Free Bride by Midnight by Linda Winstead Jones Page A

bring Lyssa here. Even though he and his bride had just engaged in a very similar activity... it wasn’t the same, not in his mind or in hers.
    He’d sworn he would not accept help from anyone, he’d vowed to do this on his own, but that wouldn’t be the first vow he’d broken—not even the first on this long day. At least this time he had a somewhat noble cause.
    Besides, improved living conditions would instill confidence in Lyssa’s father, who would be more willing to take his new son into the family business if he proved that he could care for her properly.
    Perhaps his reasons were not so noble after all.
    It was hours after he’d left Lyssa, and the sky was gray with morning light, when he knocked on a solid door far from the seedier section of town where he’d been spending his time since arriving in Arthes. He didn’t have to wait long before the knock was answered.
    Blade looked down on a face he knew well. The expression there flitted from anger to confusion and finally to something that might have been relief.
    “I need your help.”
    ***
    Lyssa slept, and for the first time in a long while she did not dream at all. Instead of waking with a start and a scream, she stretched slowly, sighed, then burrowed in the blankets for a few precious moments.
    She was married. A smile crossed her face. Perhaps it was not a real marriage, the way marriages were supposed to be, but she’d found a way around the old witch’s grim prediction and averted disaster. She would be Bad Luck Lyssa no more. Take that , Vellance.
    As she lay there, after a few hours of deep, undisturbed sleep, she imagined the day ahead of her. Introducing Blade to her parents was going to be tricky. “I sneaked out of the house last night and married a stranger” was not going to go over well.
    It was bad enough that they would find the unkempt man unsatisfactory, but if she explained how he’d come to her rescue last night in the tavern... then she would have to explain how she’d come to be in that tavern in the first place.
    That had not been the wisest decision she’d made in her twenty-three years, but in the end... in the end...
    In the end she’d found herself coupling in an alleyway with a stranger. Her husband, yes, but still a man she did not know. So why did the thought of those few moments of fumbling and physical connection make her insides heavy and itchy? Why did the memory of Blade Renshaw making her his wife cause her to squirm in her own bed?
    “Perhaps because it is long past time you were made a wife, Lyssa Tempest,” she said softly as she sat up. No, not Tempest. She was now Lyssa Renshaw .
    She washed, dressed, and presented herself for the morning meal with a smile on her face. While Sinmora made tea, Lyssa toasted yesterday’s bread over the fire. What she needed to do was arrange for Blade to have a bath and a new suit of clothes before she introduced him to her father and stepmother. Preferably a clean outfit that had not been stolen. Many men wore beards, but his was desperately in need of a trim. She wondered if he would allow her to cut his hair. She found herself humming a merry tune and turned to find her stepmother staring at her.
    “Are you all right, dear?”
    “It’s my birthday,” Lyssa said. “Can I not be happy?”
    “Of course you can.” There was a fair amount of suspicion in those words.
    Her father was as suspicious about her good mood as Sinmora had been, but somewhere between his toast and the dried figs, he apparently decided to accept his good fortune with a smile. In the past, there had been at least a week of self-pity and tears after a failed wedding.
    They didn’t know that she’d beaten the prophecy, that she was a wife.
    How to tell them, though... Not a single scenario seemed right. And really, why should she rush to tell them anything? While there had been a deadline on the marriage itself, sharing the news of that marriage could be done at any time, she supposed. Not