Free One Unashamed Night by Sophia James Page A

remembering who it was she had been.
    His wife. The positions changed over only a matter of weeks and the man with no family at all save her was as dependent as a three-year-old. There was no choice in any of it. There was no help to garner, with his finances tied to a lawyer who was living well on the interest of the Bassingstoke money just as long as the main recipient of it was alive.
    And the last years had slipped by with all the hardship of twice their number, the factories belching out high-grade iron even with an absentee owner at their helm.
    Her life became days and weeks and months disappearing into the drudge of looking after a husband she had hated. Suddenly Beatrice was overcome with everything. With the past and the present and the future and she could not breathe, could not take the proper amount of air without the stinging contracting ache in the back of her throat stopping everything.
    ‘Mama,’ she whispered and thought of her parents, dead by the time she had reached the tender age of seventeen and thankfully unaware of the type of man that they had chosen for her husband.
    The joy of the night in the snow came unbidden, taunting and mocking against the reality of what had happened today.
    Today she had understood that the fatuous dreams of an ageing widow were destined to remain ever that, her life divided into before and after one perfect night.
    Because now she knew and that was the very worst of it! Now she had had a taste of what it was to be delighted and pleasured and cared for, the impossible hope sending her into new fits of sobbing.
    A knock on the door made her stop, as she pressed her lips together and frantically rubbed at her eyes.
    ‘Yes. Who is it?’
    ‘It’s Sarah, madam. Might I come in?’
    Looking at her face in the mirror as she stood to open the door, Beatrice grimaced, her eyes swollen and her cheeks blushed.
    Sarah, her maid, stood at the door with a worried expression. ‘Cook says that we will be having chicken tonight and he will prepare it in just the way you like it.’
    ‘That will be lovely. Thank you, Sarah.’
    ‘If there is anything any of us could do to help, ma’am…’
    ‘I would certainly tell you if there was. Thank you again.’
    Shutting the door, Bea felt like a woman who had let everybody down. She had had many servants before, of course, but never ones that had become her friends as these ones had.
    Still, today she could not find it in herself to speak of anything, her disappointment in the character of Taris Wellingham such a calamity that she could barely believe it.
    Was his over-drinking something that was known in society? It was only mid-afternoon and very early to be so befuddled and yet she had never heard even a whisper of it.
    She breathed out and crossed to the window. The park opposite was filled with people, laughing happy people. People with lives that were so different from her own! Placing her palm on the glass, she enjoyed the momentary impression of cold and the frosted outline left when she removed it. Still here! Still attracted to men who could bring her nothing save heartache.
    ‘Taris.’ She whispered his name into the dusk. Strange that she had not smelt the liquor upon him as he had entered the room, which was something she had become adept at doing when Frankwell had returned home after a night out. No, all she had smelt was the tang of masculinity with an underlying hint of an astringent soap.
    She wished she had not accepted Emerald Wellingham’s offer of afternoon tea because then she might have never known…
    ‘Stupid,’ she chided herself, and, tying back her hair, decided to spend the rest of the evening cataloguing her new books.
    She saw Taris Wellingham again in the Book Society Library the very next afternoon, perusing the shelves with another man she did not recognise.
    Today his clothes were immaculate and worn in the fashion of one who did not place too much importance on the way a cravat was tied or any