The Perfect Stranger
seagulls fought over some morsel of food.
    “You said you thought he was a Hungarian violinist,” Nick prompted. “Wasn’t he?”
    “No! Well, yes—he is most definitely a violinist and an extremely talented one, but he wasn’t Hungarian at all! He was Bulgarian .”
    Nick frowned. “And it mattered—his being Bulgarian?”
    “No, of course not. What mattered was that he has five children ! Five!”
    “Five children?” he nodded. “Rather a quiverful, I agree. I gather you’re not fond of children.”
    “Of course I’m fond of children. I love children! It wasn’t the children!”
    “Then what?” He was puzzled.
    “He was married . His wife and children are living back in Bulgaria. He lied to me.”
    “So when he refused to marry you—”
    “Oh, he married me. I would never have lived with him without being married. I am not so lost to propriety as—”
    Nick leaned forward. “But you just said—”
    “The thing is, I thought we got married.” Her voice was a mixture of desolation and anger. “He faked the wedding.”
    “How the devil did the bast—” Nick bit off the word and tried again. “Er, how does one fake a wedding?”
    “He bribed a priest for the use of the church, and he got a friend of his to dress up as a minister and perform the ceremony.”
    Nick carefully unclenched his fists. He wanted to throttle the bastard. “How did you discover the cheat?”
    She sighed. “It was our one month anniversary, and I wanted to do something to celebrate. Felix was busy, so I decided I’d go to the church and take some flowers there. I took a bottle of wine for the minister, too. But when I asked for him…I found the real priest and…well, it all came out. He said he hadn’t realized what Felix wanted the church for…” She shook her head.
    Nick flexed his fists. Two people to throttle; a Bulgarian fiddler and a crooked priest. “What did you do then?”
    “I went home and confronted Felix about it. I…I thought it would all turn out to be a misunderstanding, but…he didn’t deny a thing.” She bent over so he couldn’t see her face. Trailing sand through her fingers, she said in a low voice, “I discovered he’d never loved me, had never really cared about me at all.”
    Nick said nothing, just waited for her to explain.
    “I was a bet, you see.”
    “A bet ?” His body was like a coiled spring.
    “Yes. He bet one of his friends he could elope with me.” She added in a tight voice, “Actually, any wellborn English girl would have done. But I was the stupidest girl in London that season. I thought I’d found my true love, just like Mama.”
    There was a long, awkward silence. If he ever met him, the violinist was a dead man! To ruin a sweet young girl for a bet !
    Nick could imagine it. A shy, sheltered, naive little creature, raised on stupid romantic fairy tales. She’d be no match for a slick Continental flatterer. She ought to have been protected from such a villain. “Did your parents not see what was in the wind, try to stop you?”
    “My parents died when I was seven.”
    Nick dismissed them with a curt mumble of sympathy, but he was not to be distracted. “Did no one try to stop this impostor from targeting you?”
    She shook her head. “The thing is, Felix had assumed the name of a real Hungarian family. The Rimavska family is well-known, very rich and aristocratic, so he was accounted a good match. Great Unc—”
    She bit off the sentence unfinished, but Nick could put two and two together. The lax guardian was her great-uncle. It made sense. Only a very sheltered girl, a girl brought up by an elderly man, would have been so easily deceived.
    And it would account for why the guardian was willing to turn a blind eye. Anything for a chance of a fortune, he thought savagely.
    She continued, “He wasn’t Felix Vladimir Rimavska at all. His real name was Yuri Popov.”
    “I’d bloody well pop him off!” muttered Stevens angrily.
    Mac noisily shoved some

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