Bride By Mistake by Anne Gracíe Page A

snorted. “We are a simple order. Our only treasures are our girls.”
    As she talked, Luke relaxed. Her tone was merely indignant, with no echoes of past horror. Isabella sat quiet as a rabbit, pretending not to be there.
    “I gather you managed to hold them off.”
    “Yes, although if—”
    Isabella coughed. Reverend Mother glanced at her and said smoothly, “Fortunately they were persuaded to leave.”
    “My friends would like to meet you, Lord Ripton,” Isabella said abruptly.
    “You must call me Luke,” he told her.
    She turned to the nun. “Do I have your permission, Reverend Mother?”
    The nun nodded, and Isabella jumped up, taking her plate to a sideboard.
    The moment was lost. He’d probably never find out what happened, but he didn’t care. It didn’t do to stir up old memories.
    He watched as Isabella carefully scraped her dinner into a pail—presumably there were pigs or chickens somewhere—and stacked her plate and cutlery. She seemed to have recoveredfrom her upset and now appeared to accept her fate with good grace. As he’d hoped, her training in the convent had made her into a docile and obedient young woman.
    The intense attraction he felt for her was the icing on the cake.
    He sat back, satisfied, watching as she hurried across to the far end of the table where the schoolgirls sat. She was very slender, her figure, under the thick, concealing convent clothes, girlish rather than womanly.
    “She’s very thin,” he observed. And underdeveloped for her age. The Spanish girls he’d known were lush and curvaceous. “She’s not ill, is she?”
    “We’re all thin here,” the nun said dryly. “We almost starved during the war, and the country has been slow to recover. Trust me, Isabella has the appetite of any healthy young creature.”
    Her reference to Isabella’s healthy appetite caused Luke to think of quite another sort of appetite. His body stirred at the thought. It was disconcerting, feeling the early stages of arousal while sitting at table with a middle-aged nun. But something about the way Isabella moved… appealed.
    Begetting an heir was not going to be a duty after all.
    What was she saying? Isabella’s expression looked quite severe as she spoke to her friends. One of them, a ravishingly pretty girl, glanced at him and said something. They all laughed except Isabella. She seemed one of them… yet not. A little apart.
    The other girls quickly cleared away their plates and hurried toward him in a gaggle, smoothing down their hair and eyeing him in a flirtatious, fluttery manner that made him sigh. Not so different from the girls in London, then. Young, sheltered, and silly. Any remaining fears that attackers had invaded the convent faded.
    He stood and bowed politely over each girl’s hand as Isabella introduced him. Then under Reverend Mother’s benevolent eye, the girls pelted him with eager questions.
    “Have you traveled far to come here?” They spoke in slow, clear Spanish, watching him as if they might need to repeat the question.
    “No, just from the village down the road,” he said in easy, idiomatic Spanish. Gales of giggles, as if he were a famous wit.
    “But they said you were English,” the prettiest one—Alejandra?—said in surprise, and glanced at Isabella as if she’d lied to them.
    “I learned Spanish when I was a boy,” he explained. “I spent several summers on my uncle’s estates in Andalusia.” They oohed and ahhed, as if this was somehow clever of him.
    He supposed most girls raised in a tightly disciplined and isolated female environment would overreact to a male presence. They acted younger than they were.
    Not that Isabella was giggling or flirting. In silence she watched her friends making up to him, asking no questions herself, taking no part in the conversation. Watching over them—or perhaps she was watching over him—like a small, plainly dressed hawk.
    “Do you have any brothers?” This from the intense-looking one.