark and secret? Did some exotic female break his heart?” Camille asked with mock melodrama and was instantly sorry. Her sister-in-law, Belle, looked stricken.
    Miles reached out and took his wife’s hand. “Asa matter of fact, he had a fancy for our Belle,” he told Camille, though his eyes never left his wife’s. “Who would not? But my luck held. As you can see, she preferred me.”
    Camille had felt ill. Not only would she not hurt Belle’s feelings for the world, she herself was as far from exotic as she could get without leaving the country.
    “No, not so,” Belle said softly. “Eric never meant it. All that flirtation was merely for effect. In fact, it seems to me that he’s always preferred whomever he thought he couldn’t get.”
    Camille had turned her face away, afraid her sudden joy at hearing that Eric hadn’t really succumbed to Belle’s dark charms might be noticed.
    She’d seen him often since then. She made sure of it. “Of course I could go with other men,” she’d told Miles and Belle in as pitiable a voice as she could muster, “but I feel most comfortable with Eric, because he’s your friend.” It was a gamble. They might guess how she really felt. She couldn’t help that. But they loved her, and she could trust them to keep their knowledge to themselves.
    And so, as a friend, and one of Miles’s few unmarried ones, Eric came along with them to the theater and the opera and for walks and drives. Once he’d even invited her for an afternoon all by herself, with her maid for propriety, of course. They’d gone to Astley’s Amphitheatre to see performing equestrians and trained horses. Camille hadn’t slept thenight before and had been light-headed with happiness when she got there—until she’d looked around and seen that it was exactly where a kindly uncle would take a child who was visiting the city.
    The more she found out about him, the more he delighted her. His likes and dislikes dovetailed with her own. He was athletic, he liked animals and the countryside. He read books and cared about politics and never minded that she did too. But however he looked and sounded, Camille was no fool, and she’d learned in a hard school. Her mother’s second husband had been a handsome, charming villain. Camille knew how to judge a man. She judged Eric one of the best.
    She had nothing to offer him but conversation, laughter, friendship, love, and devotion. She knew that. But she dared dream that would be enough, and all the novels she’d read fueled that dream. Now she had her chance.
    Eric hadn’t found someone else to love in London, at least, not yet. He didn’t seem smitten by the recent crop of Incomparables, nor did he have a current mistress. She knew, because she’d asked every gossip she’d met. Little by little, her dream had grown ever more possible—until tonight.
    She believed he would survive the beating he’d just received. After all, he was still walking and making sense. Nor was she daunted by his illness—malaria might be dreadful, but she refused to believe he could be felled by it. If it was chronic, itdidn’t matter. She’d see him through that and more. The question was whether he’d want her to.
    Camille stole a glance at the perfect profile of the girl Eric had rescued. She sat gazing out the window at the darkened city, her secrets still as mysterious as she was. Young, beautiful, a tragic victim saved by a gallant stranger. They’d been thrown together by fate. And fate had a way of uniting chance-met lovers, or at least, it did in every novel Camille had read.
    She swallowed hard and prayed her own fantasies were more powerful than the fictions she imagined, because she was so weary of fantasy and so very eager for life. And she couldn’t see how her life would mean very much without Eric in it.

Chapter 3
    T here was nothing to do but wait and worry. Camille was good at