Love on a Midsummer Night (Shakespeare in Love #2) Read Online Free PDF

boy of eighteen, an untried youth. He shook his head to clear it, but his heart kept pounding.
    She carried a heavy leather bag, a satchel too large for her to hold. She hefted it awkwardly, trying to find purchase, struggling to be graceful and failing. Pembroke fought to control his breathing as he crossed the room and took it from her. It was heavy in his hand and should have been completely unwieldy in hers. He laid the bag aside then stepped back, gesturing to an armchair by the fire.
    She did not sit but stood before him still in silence. Only then did she lift her veil. Only then did he see her eyes.
    Pembroke turned his back on her. To cover his shaking hands, he poured himself a brandy. He poured two glasses, one for her, and one for him. His voice sounded properly sardonic in his own ears when he finally broke the silence.
    “You honor me, Your Grace. So you’ve changed your mind? You’ve decided to take me up on my offer?”
    Arabella stared at him as if he were the interloper, as if he had intruded in her home in the small hours of the morning and not the other way around.
    “I have not, and you know it.”
    Pembroke tried to shore up his defenses against her. But her voice was a soft as he knew her body must be. He had wanted this woman all his life simply because she was the one woman he could not have. The one woman who did not want him.
    He felt the knife of her old betrayal slide into his heart, a smooth, unexpected caress of pain. His breath was gone as he stood in front of her, two useless glasses warming in his hands.
    He thought he saw pain in her eyes, a pain that mirrored his own. But in the next moment, that pain was gone, and he was left alone in his.
    “If you are not here to become my mistress, why do you trouble me?”
    “Hawthorne came to my house.”
    “Indeed. It is his house now.”
    She raised one hand and waved his words away. “No. He came at night. While I was sleeping.”
    Pembroke felt the floor beneath his feet tilt as if he stood on the deck of a ship. The room righted itself but not before his long-buried jealous fury rose to blind him. He thought he had killed that anger, but here it was again, rising to consume him. He could not bear the thought of another man touching her.
    “Hawthorne is your lover. I assume he is often there at night and stays on into the morning.”
    If it was possible, Arabella grew even paler. She must have become a consummate actress in the years since he had last seen her to affect such ladylike horror. But then he remembered. He had once thought she loved him. No doubt she had been playacting then, too.
    “He forced himself on me.”
    Pembroke shook with rage, with the sudden desire to take his cavalry sword and run the duke through. He breathed hard, fighting for control. Then he remembered that this woman was Hawthorne’s lover, come to draw him into their quarrel. Why she would foist herself on him after all these years did not bear examining. She had been a liar then, and no doubt she was a liar now. “Why should I believe a word you say?”
    Arabella met his eyes, and he saw that there were tears in hers. He cursed himself and turned away but not before his rage began to give way a little. No doubt she was a liar, and yet she still had the power to move him.
    She drew a package of linen from the pocket of her cloak. She unwound the ragged cloth to reveal a knife with a wicked blade. “The duke brought this with him,” she said.
    She raised her sleeve next. A wound had bled through the hasty bandage, coloring the white with dark blood. Pembroke was on his feet in an instant, taking her arm in his hand, forcing himself to touch with a tenderness that belied the anger coursing through him. He feared for the first time in many years that he would fall into a rage from which he could not find his way back out. With great difficulty, he released her and pulled on the bell to ring for Codington.
    Pembroke had fought many battles and had learned to