• Complain

Mary Balogh - The Huxtables 05 A Secret Affair

Here you can read online Mary Balogh - The Huxtables 05 A Secret Affair full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2010, publisher: Delacorte Press, genre: Prose. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Mary Balogh The Huxtables 05 A Secret Affair
  • Book:
    The Huxtables 05 A Secret Affair
  • Author:
  • Publisher:
    Delacorte Press
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    2010
  • Rating:
    4 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 80
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

The Huxtables 05 A Secret Affair: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "The Huxtables 05 A Secret Affair" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

Mary Balogh: author's other books


Who wrote The Huxtables 05 A Secret Affair? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

The Huxtables 05 A Secret Affair — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "The Huxtables 05 A Secret Affair" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

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

The Huxtables 05 A Secret Affair - image 1

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.

She might be past her youth, and really thirty was a quite nasty age for a woman, but she was still incredibly beautiful. No one could deny that, even though there were a few who would have done so if they could. Indeed, she was probably more beautiful now than she had been at the age of nineteen. She had gained just a little weight during the intervening years, and she had gained it in all the right places and none in any of the wrong places. She was still slender, but she was now deliciously curvaceous. Her face, less bright and eager than it had been when she was a girl, had settled pleasingly into its perfect bone structure and complexion. She smiled frequently, though her characteristic smile was half arrogant, half alluring, and altogether mysterious, as though she smiled at something inside herself rather than at the outside world. Her eyes had acquired a certain droop of the eyelids that suggested bedchambers and dreams and more secrets. And her hair, at the hands of experts, was always immaculately styledbut in such a way that it looked as if it might tumble into luxuriant disarray at any moment. The fact that it never did made it only the more intriguing.

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «The Huxtables 05 A Secret Affair»

Look at similar books to The Huxtables 05 A Secret Affair. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «The Huxtables 05 A Secret Affair»

Discussion, reviews of the book The Huxtables 05 A Secret Affair and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.