Don't Tempt Me Read Online Free PDF

edges.
    â€œI should hope so,” he said. “You tried to kill me with a cricket bat once.”
    She nodded. “I went round and round, then I fell on my bottom. You laughed so hard you fell down.”
    â€œDid I?” He remembered all too clearly. The mental cupboard would not stay closed.
    â€œI remembered that while I was away,” she continued. “I often pictured you falling down laughing, and the recollection cheered me.” She paused. “But you are…different.”
    â€œSo are you.”
    â€œAnd you are a duke.”
    â€œHave been for some time,” he said. “Since before you went away.” Forever. She’d gone away forever. But she was back. He knew her, yet she was a stranger. The world was not altogether in balance.
    She nodded, her smile fading. “I recall. Your brother. It was very sad.”
    Sad. Was that the word?
    It was in the way she said it. He heard a world of sorrow in that word. He remembered how she’d wept and how shocked he’d been, because Zoe Octavia never wept. And that had somehow made his own grief all the more unbearable.
    â€œIt was a long time ago,” he said.
    â€œNot to me,” she said. “I crossed seas, and it was like crossing years. To everyone it must seem as though I have come back from the dead. If only I had done so in truth, I might have brought your brother with me.”
    One devastating moment of shock, a sting within as of a wound opening—but then:
    â€œGood heavens, Zoe!” a sister cried.
    â€œPay her no heed, Marchmont,” said another. “Shehas acquired the oddest notions in that heathenish place.”
    â€œWhat does he care? Blasphemy is nothing to him.”
    â€œThat doesn’t mean one ought to encourage her.”
    â€œOne oughtn’t to encourage him , either.”
    â€œBut I must speak to him,” the girl said. “He is a duke. It is a very high rank. You spoke of dukes and marquesses. Will he not do?”
    A collective gasp from the harridans.
    â€œDo for what?” he said. The wound, if wound it had been, vanished from his awareness. He glanced from sister to sister. They all looked as though someone had shouted, “Fire!”
    The intensely blue gaze came back to him. “Are you wed, Lord Marchmont?”
    â€œâ€˜Your Grace,’” Dorothea hastily corrected. “One addresses him as ‘Duke,’ or ‘Your Grace.’”
    â€œOh, yes, I remember. Your Grace—”
    â€œZoe, I must speak to you privately,” said Priscilla.
    Marchmont frowned at Priscilla before reverting to the youngest sister. “ Marchmont will do,” he told the girl who was and wasn’t Zoe.
    Part of his brain said this was the same girl who once tried to injure him with a cricket bat, who climbed trees and rooftops like a monkey and fell into fish ponds and wanted to learn gamekeeping and blacksmithing and was so often found playing in the dirt with the village children.
    But she wasn’t the same. She’d grown up, that was all, he told himself. And she’d done a first-rate job of it, as far as he could see.
    Since the others so obviously wished to stifle her, he decided to encourage her. “You were saying?”
    â€œHave you any wives, Marchmont?” she said.
    â€œOh, my goodness,” said one harridan.
    â€œI can’t believe it,” said another.
    â€œZoe, I beg you,” said another.
    Marchmont looked about him. The sisters were undergoing spasms of some kind. Lexham had turned away to study the fire, as he usually did when considering a problem.
    Marchmont shook his head. “Not a one.”
    The others started talking at Zoe all at once. A lot of shush ing and “Don’t” and “Please don’t” and “I hope you are not thinking” this or that.
    Even had he been thoroughly sober, the Duke of Marchmont could not have guessed what they were about.