Page 95 of Bride By Mistake
“When you told me your mother was a very kind lady, I knew then you were lying.”
“But my motherisa kind lady.”
She could hear the smile in his voice.She tweaked his chest hair.
“Ouch!”
“So, what provision have you made for me?”
“I told you, none.”
She smacked him lightly on the chest.
He kissed her. “I’ll tell you when we get to England.”
“Why not now?”
“Because, my dear, you are a terrible liar, and we don’t want to get Cousin Twice-Removed all het up and murderous again, do we?”
“Tell me or I’ll make you bald in the chest.” She slid her hand inside his undershirt and encountered a patch of hard-ridged skin in the hollow beneath his shoulder. “What is that?”
He jerked her hand away and sat up roughly, spilling her back on the bed. “Nothing,” he said brusquely.
“But—”
“Siesta is over.” He flipped back the bedclothes, pulled on his drawers and breeches, and dragged his shirt on over his head. “Do you want to stay at Valle Verde and sort out something with your sister, or shall we leave now and kidnap her for her own good?” He grabbed his neckcloth and tied it with deft precision.
Bella sat up, pulling the bedclothes around her, watching her husband pretend nothing had just happened. What was hidden under that shirt he wouldn’t take off? He wasn’t shy. When she’d first met him he’d taken off his shirt in the heat. He had no problem going bare-chested then. He had a rather beautiful chest, as she recalled.
Was that it? Some hideously ugly war wound he felt he had to hide from her? What kind of a shallow person did he think she was? Did he think she didn’t know that soldiers could be wounded and scarred?
He avoided her gaze andfinished dressing. She could tell by the set of his mouth that he wasn’t going to talk about it.
But she wasn’t going to let it go. She wasn’t going to go through her marriage with a man who slept in his shirt. But now was not the time.
“I’d like to go for a ride later, if Ramón will let us,” she said. “I would like to show you the home of my childhood. I will ask Perlita.”
She glanced at the looking glass on the dressing table and remembered what she’d been doing before Luke had distracted her. She pulled her chemise on and ran across to the dressing table.
“What are you doing?”
She slipped her fingers into the open side drawer. “There’s a secret compartment and I hid them here before I left. At dinner I got such a fright realizing Ramón had sold furniture—that he would do that never occurred to me. Thank God he didn’t sell this.” She grimaced, trying to move the hidden lever. “I didn’t know I’d be gone for eight years, and Papa had said not to risk them on the journey. Besides, I would have had no use for them in a convent.”
“Use for what?”
“Mama’s pearls—oh!” The secret drawer sprang open and she stared into it, dismayed. “It’s empty. Mama’s pearls are gone.”
Luke made as quick an exit as he decently could from the bedchamber, leaving Isabella to dress by herself and speculate some more on what had happened to her pearls.
Luke wasn’t surprised they’d disappeared. It was naive of her to imagine they’d be where she’d left them, secret drawer or not. Ramón would have gone through this place with a fine-tooth comb, stripping it of anything worth selling. The pearls were long gone, he imagined. Pity, but there it was.
He’d buy her more pearls when they got to London.
In the meantime, he needed to get away. He was starting to feel… he wasn’t sure exactly what. A bit out of control, perhaps. Usually he liked the feeling that anything might happen, but this was different.
He walked out onto the terrace. It was lined with scraggly weeds. Ramón didn’t waste a penny on anything that was not productive.
Luke breathed in the cool air sliding down from the mountains. Times like this he almost wished he’d taken to cigarillos, as so many men had during the war. He imagined it would be a soothing thing to be able to step outside and blow a cloud. A kind of declaration of privacy.
