Mary Balogh - A Secret Affair

BOOKS BY MARY BALOGH

THE HUXTABLE SERIES
First Comes Marriage
Then Comes Seduction
At Last Comes Love
Seducing an Angel
A Secret Affair
THE SIMPLY QUARTET
Simply Unforgettable
Simply Love
Simply Magic
Simply Perfect
THE SLIGHTLY SERIES
Slightly Married
Slightly Wicked
Slightly Scandalous
Slightly Tempted
Slightly Sinful
Slightly Dangerous
BELOVED CLASSIC NOVELS
One Night for Love
More than a Mistress
No Mans Mistress
A Summer to Remember
The Secret Pearl
The Gilded Web
Web of Love
The Devils Web
The Ideal Wife
A Precious Jewel
Dark Angel/Lord Carews Bride

H ANNAH R EID, Duchess of Dunbarton, was free at last. Free of the burden of a ten-year marriage, and free of the endlessly tedious year of deep mourning that had succeeded the death of the duke, her husband.

It was a freedom that had been a long time coming. It was a freedom well worth celebrating.

She had married the duke after a five-day acquaintancehis grace, all impatience to be wed, had procured a special license rather than wait for the banns to be readwhen she was nineteen and he was somewhere in his seventies. No one seemed certain of exactly where in his seventies that had been, though some said it was perilously close to eighty. At the time of her marriage, the duchess was a breathtakingly lovely girl, with a slender, lithe figure, eyes that rivaled a summer sky for blueness, a bright, eager face made for smiling, and long, wavy tresses that were almost white in their blondnessa shimmering white. The duke, on the other hand, had a body and face and head that showed all the ravages of age that time and years of hard living could possibly have piled upon them. And he suffered from gout. And from a heart that could no longer be relied upon to continue beating with steady regularity.

She married him for his money, of course, expecting to be a very rich widow indeed within a matter of a few short years at most. She was a rich widow now, quite fabulously wealthy, in fact, though she had had to wait longer than expected for the freedom to enjoy her riches to the full.

The old duke had worshiped the ground she walked upon, to use the old clich. He had heaped so many costly clothes upon her person that she would have suffocated beneath their weight if she had ever tried to wear them all at once. A guest room next to her dressing room at Dunbarton House on Hanover Square in London had been converted into a second dressing room merely to accommodate all the silks and satins and fursamong other garments and accessoriesthat had been worn once, perhaps twice, before being discarded for something newer. And the duke had had not one, not two, not even three, but four safes built into the walls of his own bedchamber to safeguard all the jewels with which he gifted his beloved over the years, though she was perfectly free to come and fetch whichever of them she chose to wear at any time.

He had been a doting, indulgent husband.

The duchess was always gorgeously dressed. And she was always bedecked with jewels, ostentatiously large ones, usually diamonds. She wore them in her hair, in the lobes of her ears, at her bosom, on her wrists, on more than one of the fingers of each hand.

The duke showed off his prize wherever he went, beaming with pride and adoration as he looked up at her. In his prime he would have been taller than she, but age had bent him and a cane supported him, and for much of his time he sat. His duchess did not stray far from his side when they were together, even when they were at a ball and prospective partners abounded. She tended him with her characteristic half-smile playing always about her lovely lips. She was always the picture of wifely devotion on such occasions. Nobody could deny that.

When the duke could not go out himselfand it became increasingly difficult for him to do so as the years went onthen other men escorted his duchess to the social events with which the ton amused itself whenever it was in town in large numbers. There were three in particularLord Hardingraye, Sir Bradley Bentley, and Viscount Zimmerall handsome, elegant, charming gentlemen. It was common knowledge that they enjoyed her company and that she enjoyed theirs. And no one was ever in any doubt of what was included in that enjoyment. The only detail people wondered aboutand wonder they did, of course, without ever reaching a satisfactory conclusionwas whether all that pleasure was enjoyed with the dukes knowledge or without.

There were some who even dared wonder if it was all done with the dukes blessing. But deliciously scandalous as it might have been to believe so, most people actually liked the dukeespecially as he was now elderly and therefore deserving of pityand preferred to see him as a poor wronged old man. The same people liked to refer to the duchess as that diamond-laden gold digger, often with the addition of who is no better than she ought to be. Those people tended to be female.

And then the duchesss dazzling social life and scandalous loves and dreary incarceration in a union with an aged, ailing husband had all ended abruptly with the dukes ultimately sudden demise from a heart seizure early one morning. Though it was not nearly as early in the marriage as the duchess had hoped and expected, of course. She had her fortune at last, but she had paid dearly for it. She had paid with her youth. She was twenty-nine when he died, thirty when she left off her mourning soon after Christmas at Copeland, her country home in Kent that the duke had bought for her so that she would not have to leave when he died and his nephew took over his title and all his entailed properties. Copeland Manor was its full name, though the house was more mansion than the name implied and was surrounded by a correspondingly large park.

And so, at the age of thirty, the best years of her youth behind her, the Duchess of Dunbarton was free at last. And wealthy beyond belief. And very ready to celebrate her freedom. As soon as Easter had come and gone, she moved to London and settled in for the Season. It was at Dunbarton House she settled, the new duke being a genial man of middle years who preferred tramping about the country counting his sheep to being in town sitting in the Upper House of Parliament listening to his peers prosing on forever about matters that might be of crucial importance to the country and even the world but were of no interest whatsoever to him. Politicians were all prize bores, he would tell anyone who cared to listen. And being a man without a wife, he had no one to point out to him that sitting in the Upper House was only the most minor of reasons for the spring gathering of the ton in London. The duchess might occupy Dunbarton House and have a ball there every night with his blessing. And so he informed her. Provided, that was, she did not send him the bills.

That last was a comment typical of his rather parsimonious nature. The duchess had no need to send her bills to anyone. She was enormously wealthy in her own right. She could pay them herself.