Free Shades of Twilight by Linda Howard

Davenport business concerns, which was fifty percent, it had been a foregone conclusion that Jessie would have married him even if he’d been the meanest, ugliest man on the earth, which he wasn’t. Jessie had inherited Janet’s twenty-five percent, and Roanna had her father’s twenty-five percent. Jessie saw herself as the princess of Davencourt, with the promise of becoming its queen by marrying Webb. There was no way she would have accepted a lesser role by marrying someone else.
    But Jessie had been fascinated by Webb, too. The fact that she couldn’t control him as she did other boys had both irritated and entranced her, keeping her dancing around his flame and to his tune. Probably, with her overweening conceit, she had thought that once they were married she’d be able to control him with sex by bestowing or withholding her favors according to how he pleased her.
    If so, she had been disappointed in that, too. Roannaknew that their marriage wasn’t happy and had been secretly pleased. Suddenly she was ashamed of herself for that, because Webb deserved to be happy even if Jessie didn’t.
    But how she had gloated every time Jessie hadn’t gotten her way! She always knew, because although Webb might control his temper, Jessie never made any attempt to do so. When she was angry, she raged, she pouted, she sulked. In the two years they had been married, the fights had come more and more frequently, with Jessie’s yelling heard all over the house, to Grandmother’s distress.
    Nothing Jessie did, however, could sway Webb from whatever decision happened to displease her. They were locked in almost constant battle, with Webb determined to oversee Davencourt and do his best by their investments, a job that was grinding and often kept him working eighteen hours a day. To Roanna, Webb was obviously adult and responsible, but he was still only twenty-four and had told her once that his age worked against him, that he had to work twice as hard as others to prove himself to older, more established businessmen. That was his primary concern, and she loved him for it.
    A workaholic husband, however, wasn’t what Jessie wanted in life. She wanted to vacation in Europe, but he had business meetings scheduled. She wanted to go to Aspen at the height of the ski season; he thought it was a waste of time and money because she didn’t ski and wasn’t interested in learning. All she wanted was to see and be seen. When she lost her driver’s license due to four speeding tickets within six months, she would have blithely continued driving and counted on the Davenport influence to keep her out of trouble, but Webb had confiscated all of her car keys, sternly ordered everyone not to let her borrow theirs, and made her sit at home for a month before hiring a driver for her. What had enraged her even more was that she had tried to hire a driver herself, but Webb had anticipated her and stymied that. It hadn’t been difficult; there weren’t that many limousine services in the Shoals area, and none whowould cross him. Only Grandmother hadn’t received the rough end of Jessie’s tongue during that hellish month when she’d been grounded like a rebellious teenager.
    Maybe sleeping with other men was Jessie’s revenge against Webb for not letting her have her way, Roanna thought. She was willful enough and spiteful enough to do it.
    Bitterly, Roanna knew that she would have made Webb a much better wife than Jessie had, but no one had ever considered it, least of all Webb. Roanna was abnormally observant, a trait developed from a lifetime of being shoved to the side. She loved Webb, but she didn’t underestimate his ambition. If Grandmother had made it plain that she would be very pleased if he married Roanna, the way she had with Jessie, then very probably they would now be engaged. Granted, Webb had never looked at her the way he’d looked at Jessie, but