The Mark of the Midnight Manzanilla A Pink Carnation Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

marred the snowy whiteness of his cravat.
    Chapter Two
     
    Not blood. In the space of a heartbeat, Sally saw her own folly. Carmine. Merely red stone, carved with a device or sigil too faint to make out in the uncertain light.
    Sally could feel her breathing return to normal. Just a man. Just a man in a garden. What she had taken to be a gibbering imp behind him revealed itself as nothing more than the marble statue of a satyr, overgrown with moss and cracked with time. The satyr presided over the empty basin of an ornamental pool, flanked by a weather-blasted marble bench, its base tangled with dark weeds.
    Sally felt monumentally foolish. She didn’t like being made to feel foolish.
    “It isn’t polite to creep up on people,” Sally said sharply.
    “Creep?” The man looked at her incredulously. Under the circumstances, Sally wasn’t sure she could blame him. He stepped closer, holding his candle aloft. “ I was simply enjoying my own garden.”
    The sudden shock of light made Sally wince. Also, he was holding it on her bad side.
    “Which begs the question . . . ,” the man said, in a tone that made the hairs on Sally’s arms prickle with something other than cold. “What are you doing in my garden?”
    Sally pressed her lips tightly together, refusing to be intimidated. “What are you doing—”
    Sally stopped short. She couldn’t very well ask him what he was doing in his own garden.
    She drew herself up to her full height, letting the moonlight play off the rich gold of the cameo parure that adorned her neck, ears, and brow, and made a quick recovery. “What are you doing addressing me when we haven’t been introduced?”
    The Duke of Belliston—or, at least, Sally assumed it must be the Duke of Belliston—lowered his candle. “I would say,” he said silkily, “that trespass was a good substitute for a formal introduction.”
    His hair had been allowed to grow down over his collar, curling slightly at the edges, the darkness of it contrasting with the pallor of his skin. He was even fairer than she was, which Sally took as a personal affront. She was accustomed to being the fairest of them all.
    He stepped forward, the moonlight silvering his hair, making him look strangely ageless. As though he might have dwelt in this ruined garden for centuries, his eyes as dark and haunted as the night.
    Behind him, the moss-grown satyr on its plinth seemed to leer at Sally.
    “I am not trespassing,” Sally said haughtily. “I was simply admiring your foliage.”
    The Duke of Belliston arched one brow. “Has anyone warned you that strange plants might have thorns?”
    If she had wanted a lesson in horticulture, she would have consulted a gardener. “Has anyone ever told you that it is exceedingly annoying to speak in aphorisms?”
    For a moment, a flicker of something that might have been amusement showed in his dark eyes. Amusement, or merely the reflected light of the candle. “Yes,” he said. “It tends to truncate conversation quite effectively.”
    Sally wasn’t accustomed to allowing herself to be truncated.
    She took her time studying the scraggly shrubbery and empty flower beds. “Your gardener has been neglecting his duties.”
    The duke took a step forward. He was taller than she had realized, and he moved with a controlled grace that managed to be both elegant and slightly menacing. “There are gardens . . . and there are gardens.”
    His voice whirled around her like the slow swirl of a dark potion, conjuring up images of strange rites in midnight gardens, of night-blooming flowers and witches dancing under the full moon. There was a foreign flavor to it, a strange tang that blurred the edges of his accent, as exotic as a flower from distant shores.
    What manner of man cloistered himself away from the world in a garden such as this?
    A showy one, Sally told herself firmly, and made a pretense of contemplating the bleak remains of what must once have been a rather pretty little