Free A Highland Duchess by Karen Ranney

lies to reassure her. Someone would hold her down while another person—or two—would strip her clothes away, before leading her to a place where she would be displayed, naked, for everyone to see.
    That’s how it had happened the first time.
    Every other occasion, she’d simply been told that an entertainment was planned, and she’d performed in silence and utter calm, determined not to cry or plead or allow anyone to see her revulsion.
    At first she’d been terrified of Anthony. Then, when she simply could not summon enough energy to care about what he would do to her, he told her that he’d disclose everything to her father, a man who was already ailing. When her father died, slipping beyond Anthony’s grasp, her husband had threatened to tell the world what she’d done.
    In the end it was simply easier to become someone she wasn’t, the Ice Queen, no so much unaffected by what she saw as uncaring. In the last few years, she’d suspected Anthony had drugged her wine, but even that would have been unnecessary. She was an instrument of his will, his plaything, and his toy.
    And she didn’t think she could ever forgive herself for it.
    This time she was not going to wait for them. Nor was she going to cower in this room. Instead, she would investigate, and if Ian’s entertainment was anything like Anthony’s, then she would flee this house, alone and in the darkness, if necessary.
    Turning, she grabbed the latch and opened the door.
    Shadows filled the corridor, and from far away came the sound of masculine laughter. This laughter was neither boisterous nor did it have a tinge of drunkenness to it. Instead, it sounded almost polite, as might a gathering before the Queen.
    Slowly, she left the room, the flagstones abrasive on her bare feet. How shocking she was being. Her dress was badly wrinkled from lying on the bed most of the afternoon. She’d unbound her hair and it now fell in a mass past her shoulders. She’d removed her hoops and her corset was loose.
    A lady never appeared in public without being perfectly dressed, even down to her gloves.
    How idiotic that society decreed a great many rules for a woman’s behavior and comportment, and almost none to a man’s.
    Yet she’d tried to obey those dictates when she could. She was to wear an endless assortment of petticoats if she did not wear her hoops. If she wore her hoops, she was not to complain about the itchiness of the tape fastenings. Her corset was to be laced at exactly the tightness required to both give her a womanly shape yet conceal that womanly shape from prying eyes. Even in the midst of summer she was to wear stockings, a most regrettable rule since even the delicate ones made at a convent in the south of France were unbearably warm—and itchy.
    She was not to walk but to glide. Her breath was to come in soft, feminine pants, so as not to give the appearance of being too hearty or strong. Without a corset, a woman could breathe as well as a man, but every morning she laced her corset as prescribed. Only in the past months had she instructed Juliana to begin lacing at the third set of the eyelets and cease before the top two. In this manner, she allowed herself some freedom of movement, of breath, and relief from pain.
    As a woman, she was to be meek and mild mannered. She was to defer to a man at all times, taking a man’s judgment over her own, a man’s reasoning over her own, a man’s opinion over her own. At no time was she to consider herself a man’s equal. After all, was not man created first, and woman second, from man’s rib?
    If, for some reason, she was to lose all her wits and forget those lifelong lessons, then a woman’s husband was to show her where she’d erred.
    Her mother had instilled those lessons in her from the time she was a child. An elderly aunt of her father’s had added her chastisement as well, rapping Emma’s knuckles with the crook of her cane when she wasn’t quick enough to obey.
    For all that, she