The Passionate One Read Online Free PDF Page A

used
too roughly. His eyes were jetty dark, the brows above slanting like black
wings, but the skin beneath them looked bruised. He sported an old-fashioned
clipped beard amidst the shadows of lean, unshaven cheeks, and his skin was
very pale and very fine and somehow fragile.
    Fleeting emotion,
subtle and reserved, flickered over his aquiline features.
    “Rhiannon Russell,
I presume?” His voice was baritone and suave. He didn’t bother to rise and his
pose remained preternaturally still, like a cat at a mouse hole, watchful but
not hungry—not yet.
    “Yes.” She became
unaccountably aware of the hair streaming down her back, the sweat and grime
from her leather gloves embedded beneath her short nails, and the mud
splattering her bottle green skirt.
    He rose. He was
tallish and slender and his shoulders were very straight and broad. His mouth
was kind but his eyes were not. His throat looked strong. The torn lace ending
his shirtsleeves tangled in the carved gold setting of a great blue stone ring
on his little finger. He flicked it away.
    Even without the
cachet of being a Londoner, the ladies of Fair Badden would have found him
attractive, Rhiannon thought. Since he was from that great fabled city, they’d
find him irresistible. Indeed, she herself could have found much to recommend
in his black and white good looks... if she hadn’t already succumbed to a
golden-haired youth.
    “You’re not
English.”
    “I am. A quarter,”
she said. “On my father’s side.”
    “I wouldn’t have
guessed.” Having spoken, he fell silent, studying her further.
    She struggled to
remember the lessons in courtesy Edith had instilled but none of them applied
to meeting strange, elegantly shabby young men alone in her foster father’s library.
    “I’m afraid you
have the advantage of me, sir,” she finally ventured.
    “Could I only be so
fortunate as to claim as much with all my acquaintances,” he said and then,
“but didn’t Mrs. Fraiser inform you of my name?”
    “No,” Rhiannon
said. “Mrs. Fraiser has no head for names, unless they’re the names of
unscrupulous tradesmen. She only said that you’d come from London to see me and
that you had news regarding my future.”
    “I am Ash Merrick.” He sketched an elegant bow, his watchfulness becoming pronounced now, as if his
name should mean something to her, and when he saw that it did not, he went on.
“The name Merrick is not familiar to you?”
    She cast about
cautiously in her mind and found nothing there to trigger a memory. “No,” she
said. “Should it?”
    His mouth stretched
into a wide grin. It was a beautiful smile, easy and charming, but it never
quite reached his eyes. “Perhaps,” he said, “since it’s the name of your
guardian.”
     
     
    Chapter Three
     
    “I don’t have a
guardian,” Rhiannon said and then, with her usual candor, amended, “I mean, not
an official one. At least, none that I know of...”
    She trailed off,
visited by an imprecise memory. She was maybe eight years old, standing on the
street of a strange city, squinting up at a door frame filled with beckoning
light. The old woman who’d brought her had cold, gnarled fingers. They twisted
round Rhiannon’s wrist like ropy grape vines. A strangely accented voice spoke
from within the warm, yellow light. “You want another Merrick, witch. Not Lord
Carr.”
    She was to have
lived with an Englishman. He was supposed to have been her guardian. She
remembered the old lady saying so. She’d forgotten. But there’d been so much
about those days and all the days preceding them that she’d forgotten. Flight
and cold, fear and confusion, the days—weeks?—had bled into one long, seemingly
endless nightmare from which she’d only awakened upon arrival in Fair Badden.
Even when she tried to recall, it was insubstantial, flickers of sensation and
images, more emotions than actual memories.
    Rhiannon stared at
the man arrayed in damaged elegance. Surely he was too