Tempestuous/Restless Heart Read Online Free PDF Page A

motorcycle jacket.
    Christian groaned from the bottom of his heart.
    “Blimey, gov, I heard you flipped for some bird in the stables!” the woman exclaimed, her cockney accent ringing out as loudly as the bells of Saint Mary’s Church. She stopped several feet away from them, doubling over as she dissolved into a fit of laughter. “Flipped! Crikey, I’d ‘a’ killed to see that! His nibs sprawled out on the cobblestones, tossed over by a lady!”
    “Charlotte, must you always use a tone of voice loud enough to drown out aircraft engines?” Christian hissed between his teeth.
    The girl’s outburst had drawn amused stares from all around them. Snickers went through the little knots of people like ripples moving outward from one loud splash in a pond. There was no hope of keeping the little incident with Alex a secret, of course, but he would have preferred to have had the gossip spread by someone other than one of his own grooms.
    She laughed, waving a hand at him. “Oh, go on! Ain’t nobody here what hasn’t heard the tale half a dozen times already!” she exclaimed, dropping all the Hs off her words in typical East End fashion.
    Braddock rubbed a hand across his jaw to discreetly cover his grin. Christian turned a dull red and spoke through clenched teeth. “Charlotte, you are the bane of my existence.”
    “Oh, go on!” She laughed and batted his arm, not contrite in the least.
    Charlotte “Charlie” Simmonds was eighteen, a petite cockney firecracker with an accent as thick as London fog, and burgundy hair, which she wore combed straight up. It was shorn off on the top and looked as thick and flat as the yew hedges in Windsor Great Park. Christian suspected she got it to stay up that way through sheer stubbornness. Her face was still slightly round with baby fat and striking due to an overabundance of eye makeup and dark lipstick. A cluster of earrings dangled from her right lobe. The left one held a single garnet stud.
    She was the niece of Old Ned, head stable lad at Westerleigh Manor. “A bright, precocious girl,” Ned had called her. “Needs to see a bit o’ the world, is all,” he’d said. “Her dad run off and her mum drinks a bit, and there’s no proper jobs about for a girl her age.”
    There had been a kind of desperation in his eyes at the time, and Christian could only wonder now why he hadn’t taken heed of the signs. Ned had fairly begged him to take the girl back to Virginia with him. He had yet to figure out why he had said yes.
    “You might be slipping, luv,” Charlie said, digging him in the ribs with her bony elbow. “The ladies are supposed to fall at your feet, not the other way round!”
    Christian bit back half a dozen different remarks, all along the lines of “mind your betters.” He cursed a royal blue streak under his breath. Each and every one of those remarks were things his brothers might have said to the servants. One couldn’t say those sorts of things in America. According to ideology no one had any “betters” here. It was one of the reasons he had moved to the States—to get away from the blue blooded, stuffy class system he’d grown up in. And here he was, ready to revert to type at a little needling from an impudent teenager. Maybe he was slipping.
    “What’s the matter, ducky?” Charlie asked, squinting so that her eyes became tiny bright spots of brown in her pixie face. “Can’t take a little ribbing? Stuffy, stuffy,” she scolded in a singsong voice, shaking a finger at him.
    “Oh, don’t be so tedious,” Christian grumbled, scowling at her. “I ought to give you the sack for lack of proper respect.”
    He grimaced the instant the words were out of his mouth. Uncle Dicky would have been rolling in his grave if they hadn’t cremated him and scattered him over Cheltenham racecourse.
    “Right. Right. Go on. Go ahead and fire me,” Charlie said lightly, shrugging without concern. She turned her young womanly wiles in Robert’s direction