Free How To Rescue A Rake (Book Club Belles Society 3) by Jayne Fresina Page A

Hawcombe Prior?—a wretched pain in the region of her preciously guarded heart brought Diana to a halt on the path. There was also a shocking pinch of jealousy, when she had no right to feel it.
    She’d always known he would have to marry someone. Someone other than her.
    If only it didn’t have to happen here, on her doorstep so to speak.
    Alarmed by the intensity of her objections to the idea, Diana shook her head. What did it matter?
    Resuming her brisk pace, she came to the stone bridge, where her thoughts turned to the long-ago days when she and Catherine Penny had played together, tossing sticks into the stream below, waiting to see whose drifted by first on the other side. Always together in those youthful days, Cathy and Diana were close in age and of similar temperament.
    When Cathy went off to be married, leaving the village and Diana behind, it was a hard desertion to manage. At least Diana knew her friend was genuinely happy and that must be her comfort, but Mrs. Makepiece had disdainfully dismissed Cathy and her husband as “too giddy.” She predicted their marriage would end in tragedy “as such reckless and sudden matches often do.”
    Well , thought Diana, you should know, Mama .
    As for herself, she would never marry. Why should she? At her age the last thing she wanted was to suddenly be forced to adjust her life, to share it with a man. There were plenty of times when she liked to be alone to read a book, and the likelihood of that once a woman married was slim. Her mother, of course, would remind her that it was a woman’s duty to marry and bear children. It was her only purpose in life. But then her mother had no appreciation for novels.
    When Diana was a little girl, she had shocked her mother one day by declaring, “If I were rich I would never marry at all, but I’d take a lover and he would be obliged to please me for my money.”
    That declaration was also blamed on her choice of reading material.
    Funny that she should remember it now—how she’d been hot-faced and defiant, standing in her mother’s kitchen. As far as she recalled, she might even have stamped her foot. Why the subject ever came up, or what inspired her to such a wild thought, she had no idea.
    It was a moment of revolution, a spark her mother quickly extinguished by assuring Diana that there would be no more books for her if she continued in that vein.
    Pausing now at the peak of the bridge, Diana leaned against the mossy stone and gazed down into the sun-dappled water. A strange tear of sadness threatened, and a hollow ache started in her breast where that harsh pain had been a moment before. It must simply be a yearning for the sunny days of youth and for Cathy at her side again.
    Nothing made a well-guarded heart hurt more, Diana had discovered, than the absence of something it once took for granted. Or something of which it never knew the full measure until it was gone forever and could not be won back. Perhaps it was not always good to have a heart so protected, for when it did feel pain, it was almost unbearable and she did not have practice healing it.
    But if Diana mentioned such a thought to her mother, there would be a scornful huff and a reminder of the undone chores from which those “unnecessary ponderings” had distracted her.
    She set her muff on the parapet to free her hands and then reached into her coat pocket for bread crumbs to feed the ducks.
    Suddenly hearing hooves clattering over the bridge toward her, Diana flattened herself to the wall so the rider could pass. Expecting to see someone from the village, she prepared to greet them with a friendly smile as usual.
    But the person she encountered was not the blacksmith or the carpenter, or any other jolly, local face.
    It was Nathaniel Sherringham.
    Startled by the sudden sight of him coming rapidly toward her on his horse, she spun around so sharply that she nudged her muff from the edge of the parapet and it tumbled into the water with a