Free Lisbon: Richard and Rose, Book 8 by Lynne Connolly Page A

in order to give him the special treatment that an heir deserves. Not a child, but an heir. I fear William might not survive the kind of treatment my mother is capable of meting out.”
    “You told me. I agree. We can’t allow her to get jurisdiction over the boys.” The words choked me, but he was right. Most aristocratic families brought up their male children with the training they would need to become leaders of men, heads of huge family concerns, but few did it with the cold-blooded ambition of Richard’s mother. She tried to rip the humanity out of both her children, but most particularly Richard. He had looked for love elsewhere, with disastrous consequences. At fourteen, he’d become a father. Not that he knew it at the time because his mother spirited the woman away before he knew she was pregnant.
    After that, when Gervase ran away with a male neighbour and revealed his true inclinations, once the affair ended, they refused to allow him back. He left, and the brothers, previously so close, spent over ten years apart. Ten years .
    Richard was right. If we gave the children into Gervase’s care, she would move heaven and earth to have them returned to her. Or she’d take Dickon, the eldest. I could allow my sister-in-law and brother to care for them, but the Southwoods would get them back. The law was too strongly on their side. There was no easy answer, no way I could reconcile Richard to the possibility of taking the children away from his mother’s influence, short of her death.
    Richard would never forgive his mother for dealing with matters after he got the maid pregnant, and for turning her back on Gervase. Lady Southwood removed the maid before Richard discovered the pregnancy. Later, she rejected Gervase so brutally it could have destroyed him.
    Neither would I forgive her. Despite Gervase returning home wealthy and in one piece. During his absence, Richard had turned into a cold, calculating man, capable of infinite cruelty. He’d wreaked his revenge on society, participating in affaires that were less love, more physical, destroying reputations, before moving on to the next victim. I couldn’t call them affaires du coeur but affaires du corps. Only Carier had forced Richard to retain his humanity.
    He could return to that if I left him. If I died. I had always known that if I died first, I would be the fortunate one, but I didn’t have the pressures he’d suffered. I’d had a loving childhood, and I could pass that legacy on to my children, lose myself in them. I had other people I loved, my family, my best friend back in Devonshire, but Richard had nobody, except perhaps Gervase, and their years apart had damaged their relationship.
    Now that Gervase had found himself a partner to love, even more distance existed between the brothers. So for Richard, I was the person he lavished his love upon. I had hoped that children would expand that circle, and it had, but I should have known better than to imagine he’d remove any attention from me. Yes, he loved them, but not as he loved me. He loved nobody as he loved me, wouldn’t love anybody that way ever again.
    To know that brought me great joy, but also terror. Richard would one day become the Earl of Southwood, a man who controlled many lives and many fortunes. As he was now, he’d prove a wonderful earl, but as the Richard I’d first met, he would have dispatched his duties with diligence but no heart.
    “So one of us has to live,” he murmured against my temple.
    “ Both of us will live.” I wouldn’t think of any other outcome. But neither would I live a half-life. “But I won’t live in the expectation of death, either. It will come, my love, whatever we do.”
    He swallowed. “Not too soon.”
    “No. I nearly died, but I recovered. A miracle, some might say. Do I repay that by withdrawing from the part of life that gives me the most joy? I think not. I won’t, Richard. I won’t give up, either. I refuse to hold you at a