Free Learning to Waltz by Kerryn Reid

had not. She knew nothing about him—where he was from, how he lived, what his fortune was, what family he had—yet when he looked into her eyes, she felt soothed… yet perturbed too.
    Her father, her brother, her husband—all her limited experience with men told her they could not be trusted. Though her heart might tell her Mr. Haverfield was different, she could not afford to take that chance.
    She was keenly aware of her loneliness, there in the dark, though it was a creature that lived with her always. Mostly it just kept her company, sitting at her feet or walking by her side, climbing the stairs with her as it did now. Sometimes, though, it leaped onto her chest and ripped open an old wound that never quite healed. If Julian should die…
    She would not think it, could not think it. She stood in the doorway and watched him, drugged with laudanum, more unconscious than asleep. Such a serious child, as she herself had been. And lonely, as well. Her little Jack did not face the giant she herself had feared, yet here they were, confronting the biggest giant of them all. And she could do no more to protect him than her mother had done for her.
    She had been thirteen when Matilda arrived, a fairy godmother-aunt dropped to Earth to rescue her from desolation. Matilda spent four years in Lydford instructing Deborah in literature, geography, history, and natural science, boldly taking her to see the dreaded castle and the fabulous gorge of which she had heard so much. Deborah saw that it was possible to defy her father’s tyranny and began to despise her mother’s weakness. And when Mama refused to come away with them, despite all their entreaties and exhortations, that betrayal had torn her apart.
    Julian broke out in a fresh paroxysm of coughing. Deborah slapped the pitcher onto her dressing table, water sloshing over the rim, and returned to her place beside him. She drew his head and shoulders into her lap face-down to make the coughing a bit easier. None of Doctor Overley’s remedies had effected any improvement whatsoever. These fits left him utterly weakened, too exhausted even to weep.
    They sat that way until the candles guttered and another cold gray day seeped into the room. Deborah rubbed her son’s back, held him together when he coughed, and kept him warm as the cold dread crept into every part of her.
    Aunt Matilda had wrested her from the grip of one beast, but Deborah always suspected she had won only a temporary reprieve. If Julian died now, his death would be the price she paid for cheating fate.
    A very high price, indeed.
     
     
     

Chapter Nine
    Later that morning, Evan strolled into the drawing room to find Amanda entertaining Whately’s elderly vicar and his wife. “Refused to see us, Miss Latimer,” Mrs. Hepplewhite was saying, “refused us absolutely. I am told the boy is near death. One would think the poor woman would be eager to receive our prayers and blessings. If she has turned away from the Lord since her husband’s passing, then I must say it will not be surprising if He turns His face from her as well.”
    She turned to Evan, nostrils distended as though sniffing out evil. “I am also told that she has received this young man, into her bedchamber, no less. It is an abomination that a woman who served as this town’s moral preceptress should now be so lost to all sense of propriety.”
    The woman faded from Evan’s view—instead he saw Julian’s pinched white face. The vicar said something—Evan heard only his own blood boiling in his ears, and then Amanda, uttering words he did not comprehend. Fury sizzling in his mouth like acid, he locked onto Mrs. Hepplewhite’s sanctimonious blue gaze and challenged, “Were you also told, madam, that Wherein thou judgest another, thou condemnest thyself ?”
    The woman flushed an ugly red and opened her mouth to respond, but the vicar intervened, patting his wife’s arm. “I understand from the good doctor that Mrs. Moore’s