Lady Vice Read Online Free PDF Page B

Sophia would not yield to Randolph’s pursuit. No lady in England was able to hold her own with wit and strength like Sophia.
    “Lavinia?” Max called through the doorway.
    “Do come in.” Was that her voice—high, wavering and uncertain?
    Max leaned against the door frame, his expression unreadable.
    The fire in the grate and the taper on her dressing table dimly lit the doorway, but Max’s presence dominated, even in shadow. His broad shoulders and self-possessed air made him appear as if he was formed to command an estate.
    Or a woman’s heart.
    The Maximilian of her memory ceased to exist next to the real man. The former was a simple penny-lute tune. In the flesh, Max was the King’s Theater orchestra playing Haydn.
    “You sent for me?” he asked.
    “Yes.”
    Strange. Even across the room, he quickened flesh she had thought hardened and dead. Her body ripened with terrifying yearning.
    “What is it?” he asked.
    Maybe she needn’t send him away. Dare she hope that Max, who valued justice above all else, could learn the truth and understand?
    “Lavinia.” His forehead wrinkled with earnestness. “If you are worried, know this: you are not alone.”
    He stepped inside the chamber. He broke her heart all over again by smoothing her hair and placing a chaste kiss on her forehead. She folded his fingers into her palm and held on to his warmth in urgent silence.
    Love, peace, and refuge.
    Coldness fused her splintering chest.
    All balderdash.
    “You left me once before,” she said.
    He hummed a low, dangerous growl. “What did Vaile do to you? How did he fill you with scorn and bitterness?” Within his eyes, fury hissed like doused-fire smoke. “Did he beat you?”
    A simple yes would earn his understanding and sympathy, and she would never need to reveal the truth.
    She blinked, and her eyelashes stubbornly stuck together. No! She had never given Vaile the pleasure of her tears. She would not cry now.
    “He did, didn’t he?” He lifted her from the chair and gathered her into a fiercely protective embrace. Strangely, she did not bristle. Her cheek flattened against the swell of his chest and denial choked in her throat. She staunched her tears with a stinging inhale.
    “No, Max. Vaile did not beat me.” …Not the way you mean. He’d belittled her and isolated her and raged every day against her stupidity, sloth, and common nature but, outside the marital transaction, he’d never laid a hand on her.
    “Then what?” He released her, frowning.
    She examined him in the dim light. Perhaps, if he had known in his heart that Vaile had used trickery to trap her in marriage, she could trust him to understand the darker details.
    “My separation from Vaile,” she said, “was the last in a long line of humiliations, beginning with a forced marriage.”
    He flinched with surprise, and her stomach lurched like a toppling cart.
    “You did not marry him willingly?”
    In his tone she heard a thousand nights of agony, nights full of self-recrimination, nights he spent believing himself a fool for having given her his love.
    “We married,” she said, “after he had the means to shatter my reputation.”
    “I thought…” he began.
    “You thought me fickle,” she finished.
    Just as she suspected, this man who had always held her heart never once doubted she had betrayed him by choice. Max would never see the ocean of color between black and white. Max, with his proud honor and his unimpeachable record, could only see her as a sullied, weak, and ruined woman.
    She pulled away and walked back to the window. She opened the curtain, craving light. He gripped her shoulders and forced her to face him. The mottled morning sunlight spilled over his face in a haphazard cascade. A muscle in his jaw flinched and the Max she had loved disappeared under the overbearing shadow of a man she did not know.
    “How could I have known you did not wish to marry Vaile?”
    “You could have trusted me.” She jerked