Free Portrait of My Heart by Patricia Cabot Page B

India! My God, Edward! India! He’ll catch malaria and die, alone in a strange, hot country—”
    “Pegeen,” Edward said, watching her as she paced back and forth across the rose-patterned carpet.
    “You’ve got to stop him,” she said. “That’s all there is to it. You’ve got to forbid it, Edward.”
    “I can’t forbid it, Pegeen,” Edward said tiredly. “He’s a grown man. He can make his own decisions.”
    “A grown man!” Pegeen whirled on him, pointing the hairbrush accusingly at his chest. “A grown man! He’s a boy, Edward. He’s barely twenty-one. And if you don’t stop him, he’ll never see twenty-two!”
    “Legally,” Edward said, “he’s a man now, Pegeen.” Edward reached out and gently pried the hairbrush out of her fingers, so she could no longer brandish it like a weapon. “We can’t stop him from doing anything he wants to do. And I don’t think the army is such a bad choice, really. It will teach him some discipline. And it will keep him away from Maggie—”
    “Maggie!” Pegeen’s hands went to her burning cheeks. “Oh, Lord! I’ll never be able to forgive myself for that. Poor Maggie!”
    “Forgive yourself?” Snaking out a long arm, Edward took hold of his wife’s hips and pulled her onto his lap. “What did you have to do with it? I don’t recall seeing you in that stable.”
    “Oh, God!” Mortified, Pegeen hid her face against her husband’s neck. “How will I ever be able to face Anne—
not to mention her mother—again? How could he, Edward?” She banged Edward’s chest with a small, impotent fist. “How could he?”
    Edward shook his head, although he understood perfectly well how his nephew could have done something so reprehensible … and tempting. Edward, who had actually been around to witness the process, had still been as surprised as his nephew at how well Sir Arthur’s youngest daughter had turned out. Had he been twenty-one and single, he’d have acted exactly as Jeremy had. He wouldn’t, however, have been so amenable to marrying the girl. That was the curious part of the matter, as far as Edward was concerned.
    “Do you suppose,” Edward said, his chin resting on the top of his wife’s head, “that he’s in love with her?”
    Pegeen’s voice was slightly muffled by the fabric of Edward’s shirt. “With Maggie? Oh, I don’t see how. She’s never been anything but nasty to him.”
    “If I recall correctly, you were fairly nasty to me, too, upon first making my acquaintance.”
    Pegeen lifted her head. “I wasn’t!”
    “You were. You tried to hack one of my fingers off with a bread knife.”
    “Oh.” Pegeen laid her head back down upon his chest. “Well, you deserved it.”
    Edward raised his eyebrows, but wisely said nothing.
    “You don’t suppose,” Pegeen said thoughtfully, a moment later, “that’s it, do you?”
    “Suppose what’s it?”
    “Well, you said she’d hit him … .”
    Edward nodded. “Yes. Every bit as forcefully as I did, I think. Though she misaimed, and got him in the mouth. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Miss Maggie Herbert with her hand in a splint upon the morrow.”
    Pegeen winced. “Oh, Edward, really, I wish you hadn’t. It was hardly necessary for both of you to punch him.”
    “If you’d heard him, Pegeen, you’d have hit him, too, I’m quite sure,” Edward assured her grimly.
    “Well, in any case,” Pegeen said, managing to sound somehow dignified, even though she was perched on her husband’s
lap in nothing but her underwear, “I imagine that Maggie’s resistance to his, er, charms might be what attracted him to her in the first place. I can’t imagine any woman has ever resisted Jeremy before, let alone struck him. It must have been quite novel for him.”
    Edward grunted. “Novel enough to make him want to marry her?”
    “People have married for far stupider reasons. Why shouldn’t Jeremy want to marry someone who treats him as an equal, and not like some kind of