Whisper of Scandal by Nicola Cornick

viciousness had turned his biddable country wife into a different woman. Oh, how she had changed.
    After the attack Joanna’s courses had stopped completely and she had wondered if she was, at last, pregnant. She had longed for it desperately with every fiberof her being, hugging the hope to her like a secret. Yet even then her instinct had told her that there would be no baby. She tried to ignore the stubborn feeling, but over time it grew stronger and stronger. She started to believe that the hatred she felt for David was a canker that had killed all chance of a child. Superstitious as her aunt, she thought she had ill wished the baby and driven out all hope. And when her courses had started again a few months later, almost as though nothing had happened, she had felt empty and bereft, different in some way, as barren as David had taunted her she was. The doctors had shaken their heads and said that nothing was certain, but Joanna had known.
    She opened her eyes. The sky, a little blurred but a beautiful clear, sweet blue, swam back into focus. She felt the breeze. Heard the sound of voices carry to her, saw the richness of spring color all around. She drew a deep breath.
    She had told herself that it did not matter that she would always be childless, David’s grass widow, abandoned as he sailed the world. She had carved out a life of her own in ton society. She loved her beautiful, stylish existence in her beautiful, stylish house. She had her work; she had her friends. And she had told herself that it was all she wanted.
    She had lied.
    David had known that she had lied to herself and to everyone else. He had exposed that falsehood in searing detail in his letter:
    I am aware that my wife will detest the strictures that I have placed upon her but that her desire for a child is so strong that she will have no choiceother than to put herself into the greatest danger and discomfort imaginable in order to rescue my daughter…
    Such cruel, heartless words revealing the true nature of her desperation and lonely desire to be a mother! She felt a tight, painful lump in the back of her throat. David had stripped away the pretense that had protected her and shown her weakness and her vulnerability. She wondered if Alex Grant had picked up on the implication of David’s words, if he had realized that her husband had detested her for her childless state. Her insides curled up at the thought of his scorn.
    So now she could lie to herself no longer. She could not pretend that her life gave her everything she wanted. The truth hurt very much. It was more painful than anything she had allowed herself to feel ever before. But she had also been given a chance. She had to save this child, little Nina Tatiana Ware, alone, unloved, an orphan abandoned in a monastery somewhere in the Arctic wastes. Her mind, her heart, fastened on to the necessity of claiming the child with a tenacity that she knew instantly could not, would not, be shifted. Come hell or high water, she was rescuing Nina, bringing her back and raising her as her own. The giving part of her, the part that had been thwarted time and again because she had never been able to find enough people or animals or causes to love, almost exploded within her, making her shake with longing and fear and newness and excitement.
    “Lady Joanna!”
    It was not the moment that she wanted to be interrupted. Stifling a most unladylike curse and hastilyrubbing the tears from her cheeks, Joanna turned to see that Alex Grant was approaching her along the gravel path. She might have known that he would not accept his dismissal. He was not the sort of man to go tamely away when he wanted something. She found she could not speak. Her throat was stiff and dry. The words would not form. If he tells me all this is my own fault because I drove David into the arms of another woman, she thought viciously, or if he demands to know again in that high-handed manner of his what I did to make David hate me, I