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

by Mary Balogh

“You miss your friends when they are far away. You even feel a bit lonely without them. But you absolutely do not wish you had made them so dependent upon you that they would need still to be here living at Penderris. You are happy in

their independence and happiness. There is no point in denying it even if you feel so inclined. I have seen you with them. And you have given me wings with your gifts of my pianoforte and harp. I am even more than partly reconciled with

my mother because you encouraged me to visit her and talk with her. I will not fly away, however. Not ever, for you have married me and are good to me. I will stay. That is a promise and a...

wedding, but because I could never wish ...

We were forced into marrying when I was seventeen and she was twenty.

I met her for the first time when I proposed marriage to her—in the presence of her father and mine.

He felt a sudden wish to have Mrs. Parkinson’s neck between his two hands.

“I sometimes think,” he said, “that Brendan had neither the wish nor the intention of returning alive from the

Peninsula. And that is the burden I must bear upon my soul for as long as I have breath in my body,

George

had made it very clear on several occasions that he would allow no intrusion into his memories of his first marriage, but she had pried anyway.

“If it was not quite barbaric,” he said softly against the top of her head, “I would be quite happy to boil Mrs. Parkinson in oil.”

“It is barbaric,” she agreed. “Did you know, though, that I just adore barbarians?”

“My first marriage was difficult and unhappy,”

I purchased Brendan’s commission not just because he

begged it of me and certainly not because his mother was adamantly opposed, but because I thought it was right for him—the only right thing.

There will be a portrait after all of my family. You are my family, Dora.”

tip of an iceberg,

ANACHRONISM

oh, she loved him, loved him, loved him.

OH, BORING, BORING, BORING

taking all of fifteen minutes to do it.

SO, A QUICKIE

He was very, very good, Dora thought a short while later as they sat in the library together, writing their letters, at persuading other people to solve their problems and be happy. But what of himself?

Pain, even pain from long ago, could heal.

If their marriage was ever to be a truly happy one, then she needed to know.

And yet she also needed to respect his right to privacy.

It was difficult sometimes to understand what drew one to some people as friends, above the level of

friendly acquaintance. It had not happened often to her, but it had happened twice already at Penderris. She was very well blessed.

something else happened to nag at her thoughts when she was idle. Or, rather, something did

not happen, something that always happened with dependable regularity every month but had failed to materialize two weeks ago or on any of the days since.

bilious.

Miriam had hated the sea. She had hated Penderris. God help him, she had hated him.

You are all I need—all I have ever needed or will ever need. Just you.”

He was very close, he realized, to using the word love.

But the word was so p...

youthful connotations of heavy-breathing passion and starry-eyed romance that it seemed an inappropriate word for him to use, for he was a forty-eight-year-old man and the love he felt for his ...

That was the truly comfortable thing about Dora. Words were not always necessary.

“Dora?” he said. “You are increasing?” “I fear I must be,” she said. “I think it is too much to hope it is the change of life.”

“You are going to have a baby?” he said. “We are going to have a child? Dora?” Something strange had happened to his voice. He scarcely recognized it.

Lord God in heaven, was it possible? He had impregnated her. She was going to bear a child. He was going to be a father. They were going to be parents together.

“Dora,” he said, “I chose you because you were you, regardless of age or ability to bear children. First and foremost I wanted you as my wife, as my friend, as my

lover. But to be blessed with a child on top of all those things? To be a father?” He moved one hand beneath her chin and raised her face close to his own. “To have a child with you? Can there be so much happiness in the world? And you thought I

would be upset, even angry? You thought I would blame you when you could not possibly have got yourself into your present condition without considerable help...

“We are old enough to be grandparents,” she said. “But not too old, apparently, to be parents.” He smiled at her. “Can you be happy now that you know that I am?”

He set her feet back down on the path and straightened up, pleased to note that he was scarcely winded.

“I am going to be a father,” he said again, grinning like an idiot.

He was going to be a father. It was like a great miracle. If, that was, she survived the dangers of

childbirth. And if the child did.

“Goodbye, Pa— Goodbye, sir.”

The very last words Brendan had spoken to him when he left to join his regiment. George had not seen him again before they went off to the Peninsula and the boy’s death. “Goodbye, sir.” Not Papa, but

“...

“I have been standing here