Behind the Courtesan - By Bronwyn Stuart Page 0,73

summer days with Blake and Matthew, all had flown from her mind. Even up to the day her father marched her up the steps to the estate and handed her over, she hadn’t thought he would go through with it. Surely his only daughter was more important to him than a piece of land.

Evidently not.

It made her skin crawl and her stomach heave to recall the many times she’d wished the old duke would kill her rather than touch her again.

He almost did kill her, several times over. If it hadn’t been for the drink, she would have died. Instead, he’d drunk to such an excess, he forgot to turn the lock on the door all the way. After spending what seemed an eternity before daring to try the door, Sophie hadn’t even known if it would be night or day when she finally emerged from the lowest levels of the house. When Blake had told her how they’d searched for her, the hours her father had spent looking for her...she had been there all along.

Nothing had been more important that night than putting distance between herself and the man who traded her innocence for a farm. Sure, she could have woken her brother and let him see the bruises, but then they would have both had to run. She should never have written to let them know she was alive. She should have let her brother and her friend think her dead, but her sadness had weighed too heavily so she’d put pen to paper. She could have told them so much more, but the rest she kept to herself. Only the old duke knew the whole story and he was dead.

Blake would never understand that a courtesan’s life was preferable to no life at all.

She’d seen an opportunity to escape and she’d taken it. When she looked back on her flight that night, she was very lucky to have made it to London at all. She could have fallen into a ditch in the dark. She could have been attacked by animals or chanced upon a stranger on the road. It was no small miracle that she’d survived to reach the capital. She’d lived every day since as if it could be her last. She developed street sense with the help of her friends and she’d made decisions that were right at the time, not right for the future. The situation she now found herself in was no different. She had to make a decision about the information she now held and she needed to make it now, not for her future or Blake’s, not for their pasts or the possible outcomes, but for the future of her niece or nephew and the life he or she would lead.

Charles may not be exactly the same as the old duke, but he already showed he was not the man to take care of these villagers. To take care of her family.

Whether Sophie accepted the village as her home or not, she had to ensure her family would be happy, taken care of, protected. She would accept nothing less and, like it or not, Blake was the only one who could make sure that happened.

* * *

With each swing of the heavy axe, Blake split huge logs into smaller pieces for the kitchen fire and the tavern pit. His side hurt a little with the exertion but nothing compared to how his heart thundered in his chest. For the hundredth time since Sophie had arrived back in his life, he asked himself what the hell he was doing. The headache attested to the fact he was nowhere near the answer.

He wasn’t the kind of man who slept with his friend’s paramour. He certainly wasn’t the type of man to sleep with his brother’s woman. But Sophie had been his first. Not in the flesh, but he had loved her long before St. Ives had “saved” her. Blake snorted and dropped the axe once more, the sharp crack only just distinguishable above the steady patter of rain.

If the old duke had asked Blake to find the woman he’d wronged, Blake would have brought her home. He wouldn’t have offered her a position in his bed. Not as his mistress anyway.

He leaned over and hefted half a tree branch, resting it between two stumps. As he lifted and dropped the axe, rendering the useless limb down to kindling, he kept thinking what it would have been like to have Sophie by his