Mistress By Mistake Read Online Free PDF

threw it at him. His reflexes were excellent. Instead of it braining him, he caught it easily with one hand and pitched it against the opposite wall. He might have been playing cricket. “You will not attempt to do me harm again, do you understand? You’ve done enough.”
    Charlotte felt her fury bubble up. “I—I have not yet begun, sir! You are—you are inhuman! A fiend!”
    “So I have been told,” he said with a threatening smile. He pulled a watch from his pocket. “I shall return here at four o’clock. I had planned, you know, to spend the day abed with you. Lap perfectly chilled champagne from your skin and retrieve berries from—wherever. But plans change. I think you’ll find me flexible.”
    “I don’t care if you can bend like a sapling! You will not bed me, and will certainly not cover me in liquid and foodstuffs! I will not be here when you come back.”
    “Off to Little Hyssop? It sounds like a very small village. Little, in fact.”
    Damn her prideful tongue. She had told him where she lived. Charlotte had nowhere else to go and no money to get her there in any event. Deb had sent just enough money to come to London and Charlotte had been too stupid to ask for more yesterday in all the confusion. Charlotte turned to speak more cutting words, but instead watched Sir Michael pull his wrinkled shirt over his head.
    She could charge him while he was temporarily blinded by linen and bludgeon him with a Cupid if she were quick. But his dark head popped out and her chance was lost. She really was going to kill Deborah when she saw her again, if she wasn’t imprisoned already for killing Sir Michael Xavier Bayard first.
    Four o’clock. That gave her hours. It was clear she could not pawn Deb’s necklace, worthless as it was. Perhaps she could persuade the maid, Irene, or Mrs. Kelly to help her escape. There must be petty cash for the household stashed somewhere in a sugar jar. She would plead. She would beg. They must know what a wicked man their master was. And if he came to find her in Little Hyssop, she could shoot him with her papa’s old blunderbuss and afterward say he was an intruder, his big body prostrate at her feet. She smiled.
    “You should do that more often.” Sir Michael spoke from the doorway, sinfully handsome even when dressed in clothes that had lain on the floor all night.
    “What?”
    “Smile. I was beginning to think you didn’t have teeth. Oops, I forgot. You did bite me, didn’t you? In several places.” He ran a long forefinger down the column of his throat.
    Oh merciful heavens . She had bitten his tongue in anger, but the other bites, love bites when she’d nipped his delicious salty skin, were done under the influence of an altogether different emotion. She was going to Hell with Satan as her tour guide.
     
    Bay rubbed his forehead in impatience. Mr. Mulgrew droned on, oblivious to the fact that Bay longed to leap across his desk and shake the man. He stabbed an ivory-handled letter opener into his palm instead.
    “Yes or no?” he asked, interrupting, watching a drop of blood rise. He hadn’t intended such self-abuse. Charlotte Fallon was taking a toll on him. That is, her sister was. “Will you undertake the effort to find the Bannisters or shall I have to find someone else? I have a four o’clock appointment.”
    The large man flushed, adding to the high color he already sported from what had to have been several pints at lunchtime. Bay was beginning to think he had been ill-advised to seek Mr. Mulgrew’s assistance, even if he had come highly recommended. After all, he’d heard wonderful things about Deborah, and look where that had led him—wrangling with a sodden Mr. Mulgrew, whose every breath bespoke middling-priced ale and fried fish.
    “Beggin’ yer pardon, my lord. My wife says I do go on.”
    “Sir Michael will do. I’m a mere baronet, not a member of the aristocracy.”
    “Indeed, indeed, your lordship” the man said, still fawning. “Ye