Douglas: Lord of Heartache Read Online Free PDF Page B

admission.
    “Miss Hollister,” his lordship rejoined so dratted gently, “it wasn’t your judgment that betrayed you, but a flesh-and-blood man who should be called to account for his sins.”
    This topic—her lapse from propriety and its results—usually lurked beneath a conversation, whether she spoke with her tenants, her cousins, or the Enfield staff. That Amery would face it directly—and regard her as a wronged party—was a disconcerting relief.
    “Perhaps he should,” she replied, “but that man is long gone, while my judgment remains on hand.” She took the final bite of her cake, pleased to have had the last word, though in truth, “long gone” was a stretch when Rose’s father spent much of the year in nearby London.
    “Have you finished your meal, madam?”
    “I apparently have.”
    “Then I thank you for a very filling repast and will await you in the stables.” He rose, bowed, and withdrew without another word.
    ***
    When Douglas gained the peace and quiet of the stables, he first checked on Regis, who was swishing flies in a shady paddock. The horse had grass and water and seemed content to nap in the afternoon sun.
    While Douglas beheld his somnolent steed, he tried to quell his own internal tumult.
    What in the name of Jesus and the Apostles had got into him that he would challenge Miss Hollister as if she were some close associate of long standing? He had made a thinly veiled reference to the word rape in the presence of a woman connected to his family, and he’d done it purposely.
    And she had looked so… dumbstruck, so innocent.
    That exchange with her over lunch had told him things, things a man didn’t ask a lady outright regardless of her shadowed past.
    Her shock suggested she was sexually inexperienced, for all that she was the mother of a bastard child.
    And he’d learned other things, too: Her skin, when he’d taken her hand, was kissably soft. As close as he’d stood to her at several points in the day, he’d learned that if he were to take her in his arms, she’d fit him. She was tall and well formed and curved generously in the right places. And he’d learned something else, something that made him oddly… happy: he could desire her.
    This insight had come to him when he’d stood, his hand on the door, blocking her exit the previous day, and he’d known the surprising impulse to press closer to her, to breathe her in and let her feel the evidence of a man’s desire right up against her feminine curves. A momentary impulse, but he was honest with himself, and it had been an honest impulse.
    Within that impulse was nothing less than a revelation.
    Douglas had felt the need for sex before, but always in the nonspecific sense that he’d simply wanted to spend. In the past few years, it had become the less complicated option to spend in his hand rather than into the body of a willing female stranger.
    He had desired this woman, specifically: Guinevere Hollister. She was pretty enough, but Douglas was drawn to her not because of her looks but because she utterly eschewed the flirtation and simpering of many of her peers. Her lapse from propriety had, if anything, imbued her with more dignity, not less, for which he had to like—to admire—her.
    That she did not acknowledge any reciprocity was immaterial, and whether he ever fornicated with the object of his attraction was equally irrelevant. He was relieved simply to experience normal adult male longing for a woman.
    One of the grooms approached and interrupted Douglas’s peculiar reverie. “My lord?”
    Douglas shifted away from the fence. “Yes?”
    “Mistress says you may use one of our mounts for the afternoon. She’s up at the barn, awaiting yer pleasure.”
    Fascinating notion. Douglas walked back to the barn, half-curious regarding what Miss Hollister’s mood might be.
    “My lord.” She was leading out the same rawboned chestnut she’d ridden in the morning.
    “Miss Hollister.” Douglas followed her