Free Mistress by Amanda Quick Page A

Bennet aloft in a gesture of casual affection.
    Cloud frequently observed with some satisfaction that it was fortunate both of his sons had inherited his ownexcellent constitution. He pointed out that chronic ill health, such as Mrs. Cloud suffered, was a damnable nuisance. But that was the limit of his paternal involvement in his sons’ lives.
    Marcus’s mother, whose medical complaints were generally of a vague nature and featured such symptoms as melancholia and fatigue, contracted a very real fever the year Marcus turned eighteen. She succumbed to it within a matter of hours. Marcus had been at her bedside, his two-year-old brother in his arms.
    His father had been out fox hunting.
    Cloud had lived for nearly a year after his wife’s death, an event he had noticed more because it had interfered with his hunting plans than because of any great sense of loss. But eleven months after his long-neglected spouse had succumbed to the lung fever, he managed to break his own neck in a fall when his newest jumper failed to clear a fence.
    Marcus was at work in the fields with his men the morning the vicar came to tell him that his father was dead. He had been studying the effectiveness of the modifications he had recently made in a new reaping machine.
    He still recalled the curiously detached sensation he had experienced while he listened to the vicar murmur words of condolence.
    A year earlier he had wept alone after his mother’s death. But on the morning of his father’s demise he could not summon a single tear.
    His principal emotion beneath the sense of detachment had been a brief, senseless anger.
    He had not understood the reason for the inner rage, so he had quickly buried it somewhere deep inside himself. He had never allowed it to resurface.
    Young Bennet seemed virtually oblivious to his father’s absence. He’d focused all his attention and affection on the one person who was a true constant in his life, his older brother Marcus.
    Marcus pushed the memories aside and watched Ben-net wander over to the breakfast table.
    “Harry and I got bored in Scotland,” Bennet offered. “We decided to return to London for the Season.”
    “I see.” Marcus spread jam on a slice of toast. “I thought you had declared the Season a dead bore.”
    “Yes, well, that was last year.”
    “Of course.”
    Last year Bennet had been barely nineteen. He’d just come down from Oxford, full of a young man’s enthusiasm for politics and poetry. He had been disdainful of the frivolousness of the Season. Marcus had gotten him into a club populated by other young men who were passionate about the new poets and the latest political theories. Bennet had seemed content.
    Marcus had been quietly pleased to see that his brother was not the type to be swept off his feet by the superficial entertainments of the
ton
.
    Oxford had done its job.
    Marcus had not sent Bennet to Oxford for an education. On the contrary, he had seen to his brother’s schooling at home with the assistance of an excellent tutor and his own ever-expanding library.
    A young man did not go off to either Cambridge or Oxford in order to study. He went there to obtain a social polish and to mingle with the young men with whom he would later do business for the rest of his life. He went there to form friendships with the scions of the best families, families from which he would eventually select a suitable wife.
    Marcus had been determined that his brother would not be like him, a naive, rough-edged country squire who knew nothing of the world beyond life on a farm.
    Marcus had paid a high price for his own lack of worldliness. He did not want Bennet to suffer the same fate. A man needed to shed his illusions and dreams as quickly as possible if he was to avoid becoming a victim in this life.
    Marcus took a large bite of his toast. “Where did you go last night?”
    “Harry and I both went to our club,” Bennet said vaguely. “Then Harry suggested that we drop in on a