The Elopement Read Online Free PDF

was moving, his tongue and his lips making a glowing, tingling path downwards. She could barely manage to say, “No, I won’t. You’re wrong. I won’t.”
    “He’ll have you kowtowing to dowagers and suppressing everything you think. You’ll be his glittering ornament and nothing more. Before you know it your only excitement will be in helping young girls plan their boring little debuts so they can marry their boring little husbands and have their boring little children. You’ll start to believe it’s what you like to do.”
    Amanda Brown flashed into her head. She didn’t want to admit that she had already liked doing it. He was right. It was so small , such a little thing to want. Not worthy of her. “No, I won’t. I won’t be like that. Never.”
    “Never?” he asked her, and his eyes demanded a vow.
    “Never,” she promised.
    Oh, surely what he was doing with his mouth was a sin. Surely wanting it so badly was a sin? She could not help the involuntary lift of her hips. His lips curled in a knowing smile. He bent his head again, nuzzling her. “You’re mine, aren’t you?” His words, his breath, were a whisper of sound, a feeling more than something she heard. “You belong just to me.”
    “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I belong just to you.”
    She wondered sometimes over the next weeks how she could have come to be this. How was she so split in two? She was both the woman who had dinner with her father and entertained Michael Bayley and loved the evenings spent with him at the opera or the theater and the conversations afterward, and the woman who kept assignations at the hotel and, yes, other places too, caught moments, stolen intimacies in which her lover led her into doing and saying and thinking the most wicked things. She felt herself slide. She would do anything for him. Again, that troubling plasticity. But the world he showed her, the freedom he promised . . . He whispered to her, “Hypocrite,” and she knew she was, but then again, was she?
    Because that other side of her . . . She truly loved society and being seen on Michael Bayley’s arm. She enjoyed elegant dinners and balls where she dressed in jewels and gowns and danced to the strains of a glittering quartet. She found the little pretensions of her peers annoying, yes, but they were endearing too. She thought often now of what Michael Bayley had said about feet of clay, and it made her more tolerant, more hopeful. She wished she could be as kind as Mrs. Adler and as generous as Mrs. Thomas.
    So accommodating. So easily swept from side to side. She hardly knew which part of her was the hypocrite. The one who felt happy and satisfied in the company of society, or the one who laughed with her lover in contempt of its foibles?
    Things could not just go on this way forever, she knew. Her father was growing anxious; Michael Bayley was more insistent. And then . . .
    “Marry me,” her lover said to her one day. They were in a glen, hidden from the world by a copse. There was a picnic only a short distance away. Her bodice was around her waist, her corset unhooked. His mouth was on her breasts, and the danger, the excitement that someone might come upon them any moment . . . oh, the thought of it, of disaster . . . She had never been so aroused, so aware of being alive.
    “Marry me,” said Michael Bayley, on his knees in her parlor, his blue eyes shining, the kindness of him putting truth into the words he said to her, all so very proper and respectful, his admiration a balm. He would never think badly of her; he would always ask of her the best.
    He kissed her softly; it was so chaste, and yet . . . she felt a little thrill at it. A tingle that began low and climbed into her chest. He drew back, saying gently, “I think we’d do so very well together, don’t you?”
    Yes, she thought so. But then she remembered that glen, the danger of it, the thrill . . . It was impossible. How could she make a choice?
    She asked them