Free One Unashamed Night by Sophia James

that one small isolated moment. Long years of anguish and guilt, her unpredictable sham of a marriage wrung into one dreadful feeling.
    Panic!
    To get away. To run from one who had caught at fancy and hope and imagination, yet was blighted with the same curse her husband had been dammed with.
    She needed to escape, to be back again in the world of freedom and ideas that had just opened up to her, her autonomy and lack of restraint so far from the endless dread of hurt inflicted by a brandy-loosened temper.
    ‘I must go.’ Setting down her cup with a rattle, she hated the sound of alarm so easily heard in her voice.
    ‘Perhaps you do not remember my brother-in-law…’
    ‘Of course I do.’
    Pushing past them both, Beatrice-Maude did not stop even to retrieve her cloak from the astonished servant at the front door. Outside she took a breath of cold air and simply ran, for the corner, for her home, for the safety of her rooms away from anyone, the hat in her hands unfastened and the gloves in her pocket unworn.
    ‘Well,’ Taris said as the silence inside the town house lengthened, ‘I presume that means she does not favour the nickname Bea.’
    Emerald laughed, though there were tears in her voice when she replied, ‘I thought she was a sensible woman. I thought that she had impeccable manners and for the life of me I cannot understand what just happened.’
    ‘At a guess I would say she saw I lacked sight.’
    Silence confirmed his suspicions. Emerald might be able to see what he could not, but he could hear what others never did.
    Fear. Abhorrence. And the need for flight.
    He made himself smile, made his face carefully bland, the anger that was building hidden behind indifference even as his left cheek throbbed.
    ‘Mrs Bassingstoke did not know before?’
    ‘It was night,’ he returned.
    ‘And you are good in the darkness!’
    ‘Precisely.’
    ‘So good that she could spend the whole time with you and never guess?’
    ‘It seems that is true.’
    ‘I think I hate her for this.’ Her voice was small, the anger in it formidable. ‘And everything that happened today is my fault. Ashe told me to leave it alone.’
    ‘But you didn’t?’
    ‘And now you despise me.’
    ‘Hardly.’ His left hand went out to feel along the lintel of the door, the shadows in the room long with darkness. For the first time ever he felt…nearly blind, the infinite gloom pressing down almost as a living thing. Intense and pressured, the foreverness of it just around the corner.
    Where was Beatrice-Maude Bassingstoke now? How had she got home? Was home far? Would she be safe? The faint smell of flowers lingered in the air beside him and he breathed in hard, trying to keep her close and angry that he should even think to do so.
    Beatrice sat on the side of her bed and cried. She did not try to be quiet, she did not wipe her tears away with a dainty handkerchief. She did not care which servant might eavesdrop or which friend calling in the afternoon might overhear her howls of anguish.
    She just cried. For everything that had happened. For her appalling manners and her incredible rudeness, for the lack of control in Taris Wellingham’s movements and for the knowing look of complicity on his sister-in-law’s face.
    The man she had admired was a drunkard!
    Everything that had held her up in the past months was lost. Her confidence. Her belief in herself. Instead she was tossed back to the time when she had been completely at the mercy of the moods of a man whose anger or temperance depended on the amount and strength of the drop he had imbibed.
    A few beers and he would drag her to his room. A few more and he would hit her. And a few more than that…
    Never again. Never, never again!
    Using the sleeves of her gown to wipe both her nose and her cheeks, the quick swipes threw her back to Ipswich and the house there.
    Frankwell had been a big man and a bully, though after his apoplexy he had become kinder, his mind not quite