Free One Night for Love by Mary Balogh Page A

understand, I will be able to accept it. Everything will be perfectly all right.”
    She was in shock, of course. In denial. Trying to convince herself that what had happened was not so disastrous after all but merely something bewildering that would be perfectly acceptable once she understood. The exquisitely scalloped and embroidered train of her wedding gown, Neville noticed, was trailing in the dust.
    It was so typical of Lauren to react rationally rather than emotionally, even when there
was
no rational way to act. She had always been thus, always the good one among the three of them, the one to think of consequences, the one to be concerned about upsetting the adults. Her story partly explained her, of course. She had come to Newbury Abbey at the age ofthree when her mother, the widowed Viscountess Whitleaf, married the late earl’s younger brother. She had stayed at the abbey when the newlyweds left on a wedding trip—from which they had never returned. There had been letters and a few parcels from various parts of the world for a number of years and then nothing. Not even word of their deaths.
    Lauren’s paternal relatives had made no move to take her back. Indeed, when she had written to them on her eighteenth birthday, she had had a curt response from the viscount’s secretary to the effect that her acquaintance was not something his lordship sought. Lauren, Neville suspected, had never quite trusted her lovableness. And now there ware these circumstances to confirm her in her low opinion of herself.
    “I do not want to understand,” Gwendoline said crossly. “And how can you
sit
there, Lauren, sounding so calm and forbearing and forgiving? You should be scratching Neville’s eyes out.” She began to sob again.
    “Neville?” Lauren said, motionless once more. “I need to understand. Tell me about—about L-Lily.”
    “Lily!” Gwendoline said scornfully. “I
hate
that name. It is despicable.”
    “She was a sergeant’s daughter,” Neville explained. “She grew up with the regiment, living with it, moving about with it. She always did her share of the work and she was everyone’s friend. The toughest of the men and the roughest of title women loved her. But she was her own person. There was something dreamlike, fairylike about her—I do not: know quite how to describe that quality in her. She had been untouched by the ugliness of the life by which she was surrounded. She was eighteen when I—when I married her.” He went on to give brief details of the circumstances of their marriage.
    “And you loved her too,” Lauren added when he had finished.
    For her sake he wished he could deny it. Not that it would make any difference to essentials. He said nothing.
    “That is no excuse,” Gwendoline said.
“You
were not eighteen, Neville. You were a man. You should have known better. You should have had more of a sense of duty to your family and position than to marry a sergeant’s daughter for such a stupid reason. Marriage is for
life
.”
    “I will have to learn to love her too,” Lauren said as if Gwendoline had not spoken. “I am sure it will be possible. If
you
love her, Neville, then I …” But her words trailed away. She set the swing in motion with one foot.
    Neville wondered if it would help her if he strode all the way to the swing, hauled her off it by both shoulders, and shook her soundly. But he remembered his own shock of a few hours before. He had walked all the way from the church to the water’s edge on the beach without knowing he had even moved from the altar. He could not take the alternative to shaking her of lifting her off the swing into the sheltering comfort of his arms.
    “Lauren,” he said, “I am so very sorry, my dear. I wish there were more to say, something to comfort you, something to make you feel less … abandoned. I could say all sorts of meaningless things to assure you that eventually this will be in the past and … But they would not comfort now