Free His Spanish Bride by Teresa Grant

mellowed leather, glinted off gilded book spines, created islands of warmth. A vase of fresh peach-colored roses stood on a small, round table between the chairs. Other than the flowers and the books and a pianoforte against the wall, the room was bare of personal touches, giving few clues about the man who lived here. Unless that very lack of personal detail was a clue in and of itself.
    Miles Addison, Malcolm’s valet, walked toward them. “Mrs. Rannoch. If you will permit me, my felicitations to you both.”
    Mrs. Rannoch. A married woman and an English married woman at that. Suzanne smiled. “Thank you, Addison. You’re very kind. It looks lovely.” She suspected the roses had been his touch.
    She and Malcolm had stayed on at the embassy after the wedding breakfast so he could meet with Stuart and she could pack up her things, and then they had dined with Stuart and Wellington and a handful of other diplomats and officers. By dinner, talk had thankfully moved from their marriage to the plans for the spring campaign (she’d made some interesting mental notes she would write up for Raoul later). Stuart had sent them back to Malcolm’s lodgings in his carriage. There had been little time for conversation on that brief journey, and they had had Blanca with them. Except for their exchange about Linford and Haddon and the letter on the way into the wedding breakfast, she and Malcolm hadn’t had the chance for private speech all day.
    “We’re woefully unaccustomed to visitors, I fear.” Malcolm set down her two bandboxes. Behind him, Blanca stayed in the shadows by the door, surveying their new accommodations. Suzanne had been aware of Blanca’s mingled support and disapproval all day on the edge of her consciousness. In changing her life so drastically, she had changed Blanca’s as well.
    Silence gripped the room. They were all, Suzanne realized, hopelessly out of their element and unsure how to pick their way through the alien terrain. In an odd way, the need to reassure the others eased her own qualms. “What could be more welcoming than books?” she said with a smile. “I so miss my parents’ library.”
    “I hope you’ll make yourself free of the collection.” Malcolm turned to include Blanca in his words as well. “You’ll find books in Spanish and French as well as English.”
    “And Latin and a smattering of Greek,” Addison added.
    “Miss Sai—Mrs. Rannoch reads Latin,” Malcolm said.
    “A bit.” And some ancient Greek. Both were very useful for codes. “I should be glad of the chance to practice.”
    “I daresay you will wish to make some changes, madam,” Addison said. “I am happy to assist you in any way. I have coffee brewing. I thought you might prefer it to tea.”
    Addison carried her bandboxes into the adjoining bedchamber and then went to prepare the coffee. Blanca went into the bedchamber to unpack. Suzanne realized that Malcolm couldn’t sit down until she did so. She dropped into the velvet chair, guessing the other chair must customarily be his, a suspicion confirmed when he moved to the tapestry chair and sank into it with the ease of familiarity. Alone at last in his lodgings. Their lodgings.
    “All things considered, I thought it went very well,” she said, plucking at the pomegranate crêpe of the dinner dress she had changed into. “And your friends didn’t actually hang a ‘Benedick, the married man’ sign on you.”
    Some of the tension left his face. He shot her a grin. “Was I that obviously nervous?”
    “No more so than the average bridegroom, I should think. And perhaps with more cause.”
    He leaned back and turned his head against the tapestry to meet her gaze. “You looked very lovely. I should have said so sooner.”
    “It was hardly the sort of wedding that required conventional platitudes.”
    His gaze remained on her face. So often his expression was armored, and then there were moments like this when all barriers seemed stripped from his gaze