Taming Charlotte Read Online Free PDF Page A

a little, though his size and masculinity still overwhelmed her. He leaned over Charlotte, his hands pushing deep into the mattress on either side of her, and smiled. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said. His voice was low, mesmerizing. “Now, tell me your name.”
    The wine had spread into every tiny tributary of Charlotte’s veins, every cell and pore. Her fear was receding behind a rising wall of darkness, and she yawned. “Aphrodite,” she said. “Daughter of Zeus.”
    Picturing her father in a toga, standing atop his personal Mount Olympus on Puget Sound and glaring imperiously down on mere humanity, she giggled.
    “Beware the thunderbolts of Zeus,” she warned Patrick, turning sage in the space of a moment. “If my father finds out about this, he’ll be absolutely outraged.”
    Patrick sighed and thrust himself away from Charlotte and the mattress. “There’s no point in talking to you now,” he said. “Go ahead and sleep, little goddess.”
    She pulled the blanket up under her nose and peered at him over the plain edge. “Don’t you dare ravish me,” she said.
    He smiled, and Charlotte was quite dazzled by the flash. “Rest assured, my dear—my taste doesn’t run toward pampered rich girls.”
    “Pampered—?!” Charlotte tried to sit up, wanting to offer a vehement protest, but she simply had no strength left to do that. She collapsed against the pillows, closed her eyes, and slept.
    Patrick sent a passing sailor for Cochran, who appeared momentarily, bearing a basin of warm water, some liniment, and a stack of clean washing rags. The first matelooked at the girl for a long moment, then made a
tsk-tsk
sound.
    “Poor little thing. She’s been poorly used these past few days, I’m afraid.”
    Patrick glanced at her smudged, pale face. Her matted hair was the color of maple syrup, and it would glow in the lantern light once it had been washed and brushed properly.
    “What do you mean, ‘used’?” he demanded. He knew he was scowling at Cochran as though the man had done the using personally, but he couldn’t help it.
    Cochran smiled, set the things he carried on the stand bolted to the floor beside Patrick’s bed. “I wasn’t speaking of her virtue,” he said. “The kidnappers wouldn’t have lowered her value by enjoying her favors, though God knows they must have been tempted.”
    Patrick swallowed hard. He was relieved, but at the same time, for some unfathomable reason, he wanted to grasp his friend’s shirtfront and send him flying backwards against the closest wall. With effort, he managed to control both his temper and, he hoped, the expression on his face.
    “She won’t tell me her name.”
    “Probably thinks you’re no better than those wasters who nabbed her in the marketplace,” Cochran said with a shrug. “It’s no great wonder if she’s been a little fractious, now is it?”
    “I guess not,” Patrick conceded, though somewhat ungenerously.
    The vixen stirred in her sleep, turned onto her side, and whimpered softly at the pain the motion caused.
    An angry flush surged over Patrick’s jawline.
    “They bruised her pretty badly,” Cochran commented in a quiet voice, looking down at the trail of black and blue marks on her bare arm and shoulder. “Maybe we’d better get Ness in here to check her over and bind up any wounds.”
    “I’ll tend to her myself,” Patrick said. Once he’d finished speaking, he was embarrassed, because he’d spat the words at his friend like pieces of red-hot lead. He made a forcible effort to calm his renegade emotions. “We’ll find out who she is soon enough—I know she’s from Seattle or thereabouts—and send her home.”
    “Yes,” Cochran agreed, somewhat heavily. There was no conviction in his voice. “Just remember that some folks are of a mighty strange turn of mind when it comes to situations like this one.”
    “What the hell do you mean by that?”
    Cochran had reached the door of the cabin and he paused