Make Me Love You Read Online Free PDF Page A

indifferent, and on rare occasions, caring and interested. Sometimes I thought . . . but if I’d been myself with her, I would have been caught in the crosshairs when she reverted to being as cold as my father. The hurt she caused me would have been so much worse if I’d allowed myself to hope it could be otherwise. But you—I wished so many times that you, not Harriet, were my mother.”
    “Not as many times as I wished you were my daughter. But you are the daughter of my heart, never doubt that.” Then Alfreda cleared the emotion out of her throat and added more formally, “We know why you hid yourself from that unnatural family of yours. It was the only way to save yourself pain and abuse. Let us both hope those days are gone for good.”
    “What d’you think will happen if Dominic Wolfe doesn’t like me and sends me back home?” Brooke wondered aloud.
    “Nothing other than you will likely get that Season in London that you were promised, and soon after, some other husband. But there would have to be something very wrong with Lord Wolfe for him not to like you, poppet.”
    “But he hates Robert and will hate me because of it.”
    “Then he would be a fool.”
    “He could be that anyway.” Brooke sighed a little forlornly. “I knew I would marry eventually, but I expected a courtship.”
    “As well you should have.”
    “To at least know my husband well before we reached the altar.”
    “We have passed beyond ‘usual’ circumstances here. You could ask for a brief courtship, though. If your wolf is a good man, he might agree.”
    “Or he could be as afraid of the royals as my family and drag me straight to the altar instead.”
    Alfreda chuckled. “Which is it you want, to be turned away at the door or married straightaway?”
    Brooke sighed again. “I won’t know until I meet him. I wish none of this had happened.”
    “Take heart, poppet. This northern lord could be wonderful. The Prince Regent could be doing you a very big favor.”
    “Or Robert could have done me the biggest unplanned ill yet. Getting me stuck with a husband who could well repulse me.”
    Alfreda tsked. “Then perhaps we shouldn’t speculate?”
    “Perhaps not.”
    On the third day of their journey, when they stopped for lunch, no one at the inn knew who Dominic Wolfe was. But they found out that the Regent’s emissary was traveling so swiftly that he was probably on his way back to London by now. Apparently, he was traveling day and night, merely changing horses when he could, and sleeping in his coach.
    That night, they were only a few hours away from Lord Wolfe’s estate, but Alfreda refused to continue on in the dark. She wanted Brooke to be refreshed and looking her best when she faced the wolf for the first time. They took a room at an inn and Alfreda went down to order a bath for Brooke and to have food delivered to their room. When she returned, she had information about the Wolfe family.
    “You aren’t going to like this,” Alfreda said with a dour look. “As if you already don’t have enough worries on your plate, this family you’ve been ordered to join apparently has acurse hanging over their heads, so I think now we need to hope you get turned away at their door.”
    “What sort of curse?”
    “The nasty sort, centuries old, a curse that has killed all the firstborns in each generation in their twenty-fifth year—unless illness or accident takes them sooner.”
    Round-eyed with amazement, Brooke said, “You’re joking, right?”
    “No, just repeating what the barmaid, then the cook, and then one of his own villagers who is visiting a relative near here had to say about Lord Wolfe’s family.”
    “But we—I mean, I don’t believe in curses. D’you?”
    “Not really. The thing is, poppet, many people do, including those who are supposedly cursed. If you are told you are going to die by a certain age, you might be more reckless with your life so the harm invoked by the curse ends up happening