My Lady's Choosing: An Interactive Romance Novel(99)

“Please, have mercy on me. Forgive my sins. I am a man, I am but a man!” The vicar claws at your face and pulls it close, then whispers, wild-eyed, “The boy. Manvers has the boy.”

You pull your face from the wretched vicar’s grasp, spin on your heel, and witness Manvers striking a match on the side of a portrait of the dead Lady Craven. He holds the flame to the small Master Alexander, who is tied to a wooden chair, which is tied to the rest of the wooden furniture in the room.

“Manvers, no!” you yell.

“Miss!” Alexander calls. Your head snaps to him, his little face peering knowingly at you from its roped confines. “Find your move.”

You can’t know for sure, but it seems that the child flicks his little wide eyes to an area just beneath the portrait of the late Lady Craven. You act on instinct and crash past Lord Craven, the vicar, and the insane Manvers until you face the portrait dead-on.

Find your move. Master Alexander’s echoing of your own words echoes in your mind, and suddenly you punch through the portrait’s eyes. You are both shocked and unshocked to find your fist tear through the canvas as if it were no more than a spider’s web.

Your hand, now busted through the face of the late Lady Craven, feels its way around a small, secret shelf. Your fingers detect the outline of a pocket-sized leather volume, what you guess is the lady’s true diary.

As you snatch up the book, the scent of fire and smoke snatches your nose. You spin around to see Manvers setting fire to anything he can reach while training a small golden pistol on your heart. Craven and the vicar desperately attempt to untie Master Alexander.

“You should never have come here, girl,” Manvers spits at you. “All of this could have been avoided if not for you. You angered her, you see. You angered her ghost, and so I must take action to protect her.”

“Nonsense,” you spit back. Acting on instinct, you flip to a random page in the diary. You begin to read with all of the confidence you can muster: “?‘I despise it here, and I should never have come. Craven is terrible since the baby has been born, so fatherly and kind. It repulses me, how dull he has become.’?”

You cringe at the words and the effect they have on Lord Craven. Still, you read on. “?‘I have taken the vicar to my bed. It thrills me to corrupt a pure man.’?” You shudder. The vicar slumps in disgrace and self-loathing. “?‘Plus,’?” you continue, “?‘his manhood is always as hard as it is for me to pay attention at chapel.’?” At these words, the vicar blushes even more deeply.

“What is the use of reading her secret thoughts? These thoughts belong to my lady!” Manvers takes dead aim at you with the pistol.

“?‘Manvers is worse than the others,’?” you continue. “?‘He is so simple and devoted, I often think of asking him to jump off a cliff to please me.’?” As you utter these words, Manvers deflates. “?‘He is as obsessed with me as a father would be with a child. He disgusts me. I anxiously await the day he dies, so that I may dance on his grave and then forget where he is buried.’?”

“Stop your lies! Stop your lies!” Manvers drops the pistol, half begging, half damning you. Though doing so crushes you, and seriously makes you question Craven’s prior taste in women, you continue.

“?‘I’d wager if this secret diary were ever read aloud to him, Manvers would beg for it to stop being read, so ridiculous is his devotion to an entirely false version of myself.’?” You close the sinister little tome and throw it aside.

Manvers sinks to the ground. Lord Craven and the vicar have freed the child, at last. It took them long enough. Manvers looks from you, to the portrait, to the men, and then to the child.

“Nothing matters anymore,” he sobs. And with the kindling of some hidden spark, all of Hopesend Manor is aflame.





Turn to this page.





Your eyes come to rest on Fabien’s statuesque form as he stokes the flames. His eyes may be the misty green of the Nile, but his skin is the dusky color of the desert sand. In the past, at some of the ton parties you attended while the Dragon’s companion, you would wander near groups of married women, free from the constraints of paid companionship. Sometimes you would hear these women speak in hushed and tipsy tones about men with certain body parts like “steel wrapped in silk.” You were never entirely sure what they meant, but now you know. Fabien’s entire body is a firm girder wrapped in taut, tawny velvet.

The object of your thoughts flashes his eyes up at you. Their Nile green is now flecked with golden fire. “You look at me with the weight of the world,” he says, while holding your gaze steady in his own. There is a barely composed thirst in his eyes, which he drops to drink deep of the oasis that is the sight of your body.

You realize that you are parched for him as well. How majestic would it be, you wonder, to feel those hands as big as twin sphinxes, but twice as mysterious, run all over your curves?

You must know. And you must escape. You know exactly what you will do.

“I want you,” you say, “to put my blindfold back on.”

The massive man’s breath catches in his throat. “Am I so displeasing to look upon?”

“You know you are not.” Your voice remains even.

“Then why do you wish to lose your sense of sight?” he asks, his eyes now burning brighter than the fire itself.