Sinful in Satin Read Online Free PDF

did and published it. He had agreed to this little mission for himself, and for the odd chance that he would finally be able to settle an old score.
    As for Celia, this was another property that required a thorough search, but he could hardly do it in front of her nose. Last night he had given most of the chambers up here in the attic a quick inspection, but one had been locked. Now he could not break through the door across the passageway without Celia guessing just who had forced his way in.
    No water waited outside his chamber door when he opened it. He thought it unlikely that his landlady would see to the linens either. Celia would make no efforts to accommodate his presence in her house, no matter what possibilities had been silently humming in the library last night. He judged that not only her desire to inconvenience him was at work.
    He did not know where she had spent the years after she left her mother, but nothing about her suggested she had gone into service. The possibility existed that Celia did not know anything about housekeeping.
    Left to do for himself, he went down the servant stairs. No sounds came to his ears as he passed the second level where she had her own chamber, nor as he descended farther. Only as he emerged from the stairwell did he see her, sitting in that bright back chamber with a sketchbook on her lap, concentrating hard on the windows and space and the drawing she made.
    She wore a primrose-hued dress. Along with her hair and fair skin, she brightened the chamber like a beam of sunshine. She had appeared beautiful in the light of the fire last night, but now the sight of her made his breath catch.
    She would be wasted as the abbess of a brothel. He believed that her insinuations about that last night had only been another attempt to encourage him to leave, but he could not know for sure.
    She startled when he greeted her. Her blue eyes raked him from head to toe but she did not react to his dishabille. Since it wasn’t his fault he had not shaved and wore little more than shirt and trousers, that was only fair. Yet he could not block the memory of a golden girl in her mother’s other home, and imagine the lessons that Alessandra must have been imparting that year. Hiding any sense of fluster when a man looked like this was probably one of them.
    “I came for some water to wash.” The excuse sounded stupid to his own ears. The fact would be obvious enough when he returned with a bucket from the garden.
    “Were you expecting me to bring it up to you?” Her tone implied honest curiosity.
    “Of course not. You are not a servant.”
    “No, I am not. Certainly not yours.”
    “Linens, however, are customary when a single chamber is let.” He had thought to put off this demand, but her resentful tone goaded him a bit. “I said that I required little housekeeping, but I do need bedsheets.”
    She just looked at him, then returned to her drawing. He went to the well and drew the water. Cold water. He carried it back, debating whether to suffer its chill or lose the time to wait for it to warm near his fireplace.
    “Will you be going out today?” Her question found him at the bottom of the stairs.
    “That is likely. In an hour, for a while.”
    “Good.” She did not look up from the drawing.
    Her distracted, dismissive “good” provoked the devil in him. He set down the bucket and strolled into the chamber until he could look over her shoulder at the drawing.
    It showed the chamber itself, in good perspective, with a system of shelves near the windows and low trays on the floor.
    “You inherited your mother’s talent,” he said, while his gaze shifted to the intricate way she had dressed her golden hair. The angle of her head allowed tiny, errant wisps to show, like little feathers splayed against the nape of her elegant neck. He stood close enough to smell her lavender scent, and to move those tiny hairs when he exhaled.
    Her pencil stopped on the page. She looked up at him,