Laughing, she offered him her hand. "It's a great pleasure to meet you, Mikahl. Ross has told me so much about you."
He rolled his eyes, which were the greenest she had ever seen. "I demand equal time to state my defense."
Juliet was still chuckling when Lady Sara released her cousin and turned to her. For a long moment the two women regarded each other, Sara thoughtful and Juliet tense.
A slow, impish smile crossed Sara's face. "Someday, in a year or two, I'm going to give you a tongue-lashing that will make your curly hair go straight. But it will have to wait, because just now I'm too glad to see you."
Then they were in each other's arms, half-laughing and half-crying. Juliet should have known Sara would accept anything that made Ross happy. As she hugged her friend, any doubts Juliet had had about living in England dissolved like smoke in a high wind.
When she and Sara were done with their embrace, Juliet glanced over at Ross, who was disentangling himself from Mikahl's exuberant greeting.
As the two couples began making their way through the crowd to Mikahl's carriage, Ross took Juliet's arm and said in a low voice, "The prince and princess came home, and now, as in all good fairy tales, they will live happily ever after."
"Lucky prince," she murmured, her eyes warm with love and tenderness. "And lucky, lucky princess."
The End
Page forward excerpts from
Silk and Shadows
Veils of Silk
Excerpt from
Silk and Shadows
The Silk Trilogy
Book One
by
Mary Jo Putney
Prologue
England, 1839
He called himself Peregrine, the wanderer, and he came to London for revenge.
It was dusk as the Kali drifted up the Thames, her goal a berth at the Isle of Dogs. The air was thick with the rank scents that occur where water meets land, and too many people live in too little space.
Peregrine leaned against the foremast, watching the lights of London flicker on and listening to the water splashing softly under the bow. An onlooker would have thought him casual, but the relaxation in his lean figure was a product of years of discipline, a habit of pretense so long established as to be second nature. He had learned early that it was safer to let no one know the true state of his mind and heart; over the years he had become so adept at dissimulation that he himself did not always know how he felt.
But tonight he had no doubts about the nature of his emotions. This bland, civilized English darkness concealed his enemy, and that knowledge burned triumphant in his veins. He had waited a quarter of a century for this moment, when the time was right to extract a slow and exquisitely painful blood price for what he had suffered.
The flame of hatred had been fired when he was a boy of ten, and over the years he had tended it with black, bitter care. Waiting and preparing for his revenge had been a strange mixture of pleasure and pain. He had wandered the face of the earth, acquiring wealth in many ways, honing mind and body until he was a more deadly weapon than any knife or rifle, learning how to survive and prosper in any land, among any people. Every skill, every golden coin, every sharpening of wit and hand, had been treasured as another step toward his ultimate goal.
And now all his preparations had led to this: London, called the greatest city on earth, with its wealth and squalor, snobbery and noble ideals.
He left the routine of docking and regulations to his captain, preferring silence and the voluptuous ecstasy of anticipation. From a distance he had already begun to spin his web about his prey. Now he would weave the final threads himself, learning the best and subtlest torments to apply. Peregrine wanted his enemy to know why he was being destroyed; he wanted to be close enough to see fear and fury grow, and to glory in the ultimate destruction.
When they had cleared customs, Peregrine sent a message to Lord Ross Carlisle, who was important to his plans. Then he waited. The man known as Peregrine—warrior, wanderer, rich beyond avarice, hero to a mysterious people who lived beyond the bounds of British law—was good at waiting. But very soon, the time for waiting would be over.
Chapter 1
The message reached Lord Ross Carlisle quickly, and he boarded the Kali within two hours. As the tall, rangy Englishman swung onto the ship's deck and into the pool of lantern light, Peregrine watched from a vantage point in the shadows.
It had been two years since they had last seen each other, and he wondered how strong the bonds of friendship would prove to be here in England. It was one thing for the younger son of a duke to fraternize with an adventurer of dubious background in the wilds of Asia, quite another to introduce such a man to his own circle. The two men could hardly have come from more different backgrounds, but in spite of that, there had been surprising harmony of mind and humor between them.