Tempting Mr. Townsend (Dashing Widows 2)

"No," she said hollowly, at last voicing the shameful truth. "Although he was a good man and he deserved better from me than he got."

Freddie should have married a stolid farmer's wife, not a restless, curious, volatile creature who dreamed of the social whirl instead of milk yields and barley prices. By the end of Caroline's ten years in Lincolnshire, she'd felt like she drowned in mud. She sucked in a breath of London air, reminding herself that now she was free.

"Well, Crewe deserved considerably less than he got from me," Helena said sourly. "He wasn't even any good in bed. If a woman must wed a degenerate rake, the least she should expect is physical satisfaction."

Fenella was blushing. She always looked about sixteen when she was embarrassed. "Well, I loved Henry. And he loved me." She sounded uncharacteristically defiant. "I'll always miss him."

Fenella's happy marriage always filled Caroline with a mixture of envy and disbelief—and guilt that she couldn't mourn Freddie with an ounce of the same sincerity. But if she needed an example of the dangers of a close union, she merely needed to glimpse the sorrow in Fen's fine blue eyes.

Helena regarded Fenella with fond impatience. "You were lucky to have a good man, Fen. But Waterloo was five years ago, and you're still wearing half mourning. Isn't it time to start living again?"

Fenella paled at Helena's unprecedented candor. She rarely heard a word of criticism. Caroline had long ago noticed that Fenella's air of fragility made people treat her like glass, ready to shatter at the slightest rough treatment.

"You don't understand. It's different for me," Fenella stammered.

"Because of your son?" Caroline asked, wondering for the thousandth time how different her marriage might have been if God had granted her children. Would she have felt so trapped, so frustrated, so useless? Who knew?

"Brandon's only ten. He needs me."

"And you're only twenty-nine," Helena retorted. "You need to look for love again."

"I don't want love," Fenella said stiffly. She bit her lip and turned a tragic gaze on her friends. "It hurts too much to lose it."

With that stark statement, confirming Caroline's doubts about even a loving marriage, the spate of confidences slammed to a shuddering halt. A desolate silence descended on the luxurious room. Only the crackling fire and a spatter of raindrops on the windows broke the quiet.

Eventually Helena smiled, but Caroline saw the effort it took. "I'm sorry, Fen. I'm as blue-deviled as Caro. It must be the weather. I have no right to harangue you."

Caroline gestured, sloshing her tea into the saucer, and spoke with sudden urgency. "We all have the right to offer our opinion. It's what people do when they care."

Annoyance banished Fenella's distress, thank goodness. For a few moments there, Caroline had worried that her usually serene friend might dissolve into tears. "So you too believe I should forget the best person I've ever known, a faithful husband, a loving father, a brave sol

dier?"

For safety's sake, Caroline set her cup on the tea table before she slid into the chair beside Fenella's. When she took Fenella's hand, she wasn't surprised to find it trembling. "You'll never forget him. And neither you should. But Henry wouldn't want you to hide away from the outside world, not when you're young and beautiful with so much to give. The man you've described would never be so mean spirited."

Fenella's grip tightened. "I'm not brave like you and Helena. I'm comfortable in my rut. The truth is that I'm afraid of facing the world again, especially without Henry by my side."

"It's brave to admit your fear," Helena said from the sofa in an unusually subdued voice. "And you're wrong about my courage. I might act as if I'm ready to take on the world, but I've already had one disastrous marriage. Choosing a pig like Crewe, especially when I defied my parents to have him, puts my judgment in serious question."

"Oh, Helena." Fenella's lovely face softened with compassion. "You've learned from your mistakes. And you were so young then."

"We were all young," Caroline said in a low voice. "We're still young."

Freddie had been young, too. But at least he'd led the life he chose. Until illness struck him down, he'd been blissfully happy in the muck and mire of his fields. Caroline realized that if she died tomorrow, she'd never done a single thing she wanted. That seemed even more of a waste than Freddie's lingering death. She'd devoted three long years to nursing him. She'd emerged from those harrowing days painfully aware of life's brevity and how easily the years could slip away with nothing to show for them but drudgery.

"What about you, Caro?" Helena asked. "This gray day has us stripping our souls bare. We've started telling the truth. We may as well continue. What frightens you?"

Gathering her dark, confused thoughts, Caroline stared blindly into the fire. Pictures from the barren past filled her mind. Her austere girlhood, the only child of elderly parents with rigid ideas of behavior. Her seventeen-year-old self marrying stodgy, tongue-tied Freddie Beaumont with not a shred of romance to brighten the occasion. Ten dreary years as a farming baronet's wife in wet, windy Lincolnshire, with no company but the equally dreary neighbors and a prize dairy herd. This last uneventful year in London as she waited out her period of mourning for a man who had left little impression on her, however much she might pity his untimely death.

"Caro?" Fenella prompted gently. "Helena's right. If we can't be candid with one another, who can we be candid with?"

Caroline swallowed to shift the boulder of emotion jamming her throat. Guilt at not grieving for Freddie as a wife should. Lifelong dissatisfaction. A burning need to forge her own path. She loathed the restrictions of mourning. To use Helena's terminology, she'd kicked against convention like a half-broken horse in a narrow stall.

But her festering restlessness had a deeper cause. She was no different to Fenella and Helena. She too was terrified. And the admission nearly choked her.

She straightened until her back was stiff as a ruler, the way she'd been trained to sit as a girl groomed to marry her father's wealthy godson Frederick Beaumont. "I dread that what's to come will be as dull as what's past. I dread that I'll die without ever having lived." She met her friends' eyes. "And I have a raging hunger for life."

"Oh, Caro." Fenella placed one arm around her shoulders and squeezed. "It's not too late."