Free Just One Taste by Maggie Robinson Page B

after—
    Well, they said timing was everything, and Delia’s sense of timing was, to put it bluntly, atrocious.
    A tear escaped. Jack had been too weak to bed her at first, but tonight from his hints she knew he intended to resume their marriage. Their one-day marriage in a span of almost seven-hundred and thirty days. Was anything ever so ridiculous?
    He didn’t know her; she barely knew herself any more. The dashing army officer and the naïve debutante were dead right along with the poor man in the Marbury cemetery plot in the country.
    She was in Town now. Delia looked around her cozy room at Marbury House in Belgravia, its new William Morris paper a rebuke. She would have to leave.
    Leave her son behind.
    She couldn’t bear it.
    If she told Jack the truth, could he forgive her? He had already suffered so much.
    But so had she.
    She could lie and say she’d lost the earring, which was true enough. Delia didn’t have to say where, now, did she? But Arthur would tell, since there was no hope of her meeting his demands. His letter yesterday had made that very clear.
    Her little experiment had been horrible. She’d been a fool, and now there was a price to pay.
    Delia gave a bitter laugh. My word, she was becoming melodramatic. One only needed some frantic organ music as an accompaniment. She was hardly the first wife to find herself in such a predicament. And she was happy that Jack was alive. Her baby would have his father, even if her role in his life would be curtailed. One wouldn’t want the future Viscount Marbury raised without a proper male influence.
    God knows, Arthur did not qualify.

Chapter 2
    J ack Marbury woke hot and breathless from the same dream that had plagued him while he was in captivity. He was surprised to see his hands weren’t bloody from the spiky barbed wire that he’d just torn down.
    No. There was no blood, no barbed wire. He was home, really home.
    For months, he’d escaped during the night, only to find himself back on the floor in the shed in the morning, flies buzzing, the sweat of the other soldiers and swelter of the windowless hut almost paralyzing.
    The Boers hadn’t been prepared to take prisoners of war, and conditions were deplorable, to say the least. Wounded and unconscious, Jack had been rounded up with a handful enlisted men—no cushy officers’ quarters for him once he came to. It hadn’t seemed cricket to make a fuss, and as an aristocrat, he was not about to make himself a bargaining chip. In truth, he was no more valuable than the men he shared scanty rations and latrine trenches with.
    But waking up in Marbury House from an afternoon nap was a rather different proposition. For one thing, it smelled better. Smelled like heaven, and one didn’t even have to die—lavender-scented sheets, beeswax, fresh flowers on every flat surface of his room from friends and well-wishers.
    But nothing smelled as heavenly as Delia.
    His wife .
    Their courtship had been dreadfully rushed, the wedding by special license. Jack had only known her a month. He’d had to have her before he was shipped out. It was as simple as that. They would have time to get to know each other once he came home from this stupid war—they had their whole lives ahead of them.
    His friends had teased him mercilessly—Major Lord John Marbury, a rich and unrepentant rake, cut down in the prime of life by a seventeen-year-old orphan with violet eyes. He was a decade older, some said too young to marry himself. But her guardian agreed and so had she, her fabulous eyes shining up at him.
    She’d been a “Professional Beauty” in her first Season, photographs and India ink sketches of her in prime position in all the Fleet Street windows. Delia had been embarrassed by them; Jack had been mesmerized. She was as sweet as she was beautiful.
    Or had been. She was too quiet now, haggard in black, which didn’t suit her at all. Jack sensed he made his wife very nervous. He understood—she had thought him