One Final Season Read Online Free PDF

besotted, driven idiot she’d once made of him ever again.
    Once he’d let himself see the gaping chasm between heated dream and chilly reality, he’d contented himself with his estates and the odd trip to Bath to see his elderly aunt, until the blessed day when he had finally got himself under strict enough control to be indifferent to Kate Alstone. By some benign fluke, it was in that elegant and usually middle-aged spa town that he’d met Therese, a lush and lovely widow ten years his senior, who took him to her bed and taught him there were other women in the world besides Kate, however little his heart wanted to admit it at the time. Then, after what he’d thought was a mutually satisfying association, Therese decided to marry again. So she’d wed a man ten years her senior after declaring herself quite ineligible as the next Viscountess Shuttleworth when he offered to make her so.
    ‘You are too young, my love, too idealistic and intense to be happy in such a lukewarm arrangement,’ she’d told him that last time they were together. ‘We have been happy, but it’s time for us to part. I shall wed my colonel and make him an excellent wife, but I’m not the woman you dream of when you cry out her name in your sleep. Either convince that one to marry you, dearest Edmund, or tear her out of your heart before you wed some poor girl who’ll be for ever second-best.’
    He’d protested, of course. Assured her that if she married him she and the family they could make together would always come first. But Therese had chided him for offering what he couldn’t deliver and he’d hesitated too long before she gave him a sad smile and left to plan her wedding to her still handsome and rather rich colonel and to settle three counties away, which was probably just as well for all three of them. Therese was a fine woman with a quick wit and a kind heart and she now had a settled life with a man who adored her. Edmund liked and admired her, but he didn’t adore her. Though nor, he told himself sternly, did he adore the redheaded beauty who’d once driven him half-mad with headlong, youthful love and longing for her.
    So this year he’d quit Cravenhill for London, determined to find himself a wife who wouldn’t drive him to the brink of insanity every time she smiled at another man. With her he would retire to his acres, where they’d live a life of quiet contentment and usefulness, spiced by an occasional visit to the capital to catch up with old friends. Such a pity that it all sounded so deadly dull just now.
    No, it wasn’t dull, it was sensible. He wanted to be at peace in his own skin and he wanted children, not just to inherit his title and lands, but because he’d been a lone, noble and therefore very privileged orphan ever since he learnt to walk. And he wanted sanity and routine and a sense of rightness about his life, not insanity, uncertainty and a mess of passion, frustration and exasperation that Kate Alstone would offer her long-suffering husband, when she finally condescended to admit one to her bed, if not her heart.
    Easy enough to weigh his hopeless passion for Kate against that yet-to-be-born tribe of children and the faceless, sweet and loving Lady Shuttleworth, who would give them to him and love every single one as much as she adored him, and be quite certain he was cured. Now none of it was quite so clear-cut and he felt thoroughly out of sorts and nearly as deeply exasperated with Kate as he was with himself.
    Curse the contrary female for looking at him tonight as if she liked the man he’d become far more than the foolish boy he’d once been. Trust her to reawaken the slumberous, wanton siren he’d once made of her in his obsessed, Kate-tortured dreams and remind him how lifeless his sweet wife sounded by the side of the rich and passionate promise Kate could offer a potential husband. If, of course, the lucky devil succeeded in awakening the sensuality she managed to hide so well from