A Secret Affair

Zusatztext “Poignant! thought-provoking! deliciously sensual! and completely enthralling.”— Library Journal   “Mary Balogh has masterfully woven a romantic tale of the importance of family! of compassion! and of love and forgiveness.”—Fresh Fiction Informationen zum Autor Mary Balogh is the New York Times bestselling author of numerous books, including the acclaimed Slightly and Simply series, the Mistress novels, and the five titles in her Huxtable series: First Comes Marriage, Then Comes Seduction, At Last Comes Love, Seducing an Angel, and A Secret Affair. A former teacher, she grew up in Wales and now lives in Canada. Klappentext Beloved "New York Times"-bestselling author Balogh has written her most beguiling novel yet! in which the black sheep of the scandalous Huxtable family finally meets his match--in a woman of even more wicked reputation. Chapter One Hannah Reid, Duchess of Dunbarton, was free at last. Free of the burden of a ten-year marriage, and free of the endlessly tedious year of deep mourning that had succeeded the death of the duke, her husband.   It was a freedom that had been a long time coming. It was a freedom well worth celebrating.   She had married the duke after a five-day acquaintance--his grace, all impatience to be wed, had procured a special license rather than wait for the banns to be read--when she was nineteen and he was somewhere in his seventies. No one seemed certain ofexactly where in his seventies that had been, though some said it was perilously close to eighty. At the time of her marriage, the duchess was a breathtakingly lovely girl, with a slender, lithe figure, eyes that rivaled a summer sky for blueness, a bright,eager face made for smiling, and long, wavy tresses that were almost white in their blondness--a shimmering white. The duke, on the other hand, had a body and face and head that showed all the ravages of age that time and years of hard living could possiblyhave piled upon them. And he suffered from gout. And from a heart that could no longer be relied upon to continue beating with steady regularity.   She married him for his money, of course, expecting to be a very rich widow indeed within a matter of a few short years at most. She was a rich widow now, quite fabulously wealthy, in fact, though she had had to wait longer than expected for the freedomto enjoy her riches to the full.   The old duke had worshiped the ground she walked upon, to use the old cliche. He had heaped so many costly clothes upon her person that she would have suffocated beneath their weight if she had ever tried to wear them all at once. A guest room next toher dressing room at Dunbarton House on Hanover Square in London had been converted into a second dressing room merely to accommodate all the silks and satins and furs--among other garments and accessories--that had been worn once, perhaps twice, before beingdiscarded for something newer. And the duke had had not one, not two, not even three, but four safes built into the walls of his own bedchamber to safeguard all the jewels with which he gifted his beloved over the years, though she was perfectly free to comeand fetch whichever of them she chose to wear at any time.   He had been a doting, indulgent husband.   The duchess was always gorgeously dressed. And she was always bedecked with jewels, ostentatiously large ones, usually diamonds. She wore them in her hair, in the lobes of her ears, at her bosom, on her wrists, on more than one of the fingers of each hand.    The duke showed off his prize wherever he went, beaming with pride and adoration as he looked up at her. In his prime he would have been taller than she, but age had bent him and a cane supported him, and for much of his time he sat. His duchess did notstray far from his side when they were together, even when they were at a ba...

Product details

• Authors: Mary Balogh
• Publisher: Dell Publishing Inc.
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 25.01.2011
• EAN: 9780440245285
• ISBN: 978-0-440-24528-5
• No. of pages: 386
• Dimensions: 106 mm x 175 mm x 25 mm
• Series: Dell; Huxtable Quintent; Huxtable Quintent; Huxtable Quintet
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature