Far Too Tempted Read Online Free PDF Page B

leave, Colonel. As of this minute. You’ve been wounded in three different battles. You’ve not been home in years, or so I’ve been told. As little as we can spare you, you’re going back to England. This isn’t my decision either. I would selfishly keep you here, but the orders I received from London were very clear.”
    Acutely aware of the crisscross of bandages across his bare chest, Alex fell silent. Home. Grayston Hall. Green fields and decent food and clean linens. His mother and her incessant parties. Marcus and Ariel and the children. There was a new nephew he’d never met. Marcus had finally produced a direct heir.
    And Jessica Roweland—little Jess—she was now a woman and apparently engaged to be married. A mixed blessing, to be sure.
    Quietly, he said, “Thank you, sir.”

Chapter Two
    June, 1812
    Berkshire, England
    The public coach had left her off, and Jessica struggled with her trunk, dragging it behind with effort, feeling it bump her heels.
    When she got home Robert was going to get a good tongue-lashing for forgetting her. Despite her letter reminding him of her impending arrival, he’d still neglected to send the carriage, leaving her to have to scramble for transportation on a public coach bound for Berkshire. The journey had been a nightmare. No chaperone, no money for food at their infrequent stops, nothing but her body squeezed between an elderly priest who mumbled and constantly wiped his nose, and a stout farmwife who babbled on about her very large family and smelled rather pungently like a wet chicken.
    It had been quite miserable. This was better, even if she had to tug her trunk down the country lane as she trudged toward home. At least the air around her was fresh and clean, and the familiar surroundings were like a balm to her soul. She’d missed everything so much.
    She realized that she hadn’t come home in over a year. Of course she’d had her reasons, but maybe that part of it had been her fault.
    There had been Rebecca, such a dear friend, supplying companionship that Jessica sorely needed. And Nathaniel, of course. She’d spent every holiday with the Greene family for the past few years, preferring their busy household to rattling around her childhood home. All that was there for her were memories of the parents she’d lost and the hours spent watching Robert drink himself into an early grave.
    Nathaniel wanted to marry her soon. He’d asked her brother last Christmas for her hand and was pushing for her to set a date.
    Nathaniel, she thought pensively. With the dark, brooding good looks of a poet. Tall, athletic, every woman’s dream.
    Or at least close to that dream. The whispers about Elizabeth Frey were a bit of disillusionment. She very much wanted to dismiss them as not being true.
    The light evening wind ruffled her hair and cooled her face. Her hand began to get sore from lugging the weight of her baggage and she stopped to shift her trunk, flexing her aching fingers as she started forward again.
    She hadn’t heard anything from her brother recently, which was not an ominous sign because Robert was a horrible correspondent, except she was sure that he would write if some word had come of Alex Ramsey.
    Alex Ramsey. Why did she have to think of him?
    Not that she cared if Alex fell to a French bullet, she’d told herself often enough in the past four years. She’d been wrong about him her whole life, assigning him the role of gallant, taken in even as a child by his patent charm. In retrospect, with the hindsight of an adult, she knew now his casual and offhand kindness she’d misinterpreted as affection, and she, starved by the death of her parents and Robert’s self-absorption, had ridiculously built a vision of the man that did not exist.
    Especially as the truth had been very much shoved in her face that night long ago, shattering her illusion into a thousand fragments.
    He was a flagrant rake. A womanizer of the worst kind, insensitive and unrepentant.