Sophia James - Marriage Made in Shame

So he had kept on at it largely alone, day after day and week after week. A more personal revenge. Once he had thought the emotion a negative one, but now...?

It was like a drug, creeping through his bones and shattering all that was dull; a questionable integrity, he knew that, but nevertheless his own.

The veneer of social insouciance was becoming harder and harder to maintain, the light and airy manners of a fop overlaying a heavy coat of steel. The lacy shirt cuffs, the carefully tied cravat. A smile where only fury lingered and an ever-increasing solitude.

Adelaide Ashfield’s honesty had shaken him, made him think, her directness piercing all that he had hoped to hide and so very easily. But there were things that she was not telling him, either, he could see this was so in the unguarded depths of those blue eyes. And Friar was circling around her, his derogatory evaluation of England’s royal family and its Parliament as much of a topic of his every conversation as his need to make a good marriage.

Revolution came from deprivation and loss, and he could not for the life of him work out why George Friar, a successful Baltimore businessman by his own account, would throw in his lot with the unpopular anti-British sentiments of his cousin. They were blood-related, but they were also wildly different people.

Perhaps it was in the pursuit of a religious fervour he had come with, the whispers of the young prince’s depravities rising. America’s independence had the same ring of truth to it, there was no doubt about that, a better way of living, a more equitable society and one unhampered by a monarch without scruples.

Conjecture and distrust. This is what his life had come to now, Gabriel thought, for he seldom took people at their face value any more, but looked for the dark blackness of their souls.

Gabriel strained to remember the laughter inside the words of Miss Adelaide Ashfield as he poured himself a drink, hating the way his hands shook when he raised the crystal decanter.

She was the first person he had ever met who seemed true and real and genuine, artifice and dissimulation a thousand miles from her honestly given opinions.

But he did wonder just who the hell had hurt her.

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