Free The Bride Wore Pearls by Liz Carlyle Page A

we’ve always been. Absolutely nowhere.”

Chapter 3
     
    Why, sir, for my part I say the gentleman
    had drunk himself out of his five sentences.
    William Shakespeare, Merry Wives of Windsor
     
    L ate that afternoon, Lord Lazonby went home; home to his town house in Belgravia, Samir having left him little choice. Once sequestered in his upstairs suite, he stripped naked, tossed on a worn silk dressing gown, and, after uncorking a fresh bottle, made love to La Fée Verte for the rest of the night.
    It was a bad habit; one of many that had followed him home from the French army. It was also a dreadful error, given his state of mind. Rage, frustration, and, yes, even lust were always magnified by absinthe. And as he sat alone opposite the cold hearth watching, almost rapt, as the water trickled through the sugar and silver, down into the green void below, he thought of Anisha, and wondered.
    Was he a coward?
    Well, he was afraid—which was the very definition of a coward, he supposed.
    He thought again of how she’d looked this afternoon, so elegant and so beautiful and so angry. Nish, whose eyes often held a hint that her favors might be his would he but ask. And her kiss— good Lord . It had been the smallest thing. And yet it had been something else entirely.
    He could not let himself think of what that something else might be.
    And it would be such folly! Not to mention an utter breach of the promise he’d sworn her brother. Yet he considered her again and wondered what sort of red-blooded man would not want her to the exclusion of anything else in life, even honor. His duty to Ruthveyn, his hatred of Coldwater, the revenge he so desperately sought—all of it should have paled by comparison to that one simple kiss.
    It almost did.
    It would, if he let it.
    And that, perhaps, was the most frightening thing of all.
    Always, always there had been that ethereal something between him and Anisha. And he had known enough lovers to recognize that sidelong, simmering look a woman gave a man when she was sizing him up, so to speak. A few ladies of the ton had even found Lazonby’s rough edges and bad name intriguing enough to invite him to their beds—but never, of course, to their dinner parties.
    Anisha, however, genuinely liked him—or had until today. But he was not free to love her, were he even capable of it.
    Oh, he wasn’t imprisoned, precisely, nor likely to be. The reach of the Fraternitas in Britain had once again grown too strong—and, under Ruthveyn’s deft hand, too useful to the Crown. Until Lazonby actually did murder someone—today Bessett sprang to mind—and got caught in the act with blood on his hands, then Royden Napier dared not touch him.
    Odd how little satisfaction that brought him tonight.
    He would never be truly free until his name was cleared and honor restored to his family. To his father. And Coldwater somehow held the key. Yet after better than a year of dogged pursuit, Lazonby was no closer to that goal than the day he’d walked out of Newgate. He was frozen in time. Shackled by his own hatred. He could move neither forward nor backward with his life.
    He reclined now like some indolent pasha upon a tufted chaise by the window—an almost feminine piece of furniture his estate agent had acquired along with everything else in the house—and felt the lethargy melting deep into his bones.
    He could go, he supposed, to Mrs. Farndale’s for the evening, to watch her girls prance and laugh and feign an interest they did not have. But it was hard to take much pleasure in it when a man could sense with his every fiber that the desire was just a bought-and-paid charade. That in truth, such women were as jaded and mired in ennui as he was. It required a lot of alcohol—or a lot of something —to deaden his intuition and take from them a physical pleasure that was hardly pleasure at all.
    He rarely ever bothered anymore. He did not bother tonight. Instead, he watched as the sun slanted low