Only Beloved (The Survivor's Club , #7)

by Mary Balogh

“George,” she asked him, “why did you marry me? I mean, why me?” He still did not know why and could speak only the truth. “I don’t know.”

“I only know that when I thought of marrying as something I wanted to do, it was not marriage in the abstract of which I thought, but

of marriage to you. It felt right when I thought it and it felt right when I saw you again. It felt right during the month in London, and it felt very right on our wedding day. It has felt right ever since.”

“Three or four minutes do not make a day,” she told him. “Let us forget those minutes and remember all the rest. I want to remember it as the most wonderful day of my life.” Ah, Dora.

But it was as nearly perfect as any day could be. Let us remember it happily. Let us stop trying to forget it merely because there was that merest flaw in it.” A merest flaw. Ah, Dora.

“I married you because I

wanted a wife and a friend, not because I needed a mistress for Penderris.”

How could she ever be too tired for his lovemaking? Or for him? She was, of course, hopelessly, irrevocably in love with him. She had admitted that to herself long before now.

Everything comes from somewhere, even if that somewhere is beyond our conscious awareness.

I prefer not to look back, not to talk about the past, not even to think about it. I want what I have with you. I want our friendship, our . . . marriage. I have been happy with it, and I have felt that you are happy too.”

When I married you, I very much wanted life to be

new and good for both of us, unencumbered by memories of the past. The past has no real existence, after all. It is gone. The present is the reality we have, and for that fact I am grateful. I like the present.

He had, in so many words, told her that everything that had happened in his life between the ages of seventeen and thirty-five or thirty-six was none of her business.

Dora walked beside her husband and realized that she knew him scarcely at all and perhaps never would. For how

could one know a man if one experienced only the present with him and knew nothing of the past that had shaped him into the person he was? He had done almost forty-eight years of living before she married him.

She liked that about him. She liked that servants were not invisible to him as they seemed to be to so many people who had always been waited upon hand and foot.

“It is the music room,” he told her, his hand on the doorknob. “It overlooks the rose garden rather than the sea, and I have always thought that a

particularly clever touch.

A full-sized harp, intricately

and elegantly carved and looking as though it might well be made of solid gold, stood to one side of the pianoforte, a gilded chair drawn up to it. “Mine? It is mine?”

it was the duke—George—who

had got to his feet when she had finished at the harp and drawn the stool back from the pianoforte for her. It was he who had led her upstairs to the drawing room for refreshments afterward and filled a plate for her and brought her a cup of tea

before seating himself beside her and speaking in warm praise of her talent. She had fallen a little in love with him that evening, foolish and presu...

the thought had occurred to her yet again as she gazed into his smiling eyes that he was a terribly, terribly lonely man. Still. And it occurred to her that he could deal with his

loneliness only by giving, by making other people happy. Not by receiving. He did not know how to receive.

I am your wife. I am also your friend.”

She did what she had never done before. She kissed him. On

the lips. He stood very still until she was finished, though his lips sof...

The real difference was that when he was not at work, the hours were no longer long and empty. For he had a constant companion, one with whom he could discuss the day’s events and any other topic that occurred to either of them.

There was true talent in her fingers, but there was a deep beauty in her soul.

“neighbors are important,

George. One should always cultivate their good opinion when one can do so without compromising one’s principles. Sometimes neighbors can become friends, and friends are precious.”

In the main, her

mother had explained, people like to talk about themselves. The secret of good conversation was to induce them to do just that and then to appear interested in what they had to say. But not just to appear interested, Dora had added for

herself in later years. One needed actually t...

People were almost invariably interesting when one really listened to them. Everyone was so very ...

“She was a lady to inspire passion in all men who beheld her,” she said. “Though she never deliberately set one against another. The first duchess, I

mean. She was blond and blue-eyed and tall and slender and altogether more beautiful than any woman has a right to be. I might have been jealous of her if she had not also been the sweetest person I have ever met. The duke adored her and

guarded her jealously. No one could so much as look at her without drawing his wrath. He even hated her own family because they loved her and wanted to visit her here and have her visit...

forbidding her own brother to come to Penderris and of forbidding his own son to go and stay with his uncle and grandfather even though they doted on the boy. Yet he hated the boy hi...

upon him. Never has a mother so loved a child, I declare. She was inconsolable when he died after the duke had insisted upon purchasing his commission and packing him off to the Peninsula and int...

against all the piteous pleadings of the boy’s poor mother. Even if he did not push her over that cliff, he nevertheless killed her. But I daresay the worst of his passions died with her. He has been a dif...

woman, of c...

“Mrs. Parkinson,” she said rather sharply, “you will be quite boring Her Grace by so monopolizing her attention.”

What an absolute horror of a

woman, Dora thought. She wondered what on earth had induced Gwen to come and stay with her.

But that woman! Oh, gracious heaven, that woman. Mrs. Parkinson was a bore and an obsequious name dropper—and those were her

good qualities. What on earth had she been trying to accomplish with those last things she had said? Vent spite? But why? Cause mischief? But why?

Experience had taught him that silence often drew confidences when the other person obviously had something on his or her mind.

You do not cling to what you love. You give it wings instead and let it fly.