Read Online The Veils of the Budapest Palace (Darke of Night Book 3) by Marie Treanor - Free Book Online Page A

arms.
    “Thank you for coming to our rescue,” he said easily. “You saved my wife from a soulless civil marriage!”
    “You can still marry in church here too. But I’m glad to be of service to your family once more. I used to know a cousin of yours in my student days.”
    “Yes?” Zsigmund said. His attention was straying to me, and it seemed he couldn’t stop smiling.
    “Andrassy Gabor,” the bishop remembered. It is a peculiarity of Hungarian custom that the surname comes before the Christian name.
    Zsigmund stopped smiling, apparently with surprise. “You knew Gabor?”
    “Very well. We helped each other out more than once.”
    “Good Lord,” Zsigmund said faintly. Unexpectedly, he laughed. “I don’t think Gabor was cut out for the Church.”
    “No, he wasn’t,” the bishop mourned. “But he was always a spiritual man. Most spiritual.”
    “I’ll send your regards when next I write home,” Zsigmund promised.
    “Oh no,” the bishop said. “Don’t do that...” And he drifted away.
    Zsigmund frowned after him with amusement. “Do you think churchmen are born that way, or cultivate it?”
    “What way?” I asked.
    “Never mind. I daresay I don’t know enough churchmen. As you probably gathered, my family is more on the disreputable side. Aren’t you glad you married me now, Countess Andrassy?”
    I smiled and leaned on his arm. “Oddly enough, I am.”
    In that evening, I more than made up for all the dances I’d sat out since coming to Lescloches. I waltzed with everyone. I learned the czardas and danced it with Zsigmund and all his Hungarian friends. It was a wonderful occasion, and by the time Zsigmund and I departed for our new suite in the hotel, I knew I’d never been so happy in my life.
    I told Zsigmund so as we entered the room. He swept me up in his arms and carried me to the bed. “Let me see if we can’t better even that.”
    Intimacy with Zsigmund was a revelation to me, not least in the sheer number of times he wanted me. I had been used, even in the beginning of my first marriage, to a stately visit one night a week as a rule, but with Zsigmund, it was every night or morning, or both, and sometimes also in the middle of the afternoon. On top of which, as our first night had promised, I learned there were many ways to make love, all of them delicious. My feeling for Zsigmund intensified into something very close to obsession. It was so wildly different from my feeling for Neil that I couldn’t call it love, but I couldn’t deny I loved his big, scarred, beautiful body and what it did to mine.
    The morning after our wedding—well, the afternoon after—I sent a notice to the newspapers in England announcing my marriage to Count Zsigmund Andrassy, quietly in Lescloches. It would probably scandalise Neil’s family as well as my own, and I metaphorically girded up my loins for the deluge of outraged letters that would follow. But I refused to be secretive about the event. I had nothing to be ashamed of.
    Then, there was one day I didn’t see him from breakfast until dinner when he joined me at our table, brooding. Although I refused to ask, my stomach was twisting with fear that he’d returned already to his old life of drinking and debauchery with other women. Worse, there was a sort of wild discontent in his eyes, in every restless movement, in his very silence. I ate calmly, allowing him the silence until he chose to break it.
    Which he did as he finished his main course, impatiently shoving the plate out of his way so that he could lean his elbows on the table.
    “Would I make such a dreadful teacher?” he demanded abruptly.
    “No,” I replied, covering my amazement. “You would make an unconventional teacher, but an excellent one.”
    “That’s what I thought, but the ba...idiots turned me down.”
    “What idiots?” I asked, baffled.
    “The school on the Paris road,” he said with a hint of uncharacteristic sheepishness. “Béla said they were looking for