Dangerous Dalliance Read Online Free PDF

value of your father’s timepiece for me , Miss Hume. I shall always treasure this.” His voice was rough with emotion.
    My nose was out of joint that his own watch was gold, but I was somewhat mollified by his words and tone. “I’m glad you like it,” I said.
    The meeting was over, yet I was loath to leave. There was some charm in the loft, with the big white moon silvering the ocean, and painting the landscape in ghostly hues. The cooing of pigeons and gentle flutter from the nests was an undercurrent to the sighing of the wind, and the breaking of waves on the shore below. “It’s pretty up here,” I said.
    His smile, when he spoke, was not far removed from flirtation. “I have often regretted that you so seldom come to visit the birds.”
    “Papa never encouraged me to. He said I disturbed them.”
    “Ladies oftimes have a disturbing effect,” he said. His tone said that their effect was not limited to birds.
    I ignored his reply entirely. I had come upstairs without my shawl, and the sea breeze was chilly. I began rubbing my arms to keep warm.
    “You’re cold. Let me get you something to put on.”
    “I should go downstairs.”
    “What is the rush , Miss Hume? Now that you are here, why not enjoy the view for a moment?” He looked around, but finding no shawl or blanket to offer, he removed his own jacket and hung it over my shoulders.
    His body heat was still in it, warming my back and arms. “Are you sure you don’t need it yourself?” I asked.
    “Quite sure. This gives me an opportunity to display my virility,” he said facetiously.
    We exchanged a smile, but I was quite aware of the virility in his broad, straight shoulders. His shirt showed them off to advantage. I noticed his stomach was board-flat, and his hips were trim. Moonlight played over the rugged planes of his face, casting his eyes into shadows, and highlighting his well-sculpted nose and sensuous lips. I began to wonder what else the duchess had given him, besides a gold watch. This was the sort of man who caused scandals in polite households.
    “You look beautiful in the moonlight, Miss Hume,” he said softly.
    I warmed to his praise, but realized the situation was not at all proper, and depressed him with a joke. “I am one of those ladies who shows to best advantage in a dim light.”
    “I cannot agree with that. It’s a pity it’s nighttime, or I’d give you a tour of the place,” he said. “We have a few nestlings. You might enjoy to see the chicks being fed. A strange way they have of nursing. Pigeons’ milk comes from the crop of not only the mother, but the father as well. The hatchlings are fed milk for a week.”
    “The father nurses, too! How strange!” I said, happy to see he was not bent on flirtation.
    “It is unique in nature, so far as I know. The fathers also share the incubation. They take the day shift, the mothers the night. That always seems ungentlemanly to me. The ladies ought to be allowed their beauty sleep. But it is foolish to judge them by human standards.”
    “What gives the birds such a variety of colors? Papa called the prettily colored ones fruit pigeons, I think.”
    “Yes, ordinary street pigeons are drab, like the rock pigeons that are the basis of all racing birds. With so much mixing of breeds, you often see a pretty pink or green glaze on street pigeons as well. The fruit pigeons come from all over—Asia, Africa, the South Pacific islands. They are such strong flyers, they’ve spread all over the world, in a bewildering assortment of crossbreeds.
    “Caesar, I think, is our best flyer?”
    “Perhaps the best in England. Your father’s Belgian friend, Pelletier, provided the chick before he left the country. Pelletier claims to have birds that can fly two thousand miles.”
    “Goodness! I thought the races were only a hundred miles long.”
    “No, sometimes as far as five hundred miles. Those races are difficult to arrange in times of war. It involves taking the birds five