A Bride by Moonlight Read Online Free Page A

beginning to sob quietly. The sound tore at him. Lazonby was not a heartless monster. He wanted to go to her and say . . .
    What? That her husband had been a lying, murderous bastard who deserved something a good deal worse than a bullet between the eyes? And more promptly served up, too. About fifteen years sooner would have suited Lazonby, and saved him two stays in prison with a miserable career in the French Foreign Legion sandwiched between.
    He had not known until today how deceitful—how utterly evil—Sir Wilfred had been. Funny how a gun to his head had put the bastard in such a confessional mood.
    No, in his present state, it was far better to leave Lady Leeton’s consolation to the experts: that bevy of well-bred dowagers who now flitted about her, cooing and dabbing at their hostess’s tears. As to her annual charity garden party, next year’s subscription sales would surely treble this. Society loved nothing so well as a scandal.
    As to the tears more immediate to Lord Lazonby, they had long since dried, though the woman who now called herself Mrs. Elizabeth Ashton still bore a bit of her weight upon his arm. Nonetheless, much of her color had returned since he’d dragged her from Sir Wilfred’s dramatic denouement, and the lady’s visage had resumed the proud angles that were so familiar to him.
    He was stunned to realize how long it had taken him to recognize her. But now, as his gaze drifted over her face—an unconventional face, to be sure, but interesting all the same—he could so easily make out precisely who she was.
    Who she had been all along.
    He felt an utter fool. For better than a year, Elizabeth had hounded him—in one guise or another—making his life a greater hell than it already had been. She had blamed him for a murder he had not committed. For causing, indirectly, her father’s suicide. And today, at long last, he understood why. Because Sir Wilfred had set him up.
    “You have regained yourself, I see, Mrs. Ashton,” he said, not unkindly, “if that is indeed your name nowadays?”
    A faint blush crept up her face—all the way up to her strong, finely angled cheekbones. “There’s nothing nefarious about it. Since I volunteer at Lady Leeton’s charity school, I simply decided Mrs. sounded more prudent than Miss .”
    “Ah! So the name isn’t Ashton?” he asked coolly.
    She lightly lifted both brows. “As opposed to Colburne?”
    “Oh, let’s not talk about your many aliases just now,” said Lazonby. “I’m not sure I can count that high. But you are clever, my dear. I should have realized how clever back when you started hounding my every step, and insulting my character at every turn—in the newspapers, no less.”
    Her smile was faint. “Whatever roles I may have been playing, I have never denied that I’m Sir Arthur Colburne’s daughter,” she said. “But since my aunt and uncle Ashton were compelled to raise me once that monster killed my father—”
    “No, no, dear girl!” Lazonby quietly interjected, squeezing her hand where it lay upon his coat sleeve. “Set your every word with care now. My friend Napier there believes he has a murder on his hands. And we all know your father killed himself .”
    Her strange, blue-green eyes glittered. “After he was ruined, yes.”
    “Indeed,” said Lazonby tightly. “But you wished to believe that was my doing. So did the police. Every one of you played right into Sir Wilfred’s hands all those years ago. And look what that stubbornness has brought down upon our heads, my dear.”
    “I am not your dear ,” she said hotly. “And you are still a scoundrel.”
    “Aye,” said Lazonby dryly, “but an innocent one.”
    The lady cut a sidelong glance at the dairy’s door. “Oh, dear God,” she whispered, pressing her fingertips to her mouth. “I keep thinking I’ll wake up—that I can go back—but Sir Wilfred really is . . . dead .”
    “And in the end, neither of us will feel much regret about