Bride By Mistake Read Free Page A

about your marriage before?”
    “I thought it wouldn’t matter.” Thought he’d be dead. Or the marriage annulled.
    “Not
matter
?” Her mouth gaped. His mother never gaped.
    “It was wartime, Mama. Anything could happen. To her. To me.” He shrugged. “But it didn’t.” She shut her mouth, then opened it, and he quickly added, “I made the necessary arrangements in the event of my death. Everyone taken care of; you had nothing to worry about.”
    She stared at him in silence. “Only the loss of my son.”
    He shrugged again. “But it didn’t happen. As to how the 
ton
will react to the news of my marriage, I plan to put it about that I’m traveling to Spain on some other purpose—”
    “Visiting your Spanish properties? It’s the only part of the estate you’ve neglected.”
    He stiffened, not liking the accusation, though it was true enough. He’d intended to sell off the Spanish properties, wanted nothing to do with them. He wanted no reminders of his time in Spain. He loathed the place. It made him feel ill just to contemplate returning there.
    But fate had risen to bite him once more. The annulment had been denied and he had no option but to return to the country he’d sworn never to set foot in again. Stirring memories he’d tried so desperately to forget.
    “Yes, the Spanish properties, if you like. And then I’ll return with a Spanish bride on my arm.”
    “I suppose that will work,” his mother agreed. “But oh, Luke, this makes me so sad. I’ve always hoped you’d find a lovely girl who’d—”
    “A marriage of convenience will suit me very well,” he said in a crisp voice. “Now, is there anything else you wish to know before I leave?” No point in letting his mother dwell on her dreams for him to make the kind of marriage she’d had with his father. They were her dreams, not Luke’s.
    His dreams… A sliver of ice slid down his spine. The less said of them the better.
    “Is she pretty, at least?”
    He thought of Isabella the last time he’d seen her, her face all bruised and swollen, all angles and that too-big nose, like a fierce little baby bird, new hatched and ugly. “She was barely thirteen, Mama. She’ll have changed in eight years.” He hoped so, at least.
    His mother saw he’d avoided the question. “Will I like her?”
    “I don’t know,” he said helplessly. “I knew her for barely a day, and it was under extraordinary circumstances. Who knows what she is like now? Now, I really must go—”
    “One more thing.”
    He waited. There was a long silence. His mother shifted restlessly in her seat, twisting a handkerchief between her fingers. “Luke, I know you don’t like to talk about… about… and I have respected your privacy, you know I have, but now I have to ask. Was this the thing that happened to you in Spain, the thing you will not talk of?”
    He stiffened and looked away. “I don’t know what you mean.”
    She said gently, “Just because you choose not to acknowledge it doesn’t mean your mother can’t see that something terrible happened to you in Spain.”
    “I went to war, Mother,” he said in a hard voice. “War changes people.”
    “I know,” she said softly. “I saw it in all you boys. You all came back changed. But with you, my dearest son, there was something more; something very personal that cut deeper.”
    He almost flinched at her choice of words. She could not know, he reminded himself. Nobody knew. He hadn’t spoken of it to anyone, not even Rafe or Harry or Gabe.
    “I’ve seen your friends recover, and settle down, one by one, but not you… Whatever it was, it still haunts you.”
    He forced a careless tone. “Well, whatever you imagine haunts me, it isn’t this marriage. To be honest, I barely gave it a thought. She was just a young girl, Molly’s age, who was in trouble, and by marrying her I was able to save her from a nasty fate. I thought we could get an annulment, but…” He spread his hands in a