Free Rapture in His Arms by Lynette Vinet

making himself comfortable. He inclined his curly brown head in Dorcas’s direction. “However, I fear Benjamin spends too much time with his mother and not enough with me. She pampers him greatly.”
    “Mr. Addison!” Dorcas cried, dismay clearly visible on her plain face. “If you wish Benjamin’s company, you may avail yourself of him at any time. But you’d be quite bothered to have him traipsing after you in the fields all day. You’d get no work done with a small child about.”
    Tyler sent his wife a sharp-eyed look, which Jillian didn’t miss. “Do you contradict me, Mrs. Addison? I trust you do not. You coddle Benjamin so that he has yet to feel the rod, and you are familiar with what the Bible says about sparing the rod and spoiling the child.”
    Dorcas’s face paled; her surge of defiance died away. She nervously fiddled with a strand of her blond hair and ceased fanning herself. “I—I am sorry, Mr. Addison. You are right, quite right. I do pamper the boy and monopolize his time. I shall try not to spare the rod with him any longer.”
    “Aye, ’tis a sensible reply, madam.”
    “I don’t mean to interfere,” Jillian broke in with a definite scowl on her face for Tyler, “but I think children should be pampered for as long as possible and not beaten. ’Tisn’t the rod which makes a child unspoiled, but fear of the adult who wields it.”
    “My dear, I know you mean well,” came Tyler’s sugar-coated voice, “but you haven’t a child of your own, so I believe you should keep your comments to yourself.”
    A thick silence hung in the air, broken only by the sound of Tyler’s spoon tapping against the side of his teacup. Jillian didn’t bother to reply. Tyler had every right to say what he did to her; Benjamin was his son, and she hadn’t a right to express her views on child-rearing. But he’d hurt her deeply to mention her childless state.
    Sometimes she wondered how Dorcas could remain married to such a harsh man. Jillian didn’t know what was happening between these two people, but Dorcas was no longer the person she’d been before her marriage to Tyler. She’d known Dorcas all her life, and Dorcas had always been friendly and outgoing, but since her marriage to Tyler Addison some six years past, Dorcas no longer smiled as often, and sometimes the woman appeared downright frightened.
    Jillian knew that Tyler could be overbearing. When he’d courted Jillian for a brief time before her own marriage, Tyler gave every indication of being a forceful and dominant man—two qualities that in another man might be admirable, but somehow Tyler appeared brutish. Jillian remembered when he’d asked to marry her and she refused him, telling him that she was going to marry Edwin Cameron. Tyler hadn’t taken the rejection well—in her mind’s eye she still saw his red face, his cheeks puffed out in anger as he berated her for being a silly goose by marrying a man old enough to be her grandfather. But her mind had been made up; in fact she’d never considered marrying Tyler anyway. Shortly after her marriage to Edwin, Jillian received an invitation to the wedding of her friend Dorcas to Tyler. Though Jillian had no clear indication that Dorcas was unhappy with Tyler—since Dorcas never told her, and Jillian would never have dared delve into Dorcas’s marriage—she sometimes wondered if all was well in the Addison household.
    “Jillian, my dear, has your husband been ill of late?” Dorcas’s question finally broke the silence, her voice sounding thin and strained. “He truly doesn’t look well.”
    “Has Edwin been unwell?” Tyler piped up. His blue eyes narrowed a bit and glowed with alertness.
    “Edwin says he’s fine, but I’m worried about him,” Jillian confided to him, and clasped her hands together. “I know I shouldn’t say anything about his health to anyone, but I fear something is horribly wrong with him.”
    “Has he seen the doctor in Jamestown?” asked