Free Sweet Bondage by Dorothy Vernon Page B

the wedding was off because you couldn’t face spending the rest of your life with a—’ the voice broke, the eyes condemned—’with a cripple.’
    She gasped. ‘Oh!’ Her hand went to her mouth in horror at the cruelty of anyone writing such a letter to a desperately ill man. There wasn’t anything Angus could have said that would have shocked her more and she found herself nodding in violent feeling and total agreement with what he had to say next.
    â€˜Mr. Ross didn’t think he could take that on top of everything else. The laddie was pulled out of that mangled car more dead than alive. It’s a miracle that he’s rallied this long. The master kept a bedside vigil for days, although there was little he could do there except get in the way of the nursing staff. I was with him when he read your letter. It was addressed to Mr. Ian, of course, but Mr. Ross quite rightly took it upon himself to open it. Maybe you didn’t know that?’
    â€˜No, Angus, I didn’t know that.’
    Just as she didn’t know how anyone, even someone as hard and self-centered as Glenda Channing, could-add to a man’s distress by casting him off when he most needed her. Her mind exploded with criticism and reproach that Glenda could write such a brutal letter to a man facing the prospect of being crippled forever, a man fighting for his life! She shuddered at the consequences it could have had if Maxwell hadn’t intercepted the letter and Ian had pulled round sufficiently to read it Such a bitter blow could have finished him off, deprived him of the one thing that is sometimes even more vital for survival than surgery or medication, the will to live. She was beginning to understand now why Maxwell had brought her here.
    Angus seemed to confirm her thoughts as he said, ‘Even if you couldn’t bring yourself to marry the laddie, Mr. Ross was determined to make you stand by him until he was over the worst and then, he said, if you were still of the same mind, you could let him down lightly when he was more able to take it.’
    And rightly, too. If she’d got a spark of compassion or decency in her, Glenda wouldn’t have walked out on Ian, the man she was supposed to love. She must have professed to love him to have promised to marry him. But wasn’t all this rather strange, something not quite as it should be? Why the furtive haste to arrange the wedding that Angus had hinted at? Why the secrecy surrounding the engagement? Gemma would have thought that it would have been officially announced and marked by an engagement party. The Channings were noted for the flamboyancy of their parties, which they threw at the drop of a hat. Glenda’s engagement would certainly have rated a party. It was well known in the village that Glenda had some man in tow, but then, she always did. If the name of the current one was known Gemma hadn’t heard it. And not one hint of an impending engagement had been breathed; she would swear to it, because she certainly couldn’t have missed that. And yet, according to Angus, the wedding date had been set. Something definitely did not add up.
    She sought Angus’s gaze, but it slid away from her and her eyes fixed on the two cross lines between his brows. The certain knowledge came to her that it didn’t add up because she didn’t know it all. There was something, a key factor, that would link everything together and supply the correct answer. She had got plenty of information out of Angus and she felt that she could have got more if only she’d known how to go about it She didn’t know the words to use, the line to take to trick him into telling her the last vital bit.
    Giving up the struggle, she made the tea and set the tray, adding Morag’s splendid Dundee cake.
    To appease her own curiosity, since this question had nothing at all to do with the concerns of Glenda Channing, she asked reflectively,