The Secret Pearl by Mary Balogh Page B

her shudder. There was only one future facing her there.
    She was still almost numb with the nightmare of what had happened. This employment had been given to her by the man who filled all her nightmares with terror. It had been no fortunate chance, after all. He had given her employment because he pitied her—or so he said. She did not know whether to trust him or not.
    And suddenly she had found today that all her other terrors had been renewed too. Had there been any pursuit? Was there still? Would she hang if she were caught? Even though it had been an accident? Even though she had been defending herself? Was one hanged regardless of circumstances if one killed another human being? Surely not.
    But Matthew had been the only witness. And Matthew was a baron and a justice of the peace. It would be his word against hers. And he had looked up from Hobson’s dead body and called her a murderer.
    She would hang. They would tie her hands and her feet and place a bag over her head and a rope about her neck.
    She turned sharply from the window.
    She would not think of it. Or of Daniel, she thought determinedly. She would not. But his gentle smile and his blue eyes and his soft blond hair were there before her anyway, and his tall, slender body dressed in its dark, smart clerical garb.
    He had never kissed her. Only her hand, once. She had always wanted him to, but he had refused the only time she had asked him. He wanted her pure on their wedding day, he had told her with that sweet smile.
    A kiss would have made her impure? She closed her eyes and dragged at the pins that held her hair primly at the back of her head.
    He would be revolted at the knowledge of what she had done. He would look at her sorrowfully. Would he forgive her? Doubtless he would, as Jesus forgave the woman taken in adultery. But she did not want his forgiveness. She wanted his love and his sheltering arms. She wanted peace.
    But there could be no peace, although for two weeks she had persuaded herself that there could. She had murdered a man and could never go home. She would hang if she were caught. And she had done what she had done—with his grace, the Duke of Ridgeway. And was now caught in his home rather like a bird in a cage.
    She dragged her brush ruthlessly through her snarled hair. No matter how long she remained in this house, no matter how often she saw him, she would never be able to feel anything else but the blackest terror and the most nauseated revulsion whenever she set eyes on him.
    No matter how elegantly he might dress, she would always see him as she had seen him in that room at the Bull and Horn—tall and muscled and naked, the triangle of dark hair across his chest and down to his navel, the dreadful purple wounds, the terrifying arousal that had penetrated her and hurt her so searingly and violated her so irrevocably.
    Raw manhood exerting its ruthless ascendancy over weakness and poverty and hopelessness.
    With her head she knew that it was perhaps unfair to hate him. He had paid well for what she had offered freely. He had shown her kindness both with that meal and with this employment.
    But she hated him with a horror and a revulsion that might yet send her fleeing from the house without provisions or plans—just as she had fled from Heron House more than two months before.
    She closed her eyes again, the brush fallen still in her hand, and pictured his finger smoothing gently over the puppy’s fur. She had to swallow several times to overcome the nausea.
    T HE D UKE OF R IDGEWAY tapped on the door of the duchess’s sitting room the following morning and waited for her personal maid to admit him, curtsy, and leave the room quietly. His wife had sent for him. He rarely entered any of her private apartments without such an invitation.
    “Good morning, Sybil,” he said. “How are you today?” He crossed the room to take her hands and kiss her. She turned her cheek, as usual.
    “Better,” she said. “I was a little