Douglas: Lord of Heartache Read Online Free PDF

fearing it could be. “A simple clasping of the hands can lead to other things, and those things can be terrible.”
    Amery regarded her as if she were speaking Mandarin, then his expression changed, becoming frigid rather than his standard cool.
    “I will not impose myself on you, nor will I suffer any man to impose himself on you, nor to visit harm upon your person. Eat your sandwich, please.”
    He looked like he might say more, but his infernal decorum prevented him from whatever lectures were boiling up from his manly indignation. Abruptly, Gwen felt an absurd temptation to laugh—at herself. Amery shifted from casually demolishing her sandwich tray to offering her shocking assurances, and went about both pursuits with an intensity of focus Gwen could relate to easily.
    “Do you believe me?” Amery asked, glaring at her over his plate.
    She’d known him little more than twenty-four hours. He had been polite, if brusque and impatient. But his shocking assurances were something she had needed to hear, and because he was brusque and impatient, she also found she could trust him, at least a little.
    Then too, Amery seemed incapable of flirtatious innuendo or deceit.
    “I believe you,” she said, taking a bite of her meal. “Until I have evidence to the contrary.”
    “That’s a start, I suppose. You are the despair of your cousins, you know.”
    “What?” She couldn’t hide her consternation at that sally, so she took another nibble of her sandwich to safely occupy her mouth.
    “You are,” he said, looking like he might consider yet another sandwich. Did nobody feed this man? “Heathgate, Greymoor—and I suppose we must add Fairly to the list—are quite protective of you. When you pull this sniffing and silence on them, it hurts their feelings.”
    “It hurts their feelings because I’m reserved in their company?”
    “Of course.” Amery put a second sandwich on her plate, though she wasn’t done with her first. “They are chivalrous men, and you insult them when you act as if they could have less than your best interests at heart. Or perhaps”—he paused and set the mustard nearer her elbow—“you bewilder them.”
    “They are good men,” Gwen conceded, studying the crust of her sandwich. Why had the kitchen not trimmed the crusts on the rare occasion of company at Gwen’s table? “I do not mean…”
    “Yes?” He’d moved on to the tray of tea cakes now, selecting the four largest pieces to add to his plate.
    “I do not mean to be unwelcoming, your lordship. Reserve has become a habit.” She was using that word too frequently: habit, when refuge or crutch might have been more honest.
    “Habits,” he replied, refilling his teacup yet again, “can be retrained. More tea?”
    “Please.” She reached for a tea cake, then realized his perishing, bottomless lordship had appropriated all of the chocolate ones. Seeing her scowl, Amery held his plate out to her.
    “My apologies,” he said gravely.
    Gwen watched his eyes as she removed a chocolate cake from his plate.
    “There. You see? You did it again.”
    She set her cake aside untasted. “Did what?”
    “You watched me as if at any second I were going to drop that plate and vault over the table to ravish you.”
    “Nonsense. You’re not the ravishing kind, my lord.”
    “Miss Hollister, if I am not the ravishing kind—which characterization I might find slightly offensive, by the way, did I fancy myself as a dashing swain—then why do you regard me so warily?”
    She opened her mouth, prepared to put him firmly in his place, but nothing came out, so she took a bite of cake instead.
    “Well?”
    “I suppose, my lord,” she said when his stare had ruined her first bite of chocolate cake, “that having been betrayed by my judgment egregiously in the past, I am hesitant to rely on it now. Surely you can understand this.” She tried for another bite of her cake, hoping his lordship choked on the boldness of her implied