Bachelor's Wife Read Online Free PDF Page B

reminding her that she had better get rid of it before she got home. All saleable jewellery in the house had gone; she didn't want Ralph asking questions about this expensive piece of platinum. As she neared the river, without a second thought, though giving a careful look round to see if she was being observed, the ring was off her finger, meeting its watery end with barely a plop.
    Only then, her small confidence back with her, did it dawn on her that with so much else on her mind, she hadn't given thought to question Nash as to what they should do about a divorce. It came to her then for the first
    time that with the way he felt about women, the question of divorce obviously hadn't bothered him. The Equator would freeze over before he would want to remarry.
    By the time she arrived home, to find Ralph still slumped on a kitchen chair just as though he hadn't moved all day, Perry had her story ready to tell him.
    'I told you not to worry,' she said gaily, and while Ralph tried to dredge up a smile that something good must have happened for her that she would look so pleased, Perry rushed on, 'I've got the five thousand for you.'
    Maybe because he wanted to believe it, Ralph had taken without question that she had gone to see his sister Sylvia earlier in the week and today Sylvia had rung through to say she had sold some shares and could let her have the money.
    That Ralph was overjoyed and immediately dropped ten years was an understatement. 'I never for a moment thought she'd help. She swore she wouldn't after the last time,' he said, having danced Perry round the kitchen. 'I must ring and thank her straight away.'
    'No!' The word left her sharply. Fear was uppermost she would have to tell him what she'd done, the burden of guilt he would carry to know she had done it for him. 'I—well—-well, to tell you the truth,' she said, seeing at once that some explanation had to be made, 'Sylvia was-—er—a little cross about it.'
    Ralph knew his sister very well, it seemed, for all they had never been all that close. 'She neither wants to see or hear from me ever again, is that it?'
    She hated having to lie to him, but knowing Ralph couldn't have loved her more if she had been his own daughter, she thought she knew best what he could live with better—that his sister didn't want to know him or that his stepdaughter had married a stranger to settle his gambling debt.
    'Well, not until some of the money has been paid back,' she invented on the spur of the moment, not wanting to be the cause of a permanent rift between the blood relatives, for all they rarely met. 'I've arranged for us to pay the money back by monthly instalments.' Perhaps she and Ralph could use it to have that holiday abroad he was hankering after, her mind went on.
    But the holiday abroad never came to fruition, she thought sadly. Nor had there been time for Ralph to make even the first payment. For before she had been married to Nash for a month, Ralph had died as a result of being injured when the driver of the bus he had been on had suffered heart failure, and the bus went out of control and crashed into a brick wall.
    The sound of Mrs Foster below riddling her fire, something she did every night last thing, had Perry coming back to the present with a start. Her eyes fell to her writing paper, nothing else written after her 'Dear Nash'.
    She gripped her pen once more, realising that if she didn't keep her concentration on the job in hand she would never get to bed. That letter had to be written tonight ready to post in the morning.
    Several direct and to the point phrases presented themselves in her head, but she hesitated. The trouble was, for all she was married to him, she barely knew Nash Devereux. It would look well if her direct approach made his hackles rise and he dug his heels in. Though why he should, she couldn't think, and anyway, he was pretty direct himself, wasn't he? Or had been in all his dealing with her.
    Yet still she hesitated. If Nash