A Most Unladylike Adventure Read Online Free PDF Page B

if she’d stepped on to forbidden ground by even asking that question.
    ‘Why?’ she asked, biting back a ladylike apology for intruding on his private thoughts and opinions.
    ‘Because…Devil fly away with it all, woman, what right have you to break in here and interrogate me like some long-nosed inquisitor? While we’re on the subject of the devil, where’s Coste hidden the rest of the brandy, so I can get back to my previous occupation when you leave us or at least stop your infernal nagging?’
    ‘Inside himself from the look of it,’ she answered impatiently and watched him with animplacable look Kit called her I’ll-find-out-if-it-kills-us-both stare.
    ‘Selfish bastard,’ he grated in a much-tried voice and tried to look as if he didn’t know he was being inspected by his unwanted night visitor and found wanting.
    ‘You probably have enough left in your system to inebriate a goat.’
    ‘I never saw a drunken goat, but what an interesting life you must have lived to have done so, Miss Le Havre.’
    ‘Yes, I have,’ she informed him truthfully, or at least she had until she’d been hauled off to learn respectability at the age of thirteen, much against her will. ‘And it’s not Miss Le Havre, but Miss La Rochelle, if you’re capable of remembering your own name, of course, let alone mine, which I sincerely doubt just at the moment.’
    ‘I know that too well, but I dare say you could tell a tale or two about that life, could you not?’
    ‘I could, but I won’t.’
    ‘Yet you expect me to tell you my entire life story, whilst you reveal nothing of your own? You’re an implacably demanding, as well as an insensitive and intrusive, female footpad, are you not, Miss Rockyshore?’
    ‘You really have no idea, Captain Darke.’
    ‘So,
is
that how you keep your lovers under your slender little thumb?’ he drawled in his velvet-rubbed-the-wrong-way voice. ‘By dragging their darkest secrets out of them when they’re drunk, then holding them over the unfortunate idiots?’
    ‘Nothing about me is so very little, sir, I’m above average height for a woman,’ she parried coolly, ignoring the urge to counter the rest of his accusations as beneath her notice.
    Trust him to take her words as an open invitation to let his silver-blue eyes rove over her boldly. He was good at defending his privacy, she mused, as he let his gaze track over her until those eyes had all but stripped her bare. Then the renegade let that blatant stare of his rest explicitly on the secret centre of her and she had to fight not to press her legs together and visibly, physically clamp down on the fiery demand suddenly all too alive and wildly curious for more under his outrageous scrutiny. Kit and Ben hadn’t fought battle after battle to preserve her honour in their youth so she could be secretly tempted to throw it away on a ne’er-do-well like this.
    Yet that fully-formed temptation stopped her thundering scold and sharp exit in itstracks. If she let him take her virginity, then she’d lose all her value on the marriage mart the instant he did so. Not even a Charlton Hawberry would take another man’s leavings, so deeply ingrained as it was in a gentleman’s psyche that he must marry a virgin, or at the very least a virtuous widow—she would certainly be neither after a night in the ungallant captain’s bed. It might be a desperate idea, almost as reckless as climbing out of a second-floor window at midnight, but she wasn’t in a position to discard any possibility just now.
    ‘So I see,’ he said with a pantomime leer she almost applauded, but there was something deeper and darker than simple lust in his eyes as well. It suddenly occurred to her that the real Captain Darke, whoever he might be under all this dark and dangerous front he faced the world behind, could break her heart if she had one. Luckily she didn’t and stared boldly back at him.
    ‘That could change,’ she warned, ‘if you don’t stop staring