The Wedding Trap Read Online Free PDF Page A

solitude. Certainly she would have friends she could visit, but she could not trade upon their kindness indefinitely. As much as she cherished living with Violet and Adrian, as much as she adored their darling children, she could not stay with them forever. They and their children were not, and could never be, her own. And when she must, out of good conscience, leave them to lead their own lives, hers would be spent in the company of a paid companion and a handful of indifferent servants.
    But if she married, she could have her own children, someone to love again to replace the family she had lost so many years before when she had been only a child herself.
    She remembered that day with vivid clarity, the day she had awakened from a deadly fever, her hair sweat-drenched and plastered like a cap against her skull, her body listless and weak. The local minister’s wife, a woman she barely knew, had held her hand and told her with tears swimming in her eyes that both of Eliza’s parents had been claimed by the angels, dead these many days past of the same fever Eliza had survived.
    In those moments, she had wanted to die herself, weeping tears that only made her throat ache, her lungs labor harder for each ragged breath she drew. She had drifted into restless nightmares, wishing the illness would claim her too. But something inside her had clung to life, and at eleven years old she found herself alone.
    When she recovered, her aunt had taken her in rather than see her go to an orphanage. “My Christian duty,” Doris Pettigrew had pronounced with pinched nostrils and tight, humorless lips.
    In the years to follow, Eliza had found no love in her aunt’s house. Slowly she came to understand the deep resentment Doris bore her younger sister—Eliza’s mother, Annabelle. Years before Annabelle had turned her back on her aristocratic family to run off with Eliza’s father, the impoverished tutor with whom she had fallen madly in love. Doris had never forgiven Annabelle for the resulting scandal, for embarrassing the family and diminishing Doris’s own chances to make a distinguished match. Her aunt had been forced to marry down socially, a circumstance for which she had never failed to remind—and blame—Annabelle’s offspring, Eliza. Doris’s bitterness had tainted every aspect of her adult life.
    Yet astonishingly her aunt had left Eliza her fortune, giving her the means to have the one thing she desired the most—a family of her own. She was not looking for great love. She had no foolishly naive dreams that a woman like her would inspire a man to feel the sort of grand passion of which the poets wrote and romantics dreamed. But if she could find a pleasant man, a kindly sort who would give her a comfortable home and the children she craved, a man who would not abuse or harm her, then she could be quite content. And if after some while the two of them became companionable friends, she would be very glad indeed and have no room for complaint.
    So if that meant letting Lord Christopher Winter instruct her, then she would allow it. She would put aside any lingering feelings she might harbor for him and learn what she must in order to win herself a husband. Anyway, spending time with Kit would give her the chance to prove to herself that she was indeed over the man once and for all. It would let her be confident in the knowledge that all she had ever felt for him was rash infatuation and nothing more.
    Realizing she’d held the boys a bit too long, she gave both a quick squeeze and released them, then climbed to her feet.
    “Play again,” Sebastian said, clapping his hands. “Let us play again.”
    The sturdy footfalls of sensible shoes crossed the floorboards. “Not today, my lords,” said their nurse. “I am sure you have worn poor Miss Hammond down to the ground. You must let her go on her way. Besides, it is time for you to wash up and have your midday meal.”
    A pair of groans resounded.
    “We want Aunt Eliza