Scandal in the Night Read Online Free PDF Page A

escape.
    A large hand closed around her ankle like a shackle, and hauled her back. “Don’t be daft, Cat. You’re not going anywhere before that gunman is stopped. Sit down.” He all but pulled her into his lap. “And don’t argue,” he added before she could protest. “You’ll give away our position.”
    As his hands had finally ceased their minute topographical exploration of her person, she did not argue. She had much better save her breath to cool her overheated brain, and think—to find a way out of her latest desperate situation. The children were safe. One blessing, then, in this small ocean of misfortune. And she was still alive. Another blessing from a fickle, disinterested God.
    Air crept warily back into her lungs. Catriona subsided into her corner, working hard to regain some composure, to stay calm and think.
    It would have to be America for her. Lord and Lady Jeffrey had been generous in her salary, and she had saved almost everything she had earned from her previous employer, Lady Grimoy, as well as most of the money Lord Summers’s mother, the dowager duchess, had settled on her to make her disappear.
    She should have known. She should have gone sooner. She had waited too long. She had let herself be lulled into thinking she was safe. She had let herself become accustomed to Lord and Lady Jeffrey’s regard, and let herself become attached to their children despite her best efforts not to—the children who had once again become her family, her only remaining solace.
    But the problem still remained. How did she get away from this Thomas Jellicoe?
    His left arm was still wrapped around her middle, and his large hand was moving minutely, stroking along her ribs almost idly, as if he were unaware he did it. But she was more than aware. Each one of his small, idle movements sent a shaft of heat tingling under her skin until she began to grow fidgety with sensation. The steady warmth of his body at her side was a marked contrast to the cool damp of the earth beneath her hands, and she dug her fingers into the soil to hold herself still. And to keep from touching him.
    All squashed up next to him, feeling the tensile strength of his long, lithe body folded up next to hers, she was overcome with the rush of remembrance. Of wanting him, wanting to rely upon him, his heat and his strength, even as she knew she should not. She could not.
    Oh, but she was weak, for she could not help but look at him and marvel at the changes two years had wrought. His smooth chin was tipped skyward, as he listened to whatever clues there were to what was happening beyond the small cocoon of their safe shelter. She had never seen him clean shaven, without the long, carefully groomed beard that was the hallmark of the monotheistic Sikhs of the Punjab. Without it, he looked strangely bare, almost naked, the strong, chiseled plains of his cheekbones and jaw intimately exposed, slightly paler than the rest of his face. And his hair, which had once been long and flowing when he had released it from its winding turban, had been ruthlessly cropped in the English style. Her fingers itched and twitched in the dirt, with the sudden urge to run her fingers through the short, uneven strands.
    Too late, Catriona became aware that he was watching her catalogue the altered landscape of his face in amused silence, one corner of his mouth sliding upward to smile in that nearly irresistible way of his. “Well, how do you do, Miss Cates. Here we are. Getting shot at during a garden party, in merry old England. If I had known Hampshire would prove to be so full of such interesting intrigue, I’d have come home much sooner.”
    It was so like him, like Tanvir Singh, to find the humor in the ridiculousness of the situation. It was so like him to try to amuse her while her world was falling down around her. She had once found it charming. Now she found it heartbreaking.
    Especially when he continued. “Or is it perhaps just you, ” he said, “and