A Notorious Countess Confesses (PG7) Read Online Free PDF Page B

week for nearly a year now. Time had suspended as two images overtook all other thought.
    Lady Fennimore’s daughter greeted him at the door, as usual.
    “How is she this morning, Jenny?”
    Jenny gave a start. She took an infinitesimal step backward, eyes widened.
    It was then he heard himself as she’d heard him: curt, preoccupied, irritated. Very unlike him. The sort of voice that might make anyone take a step back.
    He added a smile to apologize for it. Jenny forgave him with a melting smile of her own and twined a finger in a stray curl that had escaped its pins.
    “She’s about the same, Reverend, but she’s always so much better after she sees you. You can go straight up if you like. I’ve just put the kettle on, and I can hear it about to boil. I thought you might like some tea after your long walk.”
    “You’re always so thoughtful, Jenny. Tea would be wonderful. And the walk is one of my favorites.”
    Pleased pink moved into Jenny’s cheeks and throat and collarbone, and she touched a hand to a wayward tendril of fair hair and floated to the kitchen, buoyed by his smile and kind words and her own daydreams about the vicar, which involved her serving tea and rubbing his wide shoulders and propping one of her own needlework pillows beneath his head when he napped.
    She was certain the “love thy neighbor” sermon had been directed to her.
    He watched her go, her softness and simplicity and eagerness to please balm after his last little encounter. And as she disappeared into the kitchen, and Adam strode through the foyer, past the gilt-edged mirror nailed up over a small table struggling under the weight of roses stuffed into a Chinese urn. Lady Fennimore kept a hothouse, though it sometimes seemed as though the hothouse kept her, so profuse were the blooms and so prevalent the scent of them in her house.
    Just as he was about to launch himself up the now-familiar flight of marble stairs, he froze.
    Then turned, and as cautiously as if he were about to accost a burglar midcrime, returned to the mirror.
    To discover his expression was dark and abstracted; his jaw was tense. His eyes were brilliant, with some fierce emotion, something perilously close to anger but not quite.
    No wonder Jenny had taken a step back.
    He’d best do away with that expression before the astute Lady Fennimore got a look at it and somehow worked out that a woman had caused it.
    A thoroughly baffling, unpleasant woman.
    Who had gone from sleeping in church to shrieking in what sounded very much like gutter Irish (which had perversely amused him) to prickly and difficult, to flinging flirtation at him—she’d quite alarmingly sparkled at him—like a soldier hurling boulders with a trebuchet.
    Despite all of this, two impressions surfaced through all the others. And these were the ones that dogged him all the way to Lady Fennimore’s house.
    How he’d first seen her: standing utterly still, two hot pink spots on her cheeks, hand flattened against her rib cage. Then squaring her shoulders, like a pugilist shaking off a blow.
    Something Maggie Lanford had said hurt her.
    And then there were the freckles.
    He’d seen them as they stared each other down—a faint scattering, only slightly darker than dried tears, on each cheek. And something about them, and her green eyes, made him think of bird’s eggs, and summer days, and from there he’d found himself wondering what that smooth cheek might feel cradled in the palm of his hand. What might be like to drag his thumb softly over those pale spots which, if he knew women, were the bane of her existence, to soothe away whatever hurt had put the hot pink in her cheeks.
    He’d never had a thought like that in his entire life. Let alone about a woman he disliked.
    He inhaled deeply, exhaled, and turned his back on the mirror.
    LADY FENNIMORE WAS propped in bed, engulfed by a night rail and topped by an enormous frilly cap from which her cobweb-fine gray hair escaped. She was layered