Free Nicole Jordan by Wicked Fantasy Page A

wholly explain the vague discontent she felt now. Perhaps it was her dissension with Lord Heward that had her blue-deviled. Or perhaps it was Deverill’s earlier, unwanted observation: Heward is entirely the wrong husband for you.
    Antonia muttered a mild imprecation, vexed with Deverill for his presumptuous interference. More likely, though, her dissatisfaction was merely the last vestiges of a foolish rebellion against the lack of choices in her life. Ladies did not become adventurers who sailed the seas performing daring deeds to save the world, as Deverill did. Ladies did not realize great achievements that impacted the future of mankind, as her father had done.
    True ladies did not dream of finding heart-stirring, breath-stealing passion, the kind that touched the soul.
    Even heiresses with the means to live independent lives had little real freedom. Unless she wished to remain a spinster or become a byword for scandal, marriage was the only path open to her. And marriage to a cultured nobleman like Baron Heward would greatly diminish the taint of her common, merchant-class origins.
    Before his death, her father had been fully supportive of her betrothal to Heward, indeed proud of her, for he loved her dearly and wanted to see her respected and admired instead of shunned by society as her mother had been after their marriage.
    If Antonia ever considered truly rebelling and embarking on a fate of her own choosing, she had only to summon one bitterly poignant memory of her father, here in the gallery when she could not have been more than ten years old.
    She had come upon him sitting alone, sobbing. The devastation she’d seen upon his face had wrenched her heart. When she’d fearfully asked him what was the matter—if he was going to die like Mama had—Samuel tried to smile as he wiped tears from his eyes and drew her down onto his lap.
    “No, I am not going to die, puss. The truth is, it near kills me to think how I hurt your mama.” He glanced up at the portrait of Mary Maitland. “She swore she never blamed me, but I know the sacrifices she made to wed me, spurned by all her hoity-toity friends. I can’t forgive myself for that.”
    Only when Antonia was older, however, did she truly comprehend the depth of his guilt. As a Cit, Samuel had attempted to buy respectability by wedding an impoverished nobleman’s daughter, but although they came to love each other deeply, his greatest regret was that his wife was repudiated socially for marrying him. He wanted much better for his daughter.
    “But you’ll make a grand marriage,” he’d told her that day. “Promise me, ‘Tonia. I can’t bear to think of you suffering because of me.”
    Antonia had solemnly promised.
    If in later years she’d secretly dreamed of loving a husband who loved her in return, of finding the remarkable love and devotion her parents had found, she had willingly relinquished such ideal notions for her father’s sake. It was a small price to pay after all his devotion to her, the sacrifices he himself had made for her—giving up all his former friends, his own joy in life—to gain respectability for her. His fierce effort to ensure she had the education and refinement to land an aristocratic husband had driven him until the day he died.
    And in truth, she’d never met any man who had remotely tempted her to forsake her sworn promise to marry for duty instead of love. If she had ever met such a man . . . But it was pointless to speculate. Even though her father was no longer here, Antonia reflected, she wouldn’t destroy his dream for her. The remorse of knowing how she’d disappointed him would be too much to bear.
    In any event, she was quite happy to wed Lord Heward. And she refused to allow the uninvited, uninformed comments of a rogue like Trey Deverill to raise doubts in her mind.
     
    Her blue mood carried over to the soiree that evening—a very proper affair hosted by the Earl and Countess of Ranworth. Yet a half hour