The Bride Wore Pearls Read Online Free PDF Page B

through the carriage door. Suddenly her vague longing for India turned into a bone-deep ache, and she was terrified she had made an irrevocable mistake.
    The dread had not lifted when, just a few minutes later, the vehicle slowed to a halt, drawing between a pair of massive, lamped gateposts and round the semicircular drive of a grand, porticoed mansion set a little back from the street. Reluctantly, she picked up her reticule, then drew her cloak a little tighter, as if doing so might ward off the inevitable.
    Carrying somber black umbrellas, a trio of liveried servants came in lockstep down the sweeping staircase, putting Anisha a little in mind of a firing squad. Her trepidation must have sketched across her face, for at once Rance Welham caught her hand and carried it to his lips.
    “Courage, my dear,” he said softly. “Your brother awaits. Your new life awaits. And you have all of two months before the London Season begins.”
    She felt her eyes widen. “The London Season?”
    “At which time you will set society on its ear with your beauty,” he went on, his smile firmly back in place.
    For an instant, she hesitated. “Sergeant Welham,” she finally said, drawing her hand from his, “let us be realistic, even if my brother cannot. London society will tolerate me, yes. But they will have about as much real interest in a mixed-blood army widow as I shall have in them .”
    “I would not have thought you such a coward, Lady Anisha,” he said, his smile muted.
    “I am not—” She exhaled sharply, crushing her reticule to her lap with both hands. “I am not a coward, Sergeant,” she finally said. “I am just . . . different. That is all.”
    “Just different ?” he softly echoed. “Oh, aye, my dear. Now that you surely are.”
    But Welham’s brilliant blue eyes were once again smiling, his true nature once again hidden.

Chapter 2
     
    From year to year, the battles, sieges, fortunes,
    That I have passed . . .
    William Shakespeare, Othello
     
    A s so often happens with most of life’s dreaded changes, what felt at first to Lady Anisha like an almost intolerable upheaval became quickly drowned out by a bucket brigade of small, day-to-day disasters. There were tutors and maids and music masters to hire. Tom and Teddy required cloaks, coats, and all manner of woolens to ward off the frightful English chill. The crate containing the boys’ pressed leaf collection and Encyclopedia Britannica had vanished into thin air. The bird did not like Raju’s cats.
    The cats, on the other hand, liked the bird very well indeed.
    And then there were Raju’s bullheaded notions of society and marriage to be dispensed with—a notion that Anisha did not, perhaps, crush as thoroughly or as ruthlessly as she ought to have done. . . .
    Still, for good or ill, London blew over her like a Bengali cyclone, beginning the moment Rance Welham handed her down from his carriage, leaving Anisha little time to fret, or even to mourn her beloved home, and she soon became, if not inured to her new life, then at least accustomed to it—all while scarcely realizing the change was occurring.
    And in this way, winter turned to spring and summer to autumn, until one day Lady Anisha awoke to realize her first year in London had long since passed, and with it, much of the storm. The boys had fallen into something like a routine. Lucan had fallen in with a cadre of dashing young blades—and their raffish ways. After despairing of Lucan and throwing up his hands, Raju had shocked everyone by falling in love with the boys’ governess.
    And Anisha—well, fool that she was, she had fallen just a little bit in lust with Rance Welham, the newly invested Earl of Lazonby.
    But it was so very hard not to when his eyes were so teasing, his smile so enigmatic, and his hidden depths so intriguingly beyond her reach. And he was—just as he’d professed—an incorrigible flirt, at least outwardly. A dozen times Anisha had entertained the