The Scoundrel and I: A Novella Read Online Free PDF Page A

my crime.”
    “Daresay crime’s giving it a bit too much drama. Determined, though, to help you work this out.” He moved toward her, all six-and-more-feet of gorgeous, well-muscled masculinity. A spike of sharp, hot panic jolted up her middle.
    She darted into the front room, snatched his hat off the desk, and shoved it into his chest. “You cannot help. You obviously know nothing about printing.”
    “No, but—”
    “Even if you did, there is nothing to be done anyway.” She thrust wide the shop door. Without, the night had fallen sultry and dark, the usual sounds of the King’s Barrel spilling onto the street. “Please, Captain,” she said through gritted teeth. “Go.”
    “But I—”
    “You have really done enough already,” she said sharply. “Haven’t you?”
    For a moment he seemed to consider her again. Then he bent his head, set his hat atop his glossy black locks, and went out.
    Elle closed the door, bolted it, and fell against the edge of the desk where a captain in the Royal Navy had sat minutes earlier.
    “Never again,” she whispered fervently, her gaze slipping through the doorway to the far corner of the press room, where once she had allowed foolish weakness toward a handsome man to overcome her good sense. Straightening up, she brushed her skirts free of the taint of
that
man’s desk and stepped away from it. Because of that weakness, because of what happened afterward, Josiah Brittle Junior, had it in for her.
    His smiling lies and seductive grins had coaxed her into trusting him. Then came the heartbreak when he returned from a trip to Edinburgh married. Then—when she refused to give him again what she had while in the throes of naïve adoration—began his vendetta against her, a vendetta that he still held onto tightly, five years later. She could already see his triumphant grin, when the family returned and he discovered the missing type, and hear him condemning her to his father and brother, and then throwing her out onto the street.
    She would never again fall for a pretty face.
    Captain Anthony Masinter was not pretty. He was worse. He was the sort of man Lady Justice despised: attractive, privileged, elite, obviously wealthy, and entirely at ease with his mastery over everybody. She needed his help like she needed a fresh new hole in her heart.
    Her heart was already sufficiently full of holes.
    “Never again,” she said loudly to the empty shop—no matter how tempting the man and his offer to help. “Never, ever again.”

 
     

Chapter Three
    She was the prettiest thing he had ever seen, in a heap of trouble he’d caused, and more disdainful than the Duchess of Hammershire on her tetchiest days.
    He had to help her. Even if she didn’t want help.
    There were three things Tony knew without doubt: how to command a man-of-war to victory in battle, how to turn a glum body to lighter spirits, and how to solve tricky problems. For this sassy-tongued printing-shop mistress with troubled eyes he’d haul out the twelve-pounders if it meant she’d direct that smile at him again.
    Leaving behind Gracechurch Street and the girl whose name he didn’t even know yet, he turned away from the part of town where his first lieutenant had once lived and toward his own house instead. He couldn’t very well go beg the widow’s hand with his head full of another woman. And Mrs. Park probably needed a day or two to come to terms with the state in which her husband had left her and their children: broke.
    He would find a solution to the pretty print mistress’s bind, and then—afterward—see about the other woman’s horrid situation that was also his fault.
    But by the time his manservant, Cob, set the post beside his coffee and steak the following morning, he still had not devised a solution. Taking up a letter marked with his name in a familiar flowing hand, he passed it back to Cob.
    “Do the honors, old fellow?”
    His manservant opened the message and read