Read Online The Bride Wore Pearls by Liz Carlyle - Free Book Online

the fine worsted of his trousers she could see the hard outline of his arousal. A rather impressive arousal, to be blunt.
    “I’m sorry,” he rasped, letting his hands fall. “Good Lord, Nish. Forgive me.”
    She let her hands drop and stepped away, suddenly infuriated with herself. But in that instant, she caught a hint of motion from one corner of her eye. She glanced at the door, alarmed.
    Nothing .
    Relief surged—along with a flash of guilt.
    Suddenly Rance reached for her. “Wait,” he rasped.
    “No,” said Anisha quietly, stepping back another pace. Strangely, a calm certainty was settling over her. “I’m not waiting. This thing between us . . . it won’t ever be, will it, Rance?”
    He shook his head. “No,” he agreed. “I could make love to you, Nish. I could. I . . . I want to. But Ruthveyn would kill me. And Bessett— good God, what am I thinking?”
    At last she lifted her eyes to his, her face flaming. “A better question might be, what am I thinking?”
    “You should marry him, Nish,” said Lazonby. “He’s a good man. He’ll give you an old, honorable, untarnished name—something I could never do. And he’ll be an extraordinary father to your boys. You should marry him.”
    “Yes,” she said, her hands fisting at her sides. “I should.”
    “And will you?” he rasped. “Will you do it? I hope you will.”
    She could not hold his gaze. “Perhaps,” she finally said. “If he asks me—and he has not—then yes, for the boys’ sake, perhaps I shall.”
    Rance heaved a sigh of obvious relief. “Good,” he said. “You will never regret it.”
    She pinned him with her stare, determined, finally, to get an answer to at least one of her questions. “And you will never regret it, either,” she said, “will you?”
    He thinned his lips and looked away. “You do not love me, Nish,” he said quietly.
    A long, expectant moment hung over them. Then, “No, I do not,” she finally said, her voice surprisingly strong. “I occasionally desire you, Rance. You are . . . well, the sort of man who brings out the worst in a woman, I suppose. Or perhaps it’s the best. But no, I do not love you.”
    The arrogant devil looked at her as if taken aback.
    “Is there anything else, then?” she asked coolly. “Before I go back to Whitehall? I don’t know how many trips I can make before Napier’s patience gives out.”
    Rance’s face seemed to flame with heat. But he was, as ever, perfectly shameless.
    “Yes,” he finally said. “There is one particular thing.” He went to the small desk near the door and extracted a piece of the club’s stationery. Impatiently, he scratched a name on it and handed it to her.
    “John Coldwater.” She flicked an irritated glance up at him.
    “Or Jack,” Rance rasped. “Jack Coldwater.”
    In an instant, her heart was in her throat. The scene from that awful day came hurtling back. “I know who he is.”
    “Or any name in the file that might be loosely connected to a person named Coldwater.”
    “And how am I to know that?” she snapped.
    “That’s why I was headed over to Ned Quartermaine’s,” Rance replied. “I’m going to hire one of his informant thugs to dig the chap out. Find out where he came from, and who his family is.”
    “Why?” Anisha felt her lips thin with disapproval. “I should have thought you’d learnt your lesson on that score.”
    Somehow, she resisted the urge to hurl the slip of paper back in his face. She wondered yet again just what he and Coldwater had been doing that fateful day when she and Raju had stumbled upon them together. It had looked very . . . physical . And very angry, as if thwarted rage and frustration and yes, even something akin to lust, perhaps, had driven Rance to the edge of madness.
    But anger was a complex emotion, and men—well, Anisha could not claim to understand what drove them. And really, Rance’s emotions were his own problem. She had begun to grow weary of worrying