The Dollar Prince's Wife by Paula Marshall

Author:Paula Marshall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2001-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

Dinah wasn’t sure whether she was pleased or sorry that Cobie and she were not going to…she could hardly say it even to herself. What she did know was that she had felt a sense of relief when he had told her he was prepared to wait.

Paris, now, was quite another matter. From the moment that she saw it, brilliant beneath the early summer sun, she fell in love with it, and remained so for the rest of her life. She and Cobie had separate bedrooms in a big house he owned off the Faubourg Saint Germain, the most fashionable address in Paris, she was to discover. On the first morning they drove to a little eighteenth-century mansion set in a courtyard, behind iron gates.

Inside they went up a flight of stairs and a footman outside a pair of double doors threw them open and shouted their names into an exquisitely furnished drawing room where a woman in her late fifties, white-haired, came to meet them.

‘The Marquise de Cheverney,’ Cobie told her. ‘Bow, my dear, bow.’

She did so, rising to find a pair of shrewd grey eyes assessing her.

‘Milady Grant,’ the Marquise said to Dinah, and then to Cobie, who stood there watching them both, curiously tense, she noticed with some surprise. ‘But she is charming, such promise. And clever, too, you say. But her clothes—atrocious!’ and she threw her hands up in mock despair. ‘We must remedy that, immediatement.’

Dinah wanted to say, I don’t like my clothes, either. My sister Violet chose them, I didn’t.

Cobie was speaking to them both. His tension had gone. ‘Madame la Marquise is to sponsor us in society,’ he told her. ‘And she will see that you are properly trained to be an ornament of it. Is that not so, Madame?’

The Marquise nodded. ‘Vraiment, mon ami.’ She turned to Dinah. ‘It is not just your clothes, you understand,’ she said kindly. ‘It is the hair, the way you walk, stand, talk. Everything must be just so. Oh, but we shall have some fun, you understand, but much hard work, too.’

Her English was good, but heavily accented, and Dinah wondered where Cobie had met her, they seemed to be old friends. Dinah made that observation to him later. He shrugged his shoulders, and said, ‘I met her the first time I came here, five years ago. We each did the other some service,’ and then softly, ‘She was never my mistress, Dinah. I would not do that to you,’ and that was all that he would say.

After that the Marquise rang for coffee, and it came quickly: hot, strong and black. ‘We cannot start too soon,’ she was saying. ‘I understand that your time here is short, Monsieur Grant. No?’

‘True,’ Cobie said, ‘but when I go I shall leave my wife with you for a few weeks. I want her education to be completed as soon as possible, you understand.’

The Marquise looked grave. ‘You must not try to hurry things too much, my friend.’

‘My wife is a quick learner,’ Cobie told her.

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