Taming Charlotte Read Online Free PDF

there, one hand on the latch. “Whether the young lady has been…er…deflowered or not, a lot of papas and mamas would see her as used merchandise, a shame to the family. Not a few would refuse to take her back.”
    Looking down at the nameless waif, Patrick saw the child he’d rescued from the rigging so long ago, not the woman she’d become. He felt a twisting sorrow just to imagine her being spurned by the very people who were supposed to love and protect her. “Go now,” he said, in a tone of defeat, and he heard the door close behind Cochran.
    With a gentleness he hadn’t had occasion to use since the year he was ten, when his dog had been run down by a carriage and he’d carried the spaniel out of the street, Patrick turned back the blanket. First he washed the lady’s dusty, swollen skin, and then he treated the worst of her scratches with dabs of good brandy. She flinched a few times, but didn’t awaken, not even when he lifted her up and maneuvered her into one of his shirts.
    Clearly she was exhausted, and Patrick felt no small amount of tenderness toward her as he stood for a time, watching her sleep. After a while, he turned the lamp down until there was barely any wick to burn, then went up on deck to make sure all was well with the ship.
    When he returned, his lovely guest was sleeping on her side. She’d kicked free of the covers, and her long, shapely legs, as white and translucent as the finest porcelain, lay as if she’d been running.
    Patrick sat down on the end of the bed, kicked off his boots, then rose to unfasten the buttons of his breeches. He favored the wide-sleeved, open-throated kind of shirt that made him look like a swashbuckler in a three-penny opera, and this he pulled over his head and tossed across the back of his desk chair.
    He crawled into bed, next to the wall, settled in with hiscustomary strenuous stretch and loud, sighing yawn, then turned his back on the waif.
    She made a sound in her sleep, shifted, and laid one hand full on Patrick’s right buttock.
    He tensed, from his scalp to the soles of his feet, and his member was suddenly as erect as the main mast. Patrick murmured a swear word and reluctantly moved out of her reach, but up on deck, the watches changed and then changed again before he was able to sleep.
    When Charlotte awakened, fierce sunshine was pouring in through an open porthole and she was alone in the captain’s quarters. At least, she
assumed
Mr. Trevarren was the captain, since he had such fancy accommodations all to himself and seemed accustomed to ordering people about.
    She wriggled up onto the pillows, which were wadded against the plain wall that served as a headboard, and stretched. That was when she realized she was wearing one of Patrick’s shirts, that he must have unwrapped her from the blanket and put the garment on her while she was sleeping.
    The idea mortified Charlotte, but she wasn’t about to let it take too much of her energy. Her first thought, upon being delivered to Patrick like a bagful of walnuts plump for the cracking, had been that she was safe now, in the hands of one of her own countrymen. Now, however, as she mulled over the fact that the pillows next to her own still bore the imprint of a head, she wondered.
    Horror made Charlotte’s heart lurch. She’d had wine the night before, and she’d been rendered almost witless by the things that had been happening to her. Had she been besmirched?
    She spread her legs beneath the blankets and felt herself tentatively with the fingers of one hand, but there was no soreness, no change. There was, however, just the slightest twinge of pleasure at the scandalous thought of Patrick touching her so intimately.
    Charlotte slapped both hands down on top of the covers and pulled her legs together with such force that her knees knocked.
    A rap sounded at the door, and before Charlotte could call out that she preferred to be alone, the hinges creaked and Patrick strode in,