Bride for a Night Read Free

flesh of my flesh and blood of my blood. He will attend Oxford and, in time, become a member of parliament. Perhaps he will even become prime minister.” A smile of smug anticipation curled his lips. “Not bad for the son of a butcher.”
    “I am surprised that you do not demand a throne,” she muttered before she could cut off the words.
    “I might have if you hadn’t proven to be such a disappointment.” Silas turned to stomp toward the door, clearly finished with the conversation. He had made his decision and now he expected Talia to meekly obey his command. “The wedding will be held the end of June.”
    “Father—”
    “And Talia, you will make certain that it is the social event of the season,” he said, overriding her soft plea and glancing over his shoulder to offer a warning glower. “Or you will pack your bags and join your Aunt Penelope in Yorkshire.”
    Talia’s stomach clenched at her father’s stark threat.
    Penelope Dobson was her father’s eldest sister. A bitter spinster who devoted her life to her incessant prayers and causing others misery.
    After her mother’s death, Talia had spent nearly a year in her aunt’s decrepit cottage, treated little better than an unpaid servant and rarely allowed to leave her cramped rooms. That might have been bearable if the horrid woman had not taken pleasure in striking Talia with a horsewhip for the tiniest infraction of her rigid rules.
    Her father was well aware that she would toss herself in the Thames before she would once again be imprisoned in Yorkshire.
    Heaven help her.

CHAPTER TWO
    M UCH TO T ALIA’S astonishment, her wedding day dawned with a glorious sunrise that painted the cloudless sky in shades of pink and gold. It promised to be a perfect summer day. She had expected a gray, dismal morning that would have matched the impending sense of doom that had haunted her for weeks.
    Even more astonishing, she appeared almost pretty in her ivory silk gown overlaid with silver gauze and sprinkled with diamonds along the low-cut bodice and the hem that stopped just above her ivory satin slippers. Her dark curls were carefully arranged in a complicated knot on top of her head and held in place by a large diamond tiara that matched the heavy necklace draped around her neck and shimmering earrings.
    Gifts from her father, of course.
    He was determined that her wedding would be the talk of the season, impervious to Talia’s pleas that a lavish wedding would be in poor taste considering that all of society knew that the bridegroom had been purchased with Talia’s vast dowry.
    So far as Silas Dobson was concerned, discretion was for those who could not afford to toss about their money in gaudy displays of extravagance.
    Reluctantly accepting that the earth was not going to open up and swallow her whole, Talia silently entered the glossy black carriage and allowed herself to be driven tothe small church where the private ceremony was to take place. After the ceremony they were scheduled to return to Sloane Square for an elegant wedding breakfast with two hundred guests.
    It was only when she was standing at the altar that the disaster she had been anticipating the entire day at last struck.
    The rector was attired in his finest robes with a somber expression on his round face. Talia’s father was standing at her side wearing his finest black jacket and silver waistcoat. And on the other side was Talia’s only friend, Hannah Lansing, the daughter of a baronet who shared Talia’s miserable fate as a wallflower.
    But there was one notable absence.
    Mr. Harry Richardson was nowhere to be found.
    For nearly two hours they waited for the missing bridegroom to make his appearance, while the increasingly bleak silence that had filled the church echoed in Talia’s heart.
    She felt…numb. As if the humiliation of being abandoned at the altar was happening to some other unfortunate lady.
    It was a sensation that refused to be dismissed even when her father had