The Bride Wore Pearls Read online

  Good Lord.

  “Lazonby! How fortuitous.” Anaïs de Rohan wore one of her dark, vibrant gowns, with her hair tumbled atop her head like an afterthought.

  Left with no alternative, Lazonby pushed open the gate and started up the walk, wary now on two fronts. Miss de Rohan swept down the garden path beside Anisha, standing a head taller and wearing her soft, Madonna-like smile. The path was meandering, allowing time for his unease to take a good, firm grip.

  An ax-wielding Amazon, he had called her. That had been uncharitable—and untrue.

  But when she reached him, Miss de Rohan caught his empty hand almost affectionately, then hesitated. “Oh, dear,” she said, brow furrowing. “Am I now to set my palm on your right shoulder and address you in Latin?”

  It was the formal Fraternitas greeting, but Lazonby had never been much for tradition. “Don’t trouble yourself,” he said, bowing low over her hand. “You have made a new friend, I see. I commend your good taste.”

  Miss de Rohan blushed and stepped back. “I took it upon myself to call,” she said, catching Anisha’s arm in her own. “Forward of me, was it not?”

  Lazonby let his gaze slide to Anisha’s, gently probing. He had half a mind to turn Miss de Rohan over his knee for a thrashing—and as her Fraternitas sponsor, he probably could have done it.

  Anisha’s countenance, however, was as lovely and as serene as ever. If having her former swain’s new love thrust upon her had distressed her in any way, one could not discern it. But then, Anisha was every inch a lady—and possessed a lifetime’s experience, Lazonby suspected, in camouflaging her wounds and glossing over social awkwardness.

  “I am glad you called, for we have news,” said Anisha, glancing up at her caller with what might have been genuine warmth. “You must congratulate her, Lazonby. Miss de Rohan is to be married very soon.”

  “Congratulations, then,” said Lazonby, his voice a little cool. “That’s your second triumph in as many days.”

  “Thank you.” Miss de Rohan gave a little curtsey, then cut a shy glance at her hostess. “Well, I had better go,” she said. “Cousin Maria says we must have new carpets before the big day, so I’m to meet her in the Strand. I appreciate your kindness, Lady Anisha, more than I can say. Especially the dinner party—if you are indeed sure?”

  “Nothing would give us more pleasure,” said Anisha.

  “A dinner party?” Rance murmured.

  “To celebrate the betrothal.” Anisha smiled at him. “Lucan and I are giving a dinner party for the happy couple. It will be, I daresay, my only social coup. And yes, Lord Lazonby, you will be expected to put on your best coat and turn up. Saturday at six.”

  “Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” he said smoothly.

  Anisha turned to Miss de Rohan. “I’ll draw up a guest list,” she said, “and we’ll finalize it tomorrow over tea.”

  Miss de Rohan smiled. “You truly are too kind,” she said. “And to do it on such short notice. Now I’m afraid I really must run. But thank you again, Lady Anisha, for telling me all about India. And for your . . . well, your good advice.”

  “Wedding advice, eh?” asked Lazonby.

  “Not exactly.” Miss de Rohan cast Anisha a sidelong glance, her cheeks warming faintly.

  Anisha gave one of her calm smiles. “Hasta Samudrika, Lazonby,” she said, her hands set serenely together. “I have seen her palm.”

  Miss de Rohan held up one hand, now gloved. “I believe Lady Anisha has satisfied herself as to the nature of my character, and kindly explained to me how best to manage Geoff,” she said, sounding entirely sincere. “It will be a challenge, since we are both born Mesha, the Ram. Still, I am to marry him with her blessing. Also, I am healthy, long-lived, and exceedingly fertile. I should warn him straightaway about that last one, don’t you imagine, Lazonby?”

  Lazonby felt his eyes widen but could not think of an appropriate response. Miss de Rohan, apparently, expected none, and instead set her hands to mirror Anisha’s, then bowed to her hostess.

  “Namaste, Lady Anisha,” she said. “This has been a great honor. May I let myself out the back?”

  “Yes,” said Anisha. “Of course.”

  But at the last instant, Miss de Rohan turned back to him. “Oh, by the way, Lazonby,” she said offhandedly. “My parents are hastening home from the Continent. I collect you do not know my father?”

  “I know of him,” said Lazonby reluctantly. “But no, I’ve not the pleasure of an acquaintance.”

  The young lady smiled a little wanly. “He is hard to get to know,” she admitted. “But through his work in Whitehall, he does have contacts—even I, in fact, know some of them—the sorts of people, I mean, who might be of use to you in your . . . well, shall we call it your quest? Now is not the time, of course. But you will remember, I hope, that I have offered?”

  Lazonby gave a tight bow and thanked her.

  He watched her go, not entirely sure what Miss de Rohan had just suggested. Her father’s help, perhaps, in return for his support of her marriage? That was of utterly no value to her, though perhaps she did not know it.

  But there was no doubt as to her father’s influence; de Vendenheim was a sort of eminence grise within the Home Office, and though he had never been officially employed or elected—never officially anything, really—he was a force to be reckoned with when it came to police matters within London and far beyond.

  In fact, he probably held Royden Napier’s bollocks in the palm of his hand . . .

  Well. What had she been suggesting?

  True, there was a Masonic-like bond within the Fraternitas. They were sworn to one another’s welfare. It was the reason Sutherland had helped him survive the gallows. The reason Bessett and Ruthveyn had followed him out of Morocco, and why the Gallic brotherhood had sent Geoff to Belgium. Perhaps, like all of them, Miss de Rohan meant merely to do her duty?

  For the first time in a long while, Lazonby felt the stirring of hope.

  But the young lady had already turned at the gate and waved good-bye, her Madonna-smile still firmly in place.

  Lazonby lifted his hat, and Miss de Rohan hastened away. He and Anisha were left standing together on the garden path, less than an arm’s length apart. He looked down at her, and suddenly—for reasons that utterly escaped him—he couldn’t quite catch his breath.

  Her dark eyes were wide, her countenance as open and earnest as ever, and it felt for an instant as if the whole of his world had somehow altered; as if black might be a little more gray than he’d once believed, and everything he’d been so sure of might—just might—be wrong.

  Damn it to hell.

  He had let Sutherland put mad notions in his head.

  Then Anisha broke the spell by laughing, her thin, elegant fingers going at once to her mouth. “I am sorry,” she said on a gurgle of laughter, “but you look like you’ve just burgled a hothouse.”

  Lazonby looked down and realized he still held the massive cone of roses in the crook of his arm—about half a bushel, by his reckoning. “These are for you,” he said, resisting the urge to thrust them at her. “May I carry them inside?”

  “For me?” Her gaze fell to the flowers, her throat working up and down a little oddly. “Well. How odd.”

  “Odd?”

  She lifted her gaze back to his. “I do not think anyone has ever brought me flowers.”

  Her husband, thought Lazonby, had been ten times a fool.

  He wanted, fleetingly, to tell her so. But the moment passed, and Anisha’s matter-of-fact tone was returning. “Just set them down, and Chatterjee will put them in water.” She turned and pointed to a little stone bench tucked into the shade. “Thank you. They are lovely—and huge. Now come sit with me in the arbor. I wish to speak with you.”

  But he caught her arm, all but forcing her to turn round to face him. “Anisha, I—”

  She widened her eyes. “Yes?”

  “Tell me, are you all right?”

  “All right
?” Her delicate eyebrows rose. “In what way?”

  She did not mean to make matters easy for him. Well, he did not deserve for her to do so. “Miss de Rohan,” he said, jerking his head toward the gate she’d just exited. “It was rather bold of her to come here, wasn’t it?”

  “She strikes me as a rather bold young lady,” said Anisha. “I gather she went all the way to Brussels with Bessett and practically ran some evil Frenchman through with her sword saving that poor child. And Rance, if you mean those flowers to be a gesture of sympathy, you’d best take them away again. I want no one’s pity.”

  She had resumed her walking—and her use of his Christian name, as she so often did in private. Lazonby laid the flowers down and went after her, catching her arm again.

  She froze, her gaze dropping to his fingers where they gripped her bare arm. He could feel the warmth in her; could almost feel the coursing blood—and coursing emotions—beneath her skin. She was not angry, he sensed, but there was a message in her eyes. Unsure what it was, Lazonby jerked back his hand and extracted the note from inside his coat.

  “Those flowers are an act of contrition,” he said. “Along with this abject apology. I behaved abominably yesterday—abominably when I kissed you, and even worse when I—”

  “Rance, just stop!” Anisha interjected. “I swear, every time you open your mouth nowadays, you dig yourself a deeper hole.”

  “What—?” he demanded.

  But exasperation had settled over her face. “I grow so weary of men treating me as if I have no mind of my own,” she muttered. “That kiss—I wanted it, damn me for a fool. And had I not wanted it, trust me, I would have struck you a cracking good blow across the cheek for your impudence.”

  He drew back a pace, a little surprised by the vehemence in her eyes.

  “Rance, you have—” She stopped, closed her eyes, and balled up her fists as if fighting the urge to strike him. “You have what Bessett does not—you have raw passion. It is what draws everyone into your sphere. It’s what makes you bold on the battlefield, and what makes you burn inside. It is, I daresay, what keeps you up at night. But it isn’t something one ought to apologize for.”

  “Come, Anisha, don’t make me out—”

  “I don’t make you out anything!” she snapped, eyes flying wide. “But you—you make yourself out to be nothing but a charming debauchee one moment, and some misanthropic avenging angel the next—neither of which is what you are.” She snatched the note from his hand. “Thank you. I accept your apology. You made an ass out of yourself with Bessett, and you made me angry.”

  He dropped his chin. “I know.”

  “But do not apologize for the kiss,” she went on, crushing the note, unread, in her fist. “We are bloody idiots, the both of us. But we are adults, and if we wish to be idiots, that is our God-given right.”

  “All right,” he said at last. “I will remember that.” Lazonby hung his head, as if ashamed. “I will remember, Anisha, that you are not a child—”

  “Thank you,” she muttered.

  “—but that you are, by your own admission, a bloody idiot.”

  For an instant, the garden went silent, even the birds, it seemed. He could feel her there, quivering with suppressed emotion, though he dared not look. But when at last he lifted his head and cracked one eye, she was shaking.

  They burst at once into peals of laughter.

  “You wretch!” she cried, swinging wide and striking him once on the chest—hard.

  “You asked for it, Nish,” he declared, catching her arm in his before she could hit him again. “Now, come with me, my girl. We were going to sit in the arbor. And you were going to tell me something.”

  “I think I was going to tell you not to let the gate hit you in the arse on the way out,” she grumbled.

  He threw back his head and laughed. “No, I’m pretty certain that wasn’t it.”

  She jerked away, lifted her skirts a little disdainfully, and swept past him, her spine regally stiff.

  But she was not angry; not really. And his sick dread had been for naught.

  They were, after all, still friends.

  He had not realized until just that moment how terrified he had been of losing that.

  He could bear a great deal—indeed, he had borne a great deal; the loss of his good name, his friends and his freedom, the family he’d so dearly loved—but he was not at all certain he could have borne the loss of her. It would have been, he was suddenly certain, the very last straw laid upon a very tenuous camel’s back.

  And so they were reconciled.

  Something stung and swam in Lazonby’s eyes and he blinked it back, unwilling to think what it was. It did not matter. He would simply be more careful in the future; careful to set a little distance between them and to keep things blithe and teasing. He would resume his light flirtation, secure in the knowledge that neither of them needed anything more. His baser needs, those he could slake anywhere. But friendship? Ah, that was rare.

  And yet he could not keep himself from watching the way her silk skirts shifted so temptingly over her slender hips. Not for the first time he felt lust stir deep in his loins; something primitive and raw, and he realized with a grim certainty how easy it would be to tumble over that edge from deep affection into raging desire.

  He would not do that to her; would not attach so much as a whisper of rumor to her on his account. God knew she had trouble enough as it was. Ruthveyn’s title and wealth might overcome his Anglo-Indian heritage, but Anisha had not his advantage. She did not need her name dragged into the mud, where his already wallowed.

  He forced his gaze up to the elegant twist of her hair that was entwined today with silken cords of cerulean blue that matched her vivid blue and white striped frock. The arrangement was elegant in its simplicity, and not especially fashionable. Nonetheless, Anisha had a knack for choosing just the right colors and fabrics to suit her fine bones and dark coloring.

  And though she disdained hats, Lazonby had caught sight of her once wearing a diaphanous veil over her hair, one which had hung nearly to her hips, along with one of the brilliantly hued skirts and shawl-like garments which she had brought with her from India.

  The attire had looked at once sensual, practical, and elegant; her mother Sarah’s things, mostly, Ruthveyn had said, for until her death, the pair had been inseparable. After Sarah’s death, however, their father had had little use for a daughter. Anisha had been left to the care of their few Rajasthani servants and a maternal aunt, sent out to Calcutta to care for her.

  It was the way of things, Lazonby supposed. But as he watched her now, he wondered if anyone had ever appreciated Anisha Stafford simply for what she was. Her boys, of course, loved her as their mother; Lucan doubtless felt similarly. In other words, they loved her for what she gave to them. Her husband, according to Ruthveyn’s intimations, had loved mostly her dowry. Ruthveyn adored her but saw her also as an obligation, and tried to swaddle her in cotton wool.

  And Anisha knew all of this. One could see it in the infinite sadness that sometimes softened her eyes.

  She drew up by the arbor seat and smoothed her skirts gracefully beneath her as she sat, then motioned for him to join her. “So, I called on Mr. Napier this morning as promised,” she said, coming straight to the point. “Unfortunately, he was out again.”

  “Did you wait?”

  “It would have been a long one,” said Anisha. “He’s off to Burlingame again, and if his clerks know why or how long he means to be, they weren’t about to tell me.”

  Rance cursed softly beneath his breath. “At least a week, don’t you reckon?”

  “I do,” she said a little grimly. “In any case, it seems we’ll be busy with a wedding. This dinner party will be only the beginning.” She stopped, and sighed. “Oh, I do wish Raju and Grace had not gone away.”

  He laid an arm loosely along the back of the arbor seat, careful not to actually touch her. “I know you miss them, old thing,” he said li
ghtly, “but you and young Lucan can throw a dinner party as well as anyone.”

  She looked up at him and smiled. “I daresay.”

  “I confess, though, to being surprised.” He let his gaze drift over her face, still searching for hurt or unhappiness. “You don’t have to do this, Nish. No one expects it of you.”

  “No, they expect me to be crushed,” she said. “Or angry. I’m neither, and I’ll have no one thinking I am. Even I have a little pride.”

  “I don’t believe Bessett’s intentions were too widely known,” Lazonby reassured her. “Though both he and Ruthveyn mentioned it to me.”

  Anisha lifted both shoulders in a resigned gesture. “I should have liked to have been spared even that,” she said. “But in any case, this is what my brother would wish done. He would want us to welcome Miss de Rohan into the Fraternitas, and into our family.”

  Lazonby was not entirely sure of the first. “You understand, then,” he said quietly, “that Sutherland has initiated her?”

  “And I think better of him for having done it,” said Anisha. “But I am exceedingly glad not to be her.”

  He smiled down at her. “Ah, but I think you are very bold, Nish, in your own quiet way.”

  Anisha shrugged. “That life is not for me,” she said softly. “My boys, Rance, they are my life. And I am glad to have been born when the stars were otherwise aligned—not that my father would ever have agreed to such a thing.”

  “I’m not sure hers did,” said Lazonby dryly, his gaze drifting over a long swath of daffodils. “In any case, you saw her hand today. She claims she does not have the Gift. Do you believe her?”

  Anisha lifted her narrow shoulders. “How does one define that word?” she mused. “I have never understood. Do I have the Gift? Do you? Miss de Rohan reads the tarot, she says. Is that a Gift? I do not know.”

  “You can read palms and the night sky, so what is the diff—”

  “Those are sciences, Rance,” she said in a tone of exasperation. “For many long years I studied, first with my mother, then with my aunt, to gain that knowledge. Do not disparage my hard work by claiming it was gifted to me. As to Miss de Rohan, she has . . . good instincts. But nothing haunts her dreams, waking or otherwise.”