The True Love Wedding Dress Read Online Free PDF

and a warming fire were far more inviting.
    “I know it is not what you might be accustomed to, old chap,” he told the horse as he rode the gray along a mired path, “but we all have to make sacrifices for my nephew’s future.”
    The goats and the chickens and the cow looming in the mist did not faze the gelding. The ghost did. The fearsome white wraith was billowing and blowing across the yard, making snapping, flapping noises with every gust of wind.
    In the general course of things, Forde was too good a rider to become separated from his horse. This was not his horse, however, and a trail that was more a swamp than a path was not the usual thing, to say nothing of a soaring, swooping, snow white specter. Smokey shied, bucked, then reared, but his hindquarters kept sliding in the muck beneath his hooves, terrorizing the bacon-brained beast further. He swiveled. Forde did not.
    Like the fine equestrian he usually was, Forde kept hold of the reins. And he caught the ghost in his other hand before he hit the ground, trapping the blasted thing and its rope tail beneath him. He used one wadded corner of it to wipe the mud off his face, once he caught his breath. Then he lay there, wondering if he would sink deeper into the quagmire, like a potato taking root. For certain his limbs wanted no part of getting up.
    He gave them no choice. First it was a ghost; now they were under attack by a banshee. A figure from hell was screeching, coming toward him with a pitchfork, black cape flying out behind. Forde stood in a hurry then, before Smoky could trample him in his fright. He tried to wipe some more of the muck—he hoped the chickens had not used the path recently—out of his eyes so he could see his assailant and defend himself from this latest fiend.
    “My wedding gown!” The devil’s own creature shrieked, thankfully dropping the pitchfork.
    Forde regarded the filthy, befouled length of fabric he still held in his mud-daubed hand, the clothesline lost under his feet. Then he regarded the female. He had never been knocked breathless by the sight of a woman before. Either he had been struck by one of Cupid’s arrows or his ribs were broken. She was beautiful, but she was closer to his age than Gerald’s. She also had green eyes, not blue, and honey-colored hair instead of blond. “Miss Cole?”
    “I am Susannah’s mother, but she was going to wear my gown for her own wedding this month. Now it is ruined.”
    Either the rain was starting again already or the female was crying, for her pale cheeks were definitely wet as she wrested the rag from his grasp. She was weeping over a bit of lace and cloth? No, blast it, Forde understood that he had destroyed a treasured reminder of the widow’s lost love. Who knew what else she had left of her marriage—a wedding band, perhaps a lock of hair or a miniature portrait? Damn.
    She was shaking out the sodden mess, as if that might restore it. Nothing would, Forde knew, especially not the gelding’s snorting at it. He stepped back, pulling Smoky with him. “I shall replace it, of course,” he said, full knowing the impossibility of replacing an heirloom or a memory.
    “No one can. It was . . . special.”
    “I understand your attachment, Mrs. Cole, but a skilled dressmaker can copy it. I can send it to London in the morning.”
    She had stopped shaking the gown and was now brushing at it with her hand, which instantly turned black with muck. “No, I cannot let you do that. It was my fault for leaving it on the line in such a wind. We have had so much rain this week that I could not air it before this.”
    The woman was babbling in her upset. Forde could feel her pain—or was that a wrenched shoulder from his fall? The devil take it, he would give her the money, perhaps enough for her to let Gerald out of her clutches; then no one would need the benighted wedding dress. Maybe she could save enough of it to make a handkerchief. That was the best he could do, now that he had