Upstairs, in her bedroom, Rosalind shook with unshed tears. I expected Vidal to lose interest in me if he saw Carmen even once, but this is worse than I imagined. Dizziness threatened to knock her to the floor. Desperate for air, she struggled out of her corset and tossed it aside while torturous images played in her mind. Opening that door to see the luscious Spanish woman in her fiancé’s arms, her little hands caressing him intimately, had been the worst moment of her life. Even the pain and humiliation of Charles’s assault couldn’t compare with the agony of knowing that Vidal had abandoned her. She felt sick with it. So sick, in fact, that she dropped to her knees and retched into her chamber pot.
When the spasm passed, she fell to her side on the floor, pulling her knees up to her che
