Bachelor's Wife Read Online Free Page B

her voice low.
    'So you have no one to look out for you,' he stated consideringly. 'Though you must have your head screwed on the right way to be sitting here with me now, for all you're young enough to still bear cradle marks.'
    And when she had thought he had decided she could run for her explanation of why he needed that marriage certificate, he unbent sufficiently to tell her:
    'My father died two months ago,' and at her look of instant sympathy, 'It was expected.' His jaw firmed, and she saw then that expected or not it had hit him hard. 'What wasn't expected, not by me at any rate,' he went on, 'was that my father would disinherit me if I wasn't married within three months after his death.'
    Perry gasped. So that was the reason! He had another month in which to fulfil the terms of his father's will, or lose his inheritance. She had no idea how much money was involved. But if he was the only son he had every right to expect his father to leave him everything. Unless there was some good reason why he shouldn't.
    'Why would he want to do that?' she couldn't keep from asking—and received another look that told her he thought it none of her business". 'I'm sorry,' she apologised
    at once, having seen from his look that he thought he had given her sufficient reason for him needing to be married.
    But again he surprised her. Though afterwards she was able to realise that his only motive in telling her anything else was in order that she should see that when he had said marriage was a necessary evil and that he didn't want her round his neck afterwards, he had meant exactly that.
    'Enter the wicked stepmother,' he said humourlessly, and as Perry ploughed her way through her meal, she learned, from what he said and what he didn't say—his cold cynicism filling in any gaps—that Nash Devereux knew all about women and then some, and the women he had met, gone around with, had left him with no rosy view of her sex.
    Lydia, his stepmother, had been his girl-friend before she had married his father, Joel Devereux. Nash, she gathered from the way he spoke, had no illusions about women, having seen from an early age the succession of prize-hunters his father had entertained since his divorce from his mother. Lydia, thinking Nash more enamoured of her than he was, had lost complete control of her temper one night when no marriage proposal was forthcoming, and had furiously told him if he wouldn't marry her, then she intended to marry his father. Perry could only gather what Nash had told her in answer to that—-nothing very pleasant, she thought, imagining that he would be terrifying if he too had lost his temper. He had then had to watch while Lydia made a play for Joel, had tried to tell his father that Lydia was only after his money. But Joel wouldn't hear a word against her, and anything Nash said was taken to be sour grapes because Lydia preferred the much older man.
    'So she married him,' Nash said, not a flicker of emotion in his face as he went on to tell her how his father's good living prior to and after his marriage had resulted in his first heart attack. 'He should have let up then, but he wouldn't. He was too anxious to show that bitch he could keep pace with any man half his age.'
    He broke off when the waiter came to serve the last course, and Perry knew, for all he wasn't showing it, that there was pain in Nash that any attempt he made to get his father to change his pace of life had been seen as him hankering for Lydia and not wanting her to be happy in her life with her husband.
    'I couldn't bear to watch what she was doing to him,' Nash continued when the waiter had gone. 'I spent more and more time at the Works,' his expression became granite as he said, 'and that played nicely into Lydia's hands. On the day Joel was buried, purring with the pleasure of being able to tell me so, she told me she had suggested to him that I worked far too hard. That what I needed was a wife so I could enjoy life as they did, play