Adam's Daughter by Kristy Daniels Page B

while, he would get up and leave.”
    When she finally looked at Adam her eyes were glistening.  “Why did you do it?” he asked.
    “I don’t know. I was only seventeen and I had some stupid notion that it was my duty as a wife or something.” She shook her head. “I owe that to my mother. I never once saw her show any affection to my father but she still felt qualified to give me quite a little speech about a wife’s duty before I got married.”
    She wiped her hand across her eyes. “After a few months I couldn’t stand it anymore. I refused and he didn’t press it. He just left me up there in that awful house. I was going crazy all alone. I couldn’t go home, so I started running off to the city by myself, staying in hotels just to get away.”
    Adam gathered her into his arms. He held her silently for a long time.
    “I’ve had lovers, Adam,” she said. “No one I cared about, nothing that lasted long.” She paused. “I had to tell you, Adam. Please don’t hate me for it. I was lonely and needed someone to make me feel clean and normal.”
    Conflicting emotions careened through Adam . A stab of jealousy toward the faceless lovers. But the pain in Elizabeth’s eyes finally left him with only a strong protective urge. And rage toward Willis Reed.
    “It doesn’t matter,” he said . “Forget about Reed. You’re with me now.” He held her until he could hear her breathing become deep and even.
    “Why do people do it,” she murmured, before she slipped into sleep, “why do people marry the wrong person?”
    “They have their reasons,” Adam said. “Reasons that always seem right at the time.”
     
     
     

    CHAPTER THIRTEEN
     
    Six months after their marriage, a handsome cotton rag envelope arrived addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Adam Bryant. Elizabeth opened it and asked Adam, “Who is Enid Atherton?”
    “Queen of the social butterflies,” Adam said. “She probably wants a donation for one of her charities.”
    “Actually, she wants us,” Elizabeth said. “It’s an invitation to a post-opera party.”
    Adam read the invitation. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said with a smirk.
    “Let’s go, Adam,” Elizabeth said.
    “You can’t be serious.”
    She put her arms around him. “Please,” she said. “I’d like an excuse to dress up for you.”
    Adam had planned to take Elizabeth to the opera opening, but the last thing he wanted to do was go to a party afterward. But he saw the eager look in Elizabeth’s eyes and felt guilty. He had been spending so much time at work, and she was surely restless, cooped up in the house alone most of the day. It would be good for her to get out and meet people.
    He stared at Enid’s name on the invitation, feeling a small surge of satisfaction. “Of course we’ll go,” he said. “And I want you to buy a new dress. I will be with the most beautiful woman in the world, and I want everyone to see her.”
    At the opera, Adam sat proudly at Elizabeth’s side in his box. People stared up at them and whispered, and he tilted his chin higher. He was well aware that right from the start his marriage to Elizabeth had created a furor, generating columns of type in Eastern newspapers. One New York tabloid headlined it “Mrs. Reed’s Gold-Rushed Romance.” Most accounts in the East had politely referred to Adam as the owner of the San Francisco Times . But the implication was clear that the twenty-seven-year-old heiress had married beneath her.
    U ntil now, Adam had been unaware that he also had become a curiosity in his own town, especially among the social elite. His divorce and remarriage had given him an air of notoriety. There were a few people who dismissed him as a parvenu. But most were intrigued, even a bit proud, of the handsome San Franciscan who had risen from nothing to capture Elizabeth Ingram Reed, the flower of one of the Old South’s most illustrious clans. San Franciscans had a healthy respect for epic romances and mavericks, and Adam