I Adored a Lord Read Online Free PDF Page B

chancel. He sat back on his heels and folded his arms within voluminous sleeves. “Then what did you do that brings you from the gathering at the house where your half brother needs you now?”
    â€œI kissed a girl.”
    Silence.
    â€œFather?”
    â€œVitor, you are bound for the madhouse.”
    â€œOr hell.” He raked his hand through his hair and turned to the priest. Patient tolerance lined the old Frenchman’s face. Vitor shook his head. “I shouldn’t have done it, Denis.”
    â€œYou might be taking those monastic vows too seriously, mon fils , especially since you left them behind six months ago.” He lifted shaggy brows. “Or so you told me then.”
    After the war, the monastery had made an excellent retreat. But Vitor’s fathers, the Marquess of Airedale and Prince Raynaldo of Portugal, complained. Where was the man loyal to both families, the man they had depended upon to do dangerous tasks, to loyally serve both England and Portugal at once? Where was the man hungering for adventure?
    Bound to a chair, beaten and cut .
    The monastery had suited him. For a time. But once he had put away his anger he’d been eager to move on.
    â€œIt isn’t about the vows.” He turned his face to the bare altar fashioned of granite hewn from this mountain. “She was not exactly a girl.”
    A choking sound came from beside him. “Perhaps it’s time we have a chat about that monastery after all.”
    Vitor cut him a scowl. “Oh, good God, Denis. She was female .”
    â€œAh. Bon .” The old priest again sighed in relief. “Are you confessing the sin of fornication, then?”
    â€œNo.” Vitor turned to sit on the step, relieving the ache in his leg that she’d struck with the hardest pitchfork in Christendom. He rubbed a palm over his face. “I only kissed her.”
    The hermit chuckled. “If she took money for only that, she should be the one confessing.” Denis reached into a fold of his habit and drew out a flask.
    â€œShe was not a puta . She was a lady.” Albeit wearing a gown fit for a servant and lurking in a stable at midnight. “I frightened her.” Anger and indignation and fear had all swum in her eyes. Beautiful black eyes. He hadn’t been that close to a woman’s face in years. She’d seemed an angel in the lamplight. A dark, alluring angel. “It was as if a demon drove me. She was there”—­beneath him, her curves cushioning him, her small body lush and entirely feminine, her eyes flashing—­“and I wanted to kiss her more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life. I couldn’t stop myself.”
    He should have stopped himself even before he’d followed her into the stable. She’d walked across the forecourt in the dark like she was accustomed to walking about alone, her stride comfortable, pulling the fabric of her skirts around her behind and thighs and warming Vitor as he stood in the frigid shadows and watched her. No gently bred female walked like that. In the light of her lamp, her hair had shone black and shining and tumbling about her face, begging to be set entirely free from its haphazard confines. He’d followed her as much because he’d wanted to see more of her as because he was suspicious of her intentions.
    His younger half brother Sebastiao enjoyed making assignations with serving girls in the stables. Laughingly he said it made him feel like the sportsman he was not. At this gathering, that amusing little pastime would not go over well with the prince’s guests.
    But Sebastiao had not been in the stable with the girl, only a handful of mongrel pups and a damnably hard pitchfork. Then when Vitor subdued her in the straw and she looked at his mouth . . .
    He’d gone a little insane.
    Two years of silent contemplation did not necessarily a willing monastic make.
    Denis nodded. “The devil