Veronica closed her bedroom door behind her and leaned back against it, palms flat against the cool wood.
She walked to the middle of the room, twirled in a circle with her arms spread wide, a dance of utter, complete joy. Twice, three times, four, she spun before collapsing on top of the bed, eyes closed, a smile curving her lips.
Veronica Moira MacLeod murmured a fervent prayer of thanksgiving. Even the worst kind of husband would be better than being a poor relation.
Her greatest wish had been granted.
She’d been saved.
“Were you intimate with him?”
She froze.
Slowly, she sat up to see Amanda standing in the doorway.
“You did what you set out to do, Amanda.”
She disliked Amanda intensely, and when they were alone, dropped all pretense of amiability. Over the last two years, she’d tried to like the girl or to at least find some common ground. From the beginning, she’d felt only antipathy from her cousin. Amanda had a quality about her no one else noticed, a certain type of cruelty that repelled her so much she attempted to avoid the girl.
Of all her female cousins, Amanda was perhaps the prettiest, with reddish blond hair and green eyes as sharp as chips of ice. Her features were lovely, and although she was shorter than Veronica, her figure was more fulsome. Amanda was, no doubt, the epitome of female beauty and as far from her cousin in looks and temperament as two people could be.
Since she’d come to live with her relatives, Amanda had made her miserable. Everyone else thought Amanda kind, generous,and genuinely concerned for the welfare of her older Scots cousin. She and Amanda knew the emotions were only pretense.
“It was you who informed Uncle Bertrand, wasn’t it?”
“Would you have me lie for you, cousin?” Amanda said. “Especially since I was worried about you. Why ever would you leave the house at night?”
“You could have asked me rather than inform your father,” she said.
“It’s Father’s duty to see to you, Veronica, since you’ve no one else.”
A fact Amanda brought up each day. God forbid she be allowed to forget, even for a moment, that she was an orphan.
Before that morning, Veronica had been doomed to be shunted off to a corner, to be a shadow for the rest of her life, unobtrusive, barely noticed, a figure about whom people commented in passing. “Oh, her? That’s Veronica. Pay her no heed. She has no one but us, poor thing.”
Instead, her foolishness had been rewarded, not with punishment, but a husband.
Amanda entered the room and closed the door, sitting on the bench below the window.
“You didn’t say. Were you intimate with him?”
“Don’t I pay you enough to leave me alone, Amanda?”
Amanda only laughed gaily.
“Sometimes, cousin, I think you and I are the only ones who understand each other completely. I need not put on airs around you, and you are free to be yourself with me.”
She didn’t respond. Silence was safer around Amanda than answering every barb.
Amanda turned and smiled at her, such a beatific smile she might have been fooled by it if she hadn’t looked in Amanda’s eyes.
Her cousin pointed one foot and studied the tip of her shoe. “I’ve spent all my allowance,” Amanda said. “Every bit of it.”
“You should be more careful with your money,” Veronica said.
“I believe you’re right, cousin, and if I should get my hands on any more money between now and when my allowance is paid next month, you can be certain that I would be very much on your side. You might not be punished severely, after all. Father does listen to me, you know.”
She knew that only too well.
