Moonlight on My Mind Read Online Free PDF Page A

building impatience. How could he be so . . . impersonal ? Day or night, this man had occupied a central place in her thoughts for eleven long months. He had kissed her senseless and she’d never forgotten, though she’d spent the better part of the last year trying—and failing—to replicate the experience. She wanted to scream at him. Shake him to awareness. Make him look at her as more than just a patient.
    Instead, she asked, “Do you not remember me at all?”
    His eyes continued their impersonal march across her various and sundry parts before settling back on her face. “Of course,” he said, his voice not changing inflection in the slightest. “You always did have a flair for a dramatic entrance, Miss Baxter.”
    Julianne’s heart skidded sideways in her chest. However impassive the acknowledgment, he knew who she was. And yet, he hadn’t bolted.
    She wasn’t quite sure what to make of it.
    Without another word of explanation, Channing turned and made his way toward the injured animal. Julianne watched as he shrugged—quite un -diabolically—out of his coat, one blurry shoulder after the other. “He’s unconscious but breathing,” Channing called out. “But he’s lost a good deal of blood. The leg will probably need to come off.”
    He returned to proper focus with a black and white animal wrapped in his coat and cradled in his arms. “I’ll need to take him to my clinic and see what can be done in surgery. You might as well come along with me, Miss Baxter. That is, if you trust me.”
    It was the closest he had come to acknowledging the odd history that bound them together. “I . . .” She hesitated, feeling the stares of a few curious Moraig residents on her, even though she couldn’t precisely see them. All she could see at this moment was this man towering over her, his arms full of beast and coat, a smear of blood wrapped around one wrist.
    A memory snagged on the shards of her uncertainty, a groundswell of guilt and doubt that had begun at the funeral and chased her across all these miles. There had been blood on him the last time she had seen him too. A copious amount of it, vivid scarlet turned to rust. He had stood in his father’s study as if hewn from granite, covered in his brother’s blood. At the time, she had seen that blood and interpreted it as evidence of his guilt. But with eleven months of second-guessing behind her, she was no longer sure.
    Now the old earl was dead, and the question of what came next was on everyone’s lips.
    She had entertained no plan beyond finding Patrick Channing and convincing him to return home. This journey had been naught but impulse from the moment she’d boarded the wrong train, still shattered by her first close-up look at Patrick’s family since the infamous house party. Some of those in attendance had whispered the earl had died of a broken heart, and Julianne had shrunk against the bruised eyes and hollowed cheeks of Channing’s mother and small sisters. It was clear they were devastated, and not only because of the Earl of Haversham’s sudden death.
    They needed Patrick, and they needed him whole.
    And it was equally clear—as the inquest into the circumstances of his brother’s death lumbered to life in the wake of his father’s passing and the crowd’s whispers turned to certain conviction—that she was the only one who knew where he was.
    “Quickly, please, Miss Baxter. An animal’s life may very well be at stake.”
    Julianne stared at his bloodied sleeve. The facts didn’t match. He didn’t match. That, more than anything else, cemented her decision, sane or not. “I will come with you.”
    She lifted her skirts, not even caring that she was probably exposing a good bit of ankle to the gawking townspeople. Perhaps, if she was lucky, that bit of stocking might distract them from the disaster of her hair, and discourage any speculation regarding why she was conversing—without a proper chaperone—with a man believed