The Water's Kiss Read Online Free PDF

when most recently she brought up the matter.
    “Oh, hush.” She had shaken her head. “She must have been besotted, the fool, to tear off into the jungles with him. And then to have triplets! I thought that Lady Felicia’s twins were quite the feat, but triplets ! As if it were a competition and she had to best her own sister.” She had clutched her belly in memory of something too impolite to mention and Evan had left the conversation with an invented meeting.
    And now one of those famous triplets, from deep in the bowels of hell on earth (to hear the ladies of the ton describe the Spanish colonies), was marrying the very son of the woman who had spurned the viceroy. The connections made Evan’s head hurt. Framingshire was the male whore of the House of Lords.
    (Not that he would use those words in polite company).
    Yet he, Evan Michaelson, the son of one of England’s most famous solicitors and a decorated war hero in his own right, could not marry the woman he adored. If he were a bit younger he would rail against the unfairness of it all. Instead, he pondered. Fantasized about Claire. Walked a bit, hoping inspiration would strike.
    All that struck him, sadly, was a bird unleashing a burden from above. He muttered a light curse as he extracted a cloth from his coat pocket and attempted to clean the mess created by another.
    Something more churned under Claire’s anger. His words about her cousin and Framingshire had not been the source of so much fury; that much he knew. Distancing him from her with barbs and insults might have been her way to mourn, to convince herself that whatever pairing her father made would have to be good enough, and that Evan would be relegated to some distant memory, an almost-fiance whom she narrowly escaped as she made her way to the throne of some country no one had heard of. Or cared to know.
    He knew that as a man of honor he should approach the earl and fight for the right to marry Claire. That had been his intention last week, in fact, before his own father had stopped him. Women in town commented on how similar Evan and his father, Sebastian, were in appearance. Both had the darker Irish look, both had bright blue eyes, but the elder Michaelson had not only the difference of an additional six and twenty years on the planet, enough to pepper his hair with gray and make his skin sag a bit from age and exposure, but his features were altogether different.
    A bit ratlike. Evan himself saw it, especially after overhearing a particularly caustic gossip session at Sir Tetley’s ball many years ago, when Evan was barely out of childhood. His father had sent him into the library to find a butler for some small, nonsense issue and he’d opened the door just enough to realize someone was in there, but not so much that he’d been spotted.
    “The women sure like him,” Lord Landsdown had commented, smoking some sort of cigar that smelled of clove and spices from India. His tone of voice had made Evan freeze; Father always said that gathering and saving every piece of information was like carefully collecting pennies one finds: eventually, they add up to something more substantial.
    And, often, valuable.
    “But he looks like what’s really inside,” Tetley had replied. “Ever noticed how his features are all just a bit too close?” The slur in the host’s words had told Evan he was drunk. Spying a drunk via voice was an acquired skill, one Evan had been forced to hone by the age of ten, given his father’s choice of company and ambitions that extended to accepting every party, ball, soiree or gathering at which he might be able to slip himself into.
    “Mmmm, perhaps.” Landsdown wasn’t drunk. Evan had sensed that the earl wanted the other man drunk, for some reason he didn’t understand.
    “I think he’s part rat, somewhere deep inside,” Tetley had chortled. “Have to be, with some of the clients he manages. Can’t be a solicitor without a bit of rodent in you.”
    And