Bride By Mistake by Anne Gracíe

regarded her solemnly.
    “So tomorrow you two will leave us,” Reverend Mother said. “Where do you plan to go, Lord Ripton?”
    Isabella turned her head to look at her aunt, and Luke noticed a tiny, velvet mole, just below the delicate whorls of her left ear. His mouth dried.
    “Lord Ripton?”
    He glanced at Reverend Mother. “Go?”
    “On your honeymoon.”
    Honeymoon?
He hadn’t even thought about a honeymoon. This was to have been a duty. “We’ll make immediately for England, to my home there.”
    Reverend Mother glanced at the silent girl between them. “I’m sure Isabella is looking forward to seeing her new home, aren’t you Isabella?”
    Isabella made some sort of sound that might indicate assent, and the nun went on, “And I’m sure she’ll enjoy being out in the fresh air. She is very fond of fresh air.”
    “Indeed?” Luke glanced at Isabella, noticed her mouth and immediately forgot what he’d been going to say.
    “You have hired horses, I presume?”
    Luke blinked and, with an effort, brought his attention back to the conversation. “Yes, I hope Isabella won’t find thejourney too wearying.” It was easier to conduct a conversation with the nun than with his wife. She was seemingly the quiet type—he had no complaint there; it was restful—and it was easier to maintain a civilized conversation without being… distracted. It was most disconcerting.
    “It will be a long time since she last rode a horse. No doubt she’ll be very stiff at first.”
    “Oh, but—” Reverend Mother began.
    “A horse?” Isabella looked up. “What kind of horse?”
    He glanced down at her, surprised. “Just a hired horse; nothing very special. It took me some time to find a suitable mount. Reverend Mother, you were saying?”
    “Suitable?” Isabella frowned.
    “Quite suitable,” he assured her. He turned back to the nun. “Reverend Mother?”
    But Reverend Mother had either forgotten what she was going to say or had thought better of it.
    “You don’t plan to spend any time in Spain?” she asked. “Isabella mentioned your late uncle owned several Spanish estates in Andalusia. I presume they now belong to you.”
    “Yes, however—”
    “Excellent. You will wish to visit them, since you are in Spain now.”
    Luke said nothing. He did not wish to visit them in the least. He addressed himself to his stew.
    Reverend Mother frowned slightly. “You will want to see how they fared during the war, surely?”
    Luke drank some of the thin, slightly acid mountain wine.
    Reverend Mother took off her pince-nez and gave him a governessy look down her long nose. “Things are a little… shall we say ‘unsettled’ in Spain at the moment, Lord Ripton. It would be as well to consolidate your ownership.”
    Luke stiffened, irritated by the gratuitous advice and implied moral lecture. He had an agent to check that sort of thing for him, but he had no intention of justifying himself to anyone, let alone a bossy nun, even if she was now his relative by marriage.
    “I need to return to England,” he said brusquely. “I have an engagement there I must meet.” And he wouldn’t spend a single night more in this godforsaken country than he had to.
    “It seems a shame not to—”
    “A very important engagement,” he said in a final note. “Tell me, I noticed when I arrived here the walls of the convent had been damaged. Were you attacked?”
    He’d intended it as a simple change of subject, but beside him, Isabella’s aimless stirring of the food on her plate stopped.
    Luke went cold. The attacking of convents and churches had not been uncommon in the war. In postrevolutionary France the church was no longer regarded as holy, and nuns and monks and priests were simply men and women. Nuns had been raped and murdered, churches looted.
    Reverend Mother’s thin mouth twisted with contempt. “French, and some deserters who’d joined them. Rabble. They’d heard rumors of a treasure here. Treasure!” She