Authors: His Makeshift Wife
Anne Ashley (23 page)
‘I have to settle with the teahouse. An honourable man repays all his debts.’
From the heft and size of the pouch, it must have held more coins than a month’s take at the teahouse. She chuckled.
‘What do you find so funny?’
‘They just gave that to you?’
‘Yes,’ Fei Long said, puzzled.
She laughed outright. She couldn’t help herself. For some reason, this was the funniest thing she’d ever seen. She recalled the jade seal that he had shown at the teahouse, which practically had her master kow-towing.
‘They just give you money…’ she caught her breath between gasps ‘…for nothing!’
She shook her head and grabbed at her sides. They ached from laughing so hard. When she looked up, Chang Fei Long was glaring at her.
‘Our family name is good as a guarantee of payment,’ he said stiffly.
She sucked in a breath and tried to compose herself. Of course it wasn’t funny to him that someone like her would never touch money of her own, no matter how hard she laboured. Lord Chang simply had to walk into a municipal office. Yet she was the beggar, he the nobleman.
Money from air. All things were possible—even a peasant posing as a princess in a foreign land.
‘Yes,’ she said, in a long-delayed answer to his proposal. ‘Yes, I’ll go with you, my lord.’
They headed back towards the teahouse then. Her former master would see that she was leaving town with the same gentleman they’d thrown her out over. The thought had her doubling over in laughter once more.
ISBN: 9781459233744
Copyright © 2012 by Anne Ashley
All rights reserved. By payment of the required fees, you have been
granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of
this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted,
down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any
information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether
electronic or mechanical,
now known or hereinafter invented,
without the express written permission of publisher, Harlequin Enterprises
Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents
are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and
any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments,
events or locales is entirely coincidental. This edition published by
arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
® and ™ are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with ®
are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian
Trade Marks Office and in other countries.
