Elisabeth Fairchild Read Online Free PDF

unscathed. 
    A stick might save him--a stout stick, and none to be had, though there were rocks aplenty. A rock, well-placed, might chase the beast away. He had only to scoop one up before the animal was upon him.
    A whistle cut the darkness, a female voice murmured. “Artemis! Hush.”
    Her voice!
    “Miss Foster?”
    The dog stepped onto the road, a black and white collie, legs stiff, hackles raised, growling again, nose wrinkled, teeth displayed. The man-eater.
    “Be still!” she ordered, though whether the direction was meant for him or the dog he could not say.
    The dog sat, growls subsiding.
    A darkness separated itself from the night, a bundled and hooded shape that seemed neither male nor female. “What business has Cupid here in the middle of the night?”
    Her tone was forbidding. The dog muttered an echoing discontent. Not the sound or manner of a woman given to passion and illicit midnight assignations.
    “It is not so late as that, is it?” He pulled forth his watch.
    The dog rose, teeth showing. Alexander fingered the gold fob. He might use it to throttle the animal if it lunged. “It as not yet gone ten.”
    The hood slid from her head. Moonlight made damply curled gossamer of her hair. “All of Westmoreland’s abed at this hour,” she said.
    “But for you and I, wanderers of the night.” He tucked away the watch, warmed by the image of that cloud of hair spread upon a pillow. Damn Val. He could not stop thinking of her in unmannerly terms.
    The dog faced the way it had come, uttering a throaty sound.
    Hobnailed heels clattered on sandstone. A man emerged from the darkness, paused to tip hat to Miss Foster, to stare a moment in his direction before setting off with no more than a grunt.
    “Not just you and I, after all,” she corrected him. “My shepherds have good reason to wander the night with fences downed by a careless jumper, and sheep astray. Do you?”
    Good reason? Was it not reason enough that he was alive? That he had two sound legs to carry him?
    “I like to walk.”
    She stepped closer, her face silvered in the moonlight--wary. “So you say.”
    “You do not believe me?”
    “I know next to nothing of you.”
    Was this wariness the manner of a fallen woman? Or did she simply not care for him? He did not want to believe either.
    He squatted, holding his hand out that the dog might sniff. “Another archer, are you, lad?”
    “He does not take to strangers,” she warned him. “Especially men.”
    “Just as you do not?” he asked.
    Her chin rose abruptly.
    He looked back down at the dog. “An intelligent creature. It does not do to be too trusting of strangers--especially men.”
    Head cocked, lips pursed, Penny Foster patted her cloak, thigh level, drawing the dog to her side--drawing Alexander’s attention to an area of her body he had best not think about. How easy would it be to spread the legs Val claimed to have conquered?
    The dog leaned into the woolen folds of her cloak, within reach of her hand, bright eyes unwaveringly fixed, animosity unquenched.
    She stroked the animal’s head, murmuring low. Affection softened her voice and features, rousing desire within him for just such softness. It had been too long since he had been with a woman. When her gaze rose, blue eyes turned black by the night, her affections faded, swiftly replaced by the same wary watchfulness in the dog’s eyes.
    “Have you come to deliver my Valentine?” she asked, head cocked, a hint of vitriol in the question.
    “Forgot to bring him,” he said as a test, his tone in jest.
    “Him?” she responded sharply.
    “You do not care for Val?”
    Her nostrils flared. “I have neither feelings, nor use, for him.”
    The crisp edge to her voice told him otherwise. She squatted to bury her fingers in the dog’s thick ruff, to hug his neck in a manner most endearing.
    “He told me he once held you in great regard.”
    She did not look up. “Did he? He has shown me no evidence of it.” She gave