Teresa Medeiros Read Online Free PDF

she whispered.
    Then she rolled over, snuggled her face against the warmth of his lap, and went back to sleep.
    Time stopped. Justin couldn’t have said how long he knelt there, brushing the sand from her tangled curls and enduring the exquisite torture of her warm sigh breaching the threadbare calico of his dungarees.
    He didn’t even hear Penfeld approach, huffing and puffing as if he’d trotted all the way from England. “There you are, sir. I was just out for a stroll—” His gaze dropped to Justin’s lap. He threw a hand over his eyes. “Good Lord!”
    “What?” Justin gazed dumbly up at him, still lost in the throes of his reverie.
    Penfeld peeped between his round little fingers. “If I’ve come at an inopportune moment, sir …?”
    Justin blinked as if coming awake after a long sleep. The sleep of a lifetime. He reluctantly untangled his fingers from the skein of curls. “No, no. You’ve come at the perfect time. Give me your coat.”
    Justin had to admire his valet’s aplomb. Penfeld turned his back and peeled off his coat as if finding his master cuddled on the beach with a nude, insensible woman were a normal occurrence. He started to fold it. Justin tugged it out of his hand. If he hadn’t stopped him, Justin knew he would have washed and pressed it before handing it over.
    Penfeld rubbed his arms, shivering in his crisp linen shirt as if he were the one naked. “I do say, is it a mermaid, sir?”
    “Do you see any gills?”
    Penfeld chanced a tentative glance over his shoulder. What he did see was a voluptuous young woman being tenderly enveloped in the folds of his coat.
    Justin stood, gathering her like a child in his arms. Her head lolled warm and damp against his shoulder. Hisgaze traced her features—the elfin tilt of her nose, the pout that made no apology for its sensual promise.
    Penfeld dared to turn around. “Wherever did she come from, sir? Could she be the victim of a shipwreck perhaps? Or a stowaway?”
    Grinning, Justin lifted his head. “No stowaway, Penfeld, but a gift. A gift from the sea.”
    Penfeld couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen his master truly smile. Justin was already striding down the beach, his steps no longer weighted, but as light as if he carried not a woman, but a blithe spirit fashioned of sea foam and stardust. As Penfeld watched, Justin did the most extraordinary thing. He lowered his head and pressed a kiss to the tip of the woman’s nose.
    Penfeld mopped his forehead, wondering if they’d both been struck with the moon madness so coveted and feared by the natives.
    Emily burrowed into the thin mattress, her mind tugging greedily at the blurred edges of sleep. She despised waking up. Despised the sleet tapping at the tiny attic window, the wash water frozen in her basin, the prospect of crawling down the steep stairs to teach French to wealthy little brats who didn’t know their
demitasses
from their
derrières
and who teased her mercilessly because her dress was two years too small. Groaning, she fumbled for a pillow to pull over her head. Perhaps if she hid long enough, Tansy would come tapping on the door with a mug of steaming black coffee smuggled out from under Cook’s bulbous nose.
    Her groping search yielded no pillow. A new sensation crept over her, a feeling utterly delicious and so foreign to her gloomy attic that she wanted to weep at its beauty.
    Warmth.
    She slowly opened her eyes. The sun fanned tingling fingers across her face. She lay there, stunned, basking in its heat, enveloped in its healing rays. She closed her eyesagainst the dazzling shaft of light. When she opened them again, a twisted green face hung only an inch above her own, its pointed teeth bared in a ferocious grimace.
    She shrieked and scrambled backward, groping for a weapon. Her fingers curled around the first blunt object they could find. As her back slammed into a wall, dust exploded, setting her off on a quaking chain of sneezes.
    “Now look what