A Most Unladylike Adventure Read Online Free PDF Page A

this monster of depravity’s sceptical gaze and match his cynical scrutiny with one she hoped he’d find just as difficult to meet.
    ‘The customer always has the choice not to buy,’ she said boldly, as if she fended off such outrageous provocation every day of the week and reminded herself that, if not for Kit and Ben, she’d probably be exactly what this poorapology for a gentleman thought her right now. ‘And I can take my pick of those who want to do so whenever I like.’
    ‘The most readily caught fish doesn’t always taste sweetest.’
    ‘But if you throw them back, I’ve found the little ones often live to grow up and learn a lot more, which makes catching them again into much better sport.’
    ‘I’ll have to be the one that got away, then, for hooking me would prove a challenge even to the most cunning enchantress, let alone an amateur angler like yourself, Miss…Confound it, whatever is your name, woman?’
    ‘Miss Confoundit? Now why didn’t I think of that?’
    ‘I’ll just make one up to call you by then, shall I?’
    ‘No, it’s…’ Louisa racked her brains for something suitably exotic, something an aspiring Cyprian might use to intrigue ardent gentlemen with plenty of gold in their pockets, if not rude and probably impoverished sea captains. ‘Eloise La Rochelle,’ she invented on the spur of the moment and decided she rather liked it.
    Nobody would dare drive Eloise La Rochelle to such desperation that she’d risk climbing outof a second-floor window to escape her uncle’s machinations and her importunate suitor, she decided whimsically. Indeed, Eloise would doubtless have far less respectable gentlemen than even this one climbing up the creepers to her scented balcony in their droves of a night-time to beg for her nigh-on legendary favours instead.
    Would she accept any of them? she wondered, as she slipped deeper into the dangerous fantasy of being a very different female from the one she was in reality, or make them climb back into the night? Charlton could go back the way he came as fast as gravity could take him and she hoped it would teach him a salutary lesson, but Hugh Darke? Daring, dashing Eloise La Rochelle might just let him stay for a while, because he amused and intrigued her, of course, and to enchant him into parting with the dark secrets that lurked in those ironic grey-blue eyes of his, until he finally laid even his cynical heart at her feet. Then he could take his brooding gaze and his warrior’s body down the stairs when he left, to scandalise and intrigue passing dowager duchesses with his disreputable looks and piratical charm and make them long to be as young, bold, stunningly beautiful and irresistibly seductiveas the notorious Eloise La Rochelle of such scandalous fame even they couldn’t pretend never to have heard of her.
    No, she revised her story, he wouldn’t be
able
to leave. He’d demand, then beg, then sell his soul to stay with her, if he still had one. Infamous Eloise La Rochelle would spoil him for every other female he ever met and in return he’d satisfy her as extravagantly as she would him, or be banished to decline and fall alone as a punishment for his sensual failure.
    ‘And I’m the Queen of Sheba,’ he responded sceptically to her exotic
nom de plume
, bringing her back to here and now with an unpleasant jolt, as she struggled with the uneasy certainty that he wouldn’t fail to pleasure her in such an encounter, even if she was a little foggy about what such sensual satisfaction would involve.
    A very uncomfortable present it was as well, where he didn’t look at all enchanted by her assumed name or shockingly displayed charms and probably wouldn’t beg aught but peace from the likes of her, so he could broach another bottle and swinishly lose himself in drink once more.
    ‘I suggest you act a little more regally from now on, then,’ she told him crossly, turningher back on that ridiculous fantasy of him falling at her feet,