Free The Countess by Catherine Coulter Page B

will remain my heir. Therefore, you must prepare yourself to someday take my place. There is nothing more to be said.”
    â€œBut, Uncle Lawrence,” Thomas said, waving one slender, beautifully shaped hand toward me, “John is right. She is very young. Why else would you marry except to get yourself an heir?”
    â€œMan cannot live by heirs alone,” I said.
    Dead silence.
    Why hadn’t I kept my mouth shut?

C hapter Seven

    A melia choked out the sip of wine she’d taken. John choked on a bite of baked trout, then loudly cleared his throat.
    Thomas was banging his fist against his wife’s back.
    Lawrence looked as if he would like to throw me through the dining room window, but he didn’t. Thank goodness for his restraint. Indeed, on second look, I thought perhaps he was trying not to laugh. He wasn’t angry at me, a blessed relief. But I still wanted to ask why bloody men believed that a wife’s only purpose was to produce a boy child. I suppose I was surprised that both John and Thomas viewed Lawrence’s marriage to me in that light only, and I shouldn’t have been. I was a well-bred mare whose function was to produce a boy child—nothing more.
    â€œPerhaps,” I said, knowing I should keep chewing my own turkey and chestnuts, instead of diving into such muddy waters, “your uncle found me quite to his liking, and that is why he married me. After all,George likes me very well, and usually he is an excellent judge of character.”
    â€œI don’t understand,” Amelia said, her cheeks flushed from her bout of laughter, “Uncle Lawrence isn’t a dog. What are you talking about, Andy?”
    â€œAn attempt at a jest, no more,” I said. Of course I had known that this would have to come up and have to be dealt with. I just hadn’t realized that it would be this soon and discussed right in front of everyone, Brantley included. I sighed into my plate and kept my head down.
    â€œAndy has an excellent sense of humor,” my husband said, but he wasn’t smiling at all. Then he added, “We will see.” And that was all my husband of three days had to say. He returned to his own turkey. Of course, he had really said nothing at all. I looked over at John. He was staring at me, and there was something in those dark eyes of his that I didn’t understand. Then I did. It was violence. Then, just as suddenly, that something was gone.
    Face facts, I told myself. So John had wanted to meet me. Perhaps he had felt a bit of interest in me, but for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why. I had been dressed in deep mourning. I had barely been civil. Regardless, that was three months ago. Now I was married, and separated from him as far as could be. If he felt any disappointment, which would amaze me if he had, he would simply have to get a grip on himself.
    At least Lawrence’s words had stilled the family. I wanted to tell them all that we wouldn’t be seeing anything at all, but I realized that Lawrence was protecting me. The last thing he would want to say was that ours was a marriage of mutual convenience,mutual respect, and mutual liking with nothing else cluttering it up, like a naked man humiliating a naked woman, namely me.
    I looked again at John. He appeared to be staring into his wineglass. Why, I wondered, had he wanted to meet me? Well, it didn’t matter now. Still, for a moment I didn’t look away from him.
    He was still too big and too dark in his black evening clothes. He appeared even larger now than he had the last time I’d seen him three months before. I could sense the danger in him, the cold control of an autocrat used to obedience, and he was surely too young for such control, I thought again. His face was still tanned from his years of campaigning and from his mother’s Spanish blood, and his hair, like Amelia’s, was raven-black. His eyes were so dark that they appeared black