Free My Lady Gambled by Shirl Anders Page B

This was daft. She did not know how to be a wife with a brooding husband, a husband that did not like her. Nia tossed down the quill pen she had held in her other hand. She had been trying to write poetry, hoping the sunlight would improve her mood. She stood in a flurry, casting her papers and pen to the ground. Then she turned and fled into the mansion.
    Radford rocked back on his heels, one hand hitched in his pocket, the other clamped to the silver knob of his cane. His blurring one-eyed gaze tried to follow his wife’s hurried leave taking. He had been watching her, hidden behind the large oak, his favorite in a well-planned landscape. At the time, his wife had been sitting still as a lovely vision in the sunlight, and he had been able to see her more clearly. But, her rapid movements just now had blurred his faltering vision, but he had heard the sobs.
    “Damnation!” he cursed. Perhaps, Nia was pregnant and over emotional? Yet, he knew that was a lie. She could be with child, yes. However, that was not the cause of her emotional state. He knew, it was him.
    How had he let everything go so far? He had trapped them both, because he was so afraid of giving her up. Now everything loomed, and still he had not found the courage to tell her, and then release her. The evil part of his soul had hoped that she would become pregnant, and it would be added leverage for her to stay with him, when she discovered he was going blind.
    Yet, that was illogical and unreasonable, because he wanted her gone in that case. He intended to demand it! She was young, beautiful, and vivacious. How could he limit her? Because, she is your wife until death do you part! Radford blinked his one eye up into the sun. But, Nia had not had the truth when he had foolishly and greedily married her. No one had. Somehow, in his arrogance and happiness, he had thought his eyesight would improve. Now, he was left on the edge of a steep cliff. He had to jump. He had to tell his wife and tell the Archangels. Still, he hesitated with such control in his hands to completely change his life forever. 
    “You, arrogant imbecile,” he berated himself. The control was out of his hands, had been out of his hands each month by darkening month as his eyesight worsened.
    Radford tapped his cane in disgust, then moved toward Nia’s strewn papers. It was a mission to read while he still could, to love for as long as he could hold on. Radford reached down and picked up Nia’s papers, lifting them up to the sunlight to read slowly.
    “Passion would keep one eye blue. Love would linger with sight deep in our souls. Naked together we see our desire. Breasts to chest, loins slick. We need no light. Our sight is but love.” Radford’s fingers curled, crimping the papers with a tremor. “Damnation.” His wife knew!
    His one-eyed gaze jerked upward to the windows of their bedchamber. He thought that he caught sight of a cream-colored flutter. The color of the gown his wife had been wearing. She could be looking down on him right now and he would not know it, but his heart did. His heart knew it, and shakily he lifted the papers to his lips and kissed them. Then, he started forward into the mansion to find his wife.
    When Radford entered their bedchamber still holding Nia’s poetry in his hand, he could see that his wife was quite discomposed. She fluttered with agitated movements, apparently haphazardly throwing her stocking, garters, and other frilly accessories onto their large four-poster bed.
    “I would try to learn about the things that interest you, Radford,” she said, glancing at him, then glancing away as she lifted two mismatched pairs of stocking with jerky movements. “I could talk to you, about anything you like, really, if you just tell me what it is. Help me along. Anything that interests you interests me.”
    Radford tilted his head in confusion, raising the papers in his hand higher into view. “You knew,” he stated, in mixed wonder.
    Nia tossed