Leslie Lafoy Read Online Free PDF

be melted into a most willing participant.
    God, it was going to be difficult to take things slowly with her. And damn difficult to keep his mind on anything other than her. What had she asked him as she’d set his blood on fire? Oh yes. Why they were alone together. He wasn’t about to be completely honest with her and confess his most basic motives. Not when a superficial one would do for the moment. He cleared his throat and very deliberately put away his fantasies.
    “Em and Noland are searching for our carriage and then hopefully on their way home. Who’s this Haywood fellow you’re looking for?”
    “My escort this evening.”
    Escort? Damn. “Oh?” he posed ever so casually. “Am I likely to have to meet him in some field at dawn for having cut your skirt off you?”
    She laughed softly. “He’s my brother-in-law’s friend and old enough to be my father.”
    That was fairly reassuring news, but it was better to be certain. “Age is seldom a consideration in matchmaking, you know.”
    She rolled her eyes. “He’s like a favorite uncle. A matching with Haywood would be perverted.”
    The angels didn’t sing, but they did hum a few bars of a snappy tune. Tristan stripped off his jacket as they walked and draped it over her shoulders, saying, “You’d best wear this.”
    Again she tilted her head to look up at him. “I’m hardly chilled.”
    He wasn’t, either, and the fire had nothing to do with it. The angle of her chin was so incredibly come-hither that he stuffed his hands in his pockets and forced himself to look away. “I was thinking to protect you from the drifting cinders.”
    “Oh. Thank you. That’s very considerate.”
    A woman with more carnal experience would know that it wasn’t an entirely magnanimous gesture. Tristan felt a slight pang of guilt, but it was short-lived, snuffed out in the tide of appreciation. A woman instinctively and naturally seductive was such a rare thing. In fact, now that he thought about it, he couldn’t remember ever having met one. The women of his world came in three varieties: completely clueless fawns like Emmaline, deliberate, predatory sharks like Sarah Sheraton and a hundred others whose names he couldn’t remember, and icebergs like his stepmother.
    Lady Simone Turnbridge was decidedly not fawnlike, hardly predatory, and most definitely no iceberg. God give him strength to resist the temptation of her in a measured, well-timed fashion. If he was too bold too soon and scared her off, he’d likely kick himself for several months.
    They rounded the corner of the mansion together in silence and then froze in the same step. The heat struck hard against his face and he had to narrow his eyes to look into it. Flames rolled out the doors of the ballroom and up the manison’s already-blacked stone walls. Those windows that hadn’t yet shattered from the heat glowed in promise. Knowing there was nothing the fire brigade or anyone else could do to save the structure, he looked away, out into the yard and the gardens.
    In the pulsing orange light of the fire and the rain of cinders, people were moving about like oddly jointed dolls. There were knots of them here and there, some clustered around a form lying on the ground, others standing mute and clinging to each other. Still others were moving away as quickly as they could and damning the indignity of stumbling. It was eerily close to the images of hell Dante’s book had conjured for him.
    “My God,” Simone whispered.
    Tristan shook his head to dispel the trance and took command. “Perhaps you should describe this Haywood,” he suggested firmly, “and let me go about the search for him while you wait over there with the ladies.”
    “I’m not a lady. The title notwithstanding,” she declared, starting forward. “And three-quarters of the windbags under that tree will be happy to tell you so and why. In great detail.”
    Interesting. “What about the other quarter of them?” he asked as he took