One Night of Sin Read Online Free PDF

breath. Indeed, he was eager to see what she might try to do to him.
    He cast aside his initial prejudice about her kind. The lass had spirit, aye, pluck to the backbone. He had to know her name. She was a challenge, and challenges, like surprises, were so very rare in his life. More than being merely intrigued, though, he was concerned about her, too—perhaps, in spite of himself.
    He was not entirely sure now that their first assumption had been correct, that she had arrived in advance of their usual summons for the
filles des joies.
She hadn’t been dressed like one, hadn’t smelled like one, doused in cheap perfume. She’d worn no rouge, no tawdry fake jewels. And she was sober.
    Either she had just woken up and hadn’t yet known what was going on when his friends had besieged her with their excessive attentions, or there was another explanation for her naive alarm.
    Alec intended to get to the bottom of it, solve her little mystery. It was not as though he had anything better to do.
    Ahead, the girl paused on the corner, beginning to tire. Looking one way and the other, as though she wasn’t sure which way to go, she glanced behind her and now saw him chasing her. She jumped back, recoiling.
    “Leave me alone!” she cried shrilly, though he was still half a block away.
    “Wait! I just want to talk to you!”
    She let out a furious sound and fled again, darting to the left.
    With a glint in his eyes, Alec poured on the speed, drawing easily on his large, unused reserves of physical strength honed over many years of near daily training at the best fencing and boxing clubs in London. The puddles were deep as he splashed through them in his flat black shoes. He was still dressed for the ballroom in black trousers and tails, but the driving rain quickly soaked his shoulders and chest, sousing his favorite white silk waistcoat and plastering his hair to his head. Breathing harder with his sprint, he tugged off his cravat and threw it aside.
    As he turned the corner onto Bond Street, a carriage-load of Drax’s expected guests passed him, hailing him in surprise, but he ignored them, absorbed in the chase.
    He had a feeling he would not be going back to Draxinger’s for any cardplay tonight. No, he was already contemplating another kind of play altogether, the wondrous game of skin to skin. God, he needed it.
    He had gone too long without. He had not had a woman since well before Lizzie’s wedding to Strathmore on Midsummer’s Eve. Rejected by the one girl he always thought he’d marry—if and when he was ever ready to settle down—Alec had not had the heart to resume his Don Juan ways.
    Until tonight.
    What the hell was he waiting for? His body ached for a woman’s touch. He made up his mind as he pounded on through the rain that this mystery girl would do as well as any. Besides, it would indulge his vanity to succeed where his friends had failed.
    Passing a row of quaint shops with darkened bow windows, their shutters and doors locked up tightly for the night, the girl’s pace began to flag, as though she could not keep going much longer. She cast another anxious glance over her shoulder and saw him catching up.
    Alec was almost upon her now, only a few yards behind, close enough to see the fury that flicked over her dainty features at his determined pursuit.
    “Go away, you fiend!”
    “No,” he panted cheerfully. She had yet to learn of his famed stubbornness—and he had yet to learn her name.
    With a small yowl of pure feminine frustration, she rushed over to the nearest storefront, a haberdasher’s, and seized the only weapon she could find.
    Snatching the long-handled candlesnuffer off its metal holder on the wall, she whipped around and swung it at him. “Stay back!”
    “Oh-ho!” he laughed as he approached slowly.
I like this girl.
“What are you going to do with that thing? Put my lights out?”
    “Keep your distance or I’ll brain you! I’ll do it, I will!”
    He disobeyed, of course,