Kate Moore Read Online Free PDF

plucked a row of corded ivory bows from each sleeve. Margaret pulled the poor bare puffs of muslin back up over her shoulders, but his hands met hers and stilled them. His thumbs lightly traced the line of bone from her shoulders to the hollows of her throat. She stared at him, appalled and fascinated.
    “You miss your finery?” he asked abruptly. “No matter. You need another sort of ornament for your disguise.”
    From the sparkling array in the case on the lowboy, he drew a strand of sapphires and fastened it about her neck, his fingers tangling briefly in her curls.
    “A reward for your courage,” he said. She thought: How carelessly he takes and gives.
    “There,” he whispered, turning her so that she could look in the mirror, “Margaret Somerley becomes . . . Meg Summers.” For an astonished instant Margaret gaped at her own appearance, the tumbled chestnut curls, the wide eyes more black than gray in the dim light, the flash of jewels above the white swell of her breasts.
    Then her gaze met his in the mirror. He grinned. “If anyone asks where you’ve come from, you may say that you just left my bed.”

3
    O NCE MORE THEY hurried through the night. The cottage, which had seemed so remote, proved to be just steps from the main thoroughfare of a coastal village. As they emerged from a wooded path, the sea lay to their left with a stripe of moonlight on it like a glittering extension of the street. To their right shops lined the steep ascent to an inn that clearly served as a coaching stop, for even as they moved toward it Margaret heard the guard’s blast on his yard of tin and saw the stage pull in.
    As they entered the inn yard, the ordinary and familiar bustle of stableboys attending horses and weary travelers descending from the coach had the effect of rousing Margaret as if from a daydream. The world of ordinary action, which had seemed so remote since the thief had carried her off, now appeared accessible. She did not doubt that the unknown Humphrey would restore her to her family as the thief said, but surely here she could find someone kind enough to help her. Her thief appeared to be intent on his own errand and for the moment unaware of her on his arm. She had only to approach some reasonable person and explain who she was. But no one seemed to remark them. Margaret caught no one’s eye.
    When they entered the inn itself, her sense of familiar and comfortable surroundings was immediately dispelled. Her parents patronized only the most respectable posting houses on the Bath road, establishments that catered to the quality, to whose proprietors Margaret’s father was well-known. How easy to explain her situation in one of them, how impossible here. The main taproom was plainly visible as she and the thief stood in the entry, waiting for the host to serve them. The room was dim, and a haze of pipe smoke drifted sluggishly on currents stirred by the movement of the waiters. The sober faces at the ends of the pipes appeared as unalterable as the carvings in the heavy paneling. To Margaret the inhabitants seemed not precisely evil but peculiarly indifferent. She doubted they could be moved to anything stronger than idle curiosity. She could hardly appeal to one of these.
    She turned to the innkeeper, whose professional cheer and white apron made him seem a more likely rescuer, but he had eyes only for her foppishly dressed companion. She did not receive the least deference from him, and suddenly she realized the effect of her altered appearance. The borrowed cloak did little to conceal her bedraggled state; her arrival unattended by an abigail hardly suggested that she was a lady of quality. To convince anyone that she was a lady, let alone a baron’s daughter, would be impossible. Her thief had not asked for any further promises from her, and now she understood why. She felt her cheeks burn, but she lifted her chin and looked disdainfully upon the innkeeper. She averted her gaze from the thief, but