The Maiden's Hand Read Online Free PDF

She poked her nose into the air. “It rather spoils the effect.”
    He sobered, though his eyes still shone with mirth. “I meant no insult, dear Lark. It is just that your smile was not real. A real smile starts in the heart.” Forgetting—or ignoring—her interdict against touching, he brushed his fingers over her stiff bodice. “Love, I can make your whole body smile.”
    “Oh, honestly—”
    “It is a warmth that travels upward and outward, like a flame. Like this.”
    She sat transfixed as his hands brushed over the tops of her breasts, covered by a thin lawn partlet. His fingers grazed her throat, then her chin and lips. She thought wildly of the oarsmen and Bodkin at the helm, yet even as a horrible embarrassment crept over her, she stayed very still, transfixed by Oliver.
    “A true smile does not end here, at your mouth.” He watched her closely. “But in your eyes, like a candle piercing the darkness.”
    “Oh, dear,” she heard herself whisper. “I am not certain I can do that.”
    “Of course you can, sweet Lark. But it does take practice.”
    Somehow, his lips were mere inches from hers. And hers tingled with a hunger that took her by surprise. Shewanted to feel his mouth on hers, to discover the shape and texture of his lips. She had been lectured into a stupor about the evils of fleshly desires, she thought she had done battle with temptation, but no one had ever warned her about the seductive power of a man like Oliver de Lacey.
    Closing her eyes, she swayed toward him, toward his warmth, toward the scents of tavern and river that clung to him.
    “I am touching you again,” he said, and she heard the whispered laughter in his voice. “Please forgive me.” He dropped his hands and drew away.
    Her eyes flew open. He lay half sprawled on the tasseled cushions, one leg drawn up and one hand trailing in the water. “A rather cold day, is it not, Mistress Lark?”
    She resisted the urge to make certain her partlet was in place. “Indeed it is, my lord.” She was not used to being teased. And she was definitely not used to bold, handsome men who flung out jests and insincere compliments as if they were alms to the poor.
    It mattered not, she told herself. Spencer claimed he needed Oliver de Lacey. For Spencer’s sake she would endure the young lord’s insolent charm. Certainly not for her own pleasure.
    “Will you listen now?” she asked. “I have come a very long way to see you.”
    “Nell!” he roared, causing the barge to list as he leaned out from under the canopy. “Nell Buxley!” He waved at a shallop proceeding downstream, aimed toward Southwark. “I made heaven in your lap last time we met!”
    “Good morrow to you, my bed-swerving lord,” brayed a wine-roughened female voice. A grinning woman in a yellow wig leaned out from the shallop. “Who’s that with you? Have you ransacked her honor yet?”
    With a moan of futility, Lark slumped back against the cushions and yanked her hood over her head.
     
    “This is another place of iniquity!” Lark dug in her heels. “Why have you brought me here?”
    Oliver chuckled. “’Tis Newgate Market, my love. You’ve never been?”
    She stared at the swarm of humanity pushing through the narrow byways, crowding around stalls or pausing to observe the antics of a monkey here, a dancing dog there. “Of course not. I generally try to avoid places frequented by vagrants, cutpurses, and no-account young lords.”
    Even as she spoke, she saw a lad dart up behind a portly gentleman. The child tickled the man’s ear with a feather, and when the man reached up to scratch, the little rogue cut his purse and slipped away with the prize.
    Lark clapped one hand to her chest and pointed with the other. “That child! He…he…”
    “And a good job he made of it, too.”
    “He stole that man’s purse.”
    Oliver began strolling down the lane. “Life is brutish and short for some people. Let the lad go.”
    She did not want to follow Oliver