The Reluctant Bride Read Online Free PDF

whisk Emily’s mother and aunt from the chaos of the French Revolution which had claimed the heads of the aunt and cousins with whom the Laurent sisters had lived, Bartholomew had married the crippled younger Marguerite. Emily’s mother.
    Marguerite’s elder sister, the exquisitely beautiful Fanchette, had elected to remain in France and her likeness hung above her mother’s writing desk, a tantalising link to an exotic past.
    When Emily was twelve and no longer a child, her father’s attitude towards her changed dramatically. The indulgent papa who’d praised her childish exuberance became the stern disciplinarian. Lucy was put to work as a general maid in Micklen Hall and a series of governesses became Emily’s only link with the world outside. At night Emily would hug her rag doll, Fanchette, to her chest and dream about the exciting life her mysterious aunt might be living. Her own existence seemed stifled and dull.
    One night her father had burst into her room, shouting that Emily was too old for such childish props as he’d torn faithful Fanchette from her tight embrace before tossing it onto the fire.
    Her parents had been arguing over her Aunt Fanchette. She’d heard whispers that her mother’s sister had been found guilty of a sin too wicked to repeat.
    Her father’s seditious activities, which had required him to leave England hurriedly, to travel to France when he was a young man, were, she thought sourly, nothing compared to Tante Fanchette’s immoral liaison with one of Napoleon’s trusted generals.
    Emily and Fanchette’s greatest sins were not the transgressions themselves, but the fact that
they had been caught.
    Now Emily gazed from her bedroom window in her Aunt Gemma’s house and despite the lies and secrets that whispered through the corridors of Micklen Hall she still longed to return to her old home with its surrounding green fields edged by the familiar high, rocky cliffs that fringed the sea in the distance.
    But Emily no longer had a home. Even if her father did renege and open his doors to her, she knew that unless she married Major McCartney, life under her father’s roof as a sinner would be as intolerable as her only other option: the workhouse.
    Having had all night to ponder the inescapable truth, following a fraught interview with her aunt, Emily awoke with a pounding megrim and a heavy heart, shot through with the inescapable knowledge that she had no choice in her future.
    Jack had given her a glimpse into a world of unexpected pleasures and mutual love but those doors were now shut.
    Two minutes after the stiff, unsmiling and clearly nervous Major McCartney had been ushered into the drawing room, Emily accepted his suit.
    Emily listened to the vicar intone the wedding service as if she were trapped on the outside of a large bubble, watching herself within. Her fate was beyond her control, but then it always had been. Aunt Gemma and Major McCartney deemed it in everyone’s interests that a hasty marriage be contracted between the introverted soldier and herself. In order to proceed with all due haste, a Common Licence had been obtained and now, resting her hands on her swollen belly – because there was nowhere else to rest them, these days – Emily stood beside the man who was in the process of becoming her husband.
    Staring fixedly at the rector, she tried not to cry.
    She heard the major solemnly repeat his vows. She dared not look at him in case she saw … what? Satisfaction? Aunt Gemma was a wealthy woman who set a great deal of store by appearances. She’d have paid Major McCartney a large sum to maintain family honour.
    Though glad, Emily was perversely piqued he did not try to touch her. No comforting caress, or even the slightest attempt at showing her that he was aware of what she must be feeling. She choked on a sob which she managed to turn into a cough. How large had Aunt Gemma’s inducement