Twice Tempted Read Online Free PDF Page B

been caught up beneath her sternum, like champagne drunk too quickly.
    “Mrs. Bryan don’t live here anymore,” Mrs. Quick snapped.
    Fiona held her breath, as if it could improve her hearing.
    “Could you provide us with her new address?” the voice came again. “It is very important.”
    It was he. Oh, dear God, it was. She squeezed her eyes shut. She swore her stomach did a complete flip inside her chest. The last time she’d felt like this was four years earlier, in a cow pasture on a rainy spring day, as a man sliced off her hair with a knife. As he bent to kiss her. She swore she could almost smell the fresh-mown hay in that damp field, could feel the sure clasp of a man’s hand and the skittering of unrecognized arousal. She had been sixteen, and he had come to take her back to school. He had been kind. She had fallen head over heels in love, a girl too new to anticipation to understand its peril.
    The only other time she had seen him, he had come to deliver the news that her brother was dead. He had still been so kind. But it was only now that she noticed.
    She didn’t even remember getting up from the stair, but suddenly she was running down the hallway toward the foyer to see Mrs. Quick poised before the open front door, hand on hip, face pursed in displeasure at the sight of the two men on the stoop.
    “I don’t know where she is, and if I did I wouldn’t tell you,” she said and gave the door a good push.
    “Wait!” Fiona called, slowing down, as if it would make her look less frantic. “Let them in, Mrs. Quick.”
    “Don’t think I should,” the woman retorted with a squint at the two town bucks. “Don’t need their kind nosin’ around the school.”
    Fiona almost laughed out loud. “I sincerely doubt the gentlemen are here to ravage our children,” she said, hoping they couldn’t hear how overwhelmed she felt.
    Taking in a surreptitious breath, she stepped past her housekeeper. “Lord Whitmore,” she said with a smile. “It is so nice to see you.”
    It was beyond nice. It was beyond anything. He was truly standing there before her, wind-chapped and tousled, sleek as a big cat. He had such broad shoulders, such angular, chiseled features, with only an odd cant to his nose to make him seem human. Fiona was afraid her heart would simply seize up, battered by joy and grief.
    “By God,” he said suddenly, staring at her. “It really is you.”
    She saw a strong emotion cross his features. Shock? Relief? Before she could decide, he strode up and grabbed her hands. “You have no idea how glad I am to see you.”
    Fiona caught her breath. It was the same, when he touched her, that arc of lightning, the surge of warmth that flooded her as if she had just rediscovered the sun.
    She smiled up at him, praying she didn’t look as upended as she felt.
    “I, uh…,” she said, and had to clear her throat. “Won’t you both come in? You were looking for Mrs. Bryant?”
    “Actually,” Alex Knight said, grinning, his hands still chilly and hot at once around hers. “We were looking for you.”
    Fiona blinked, somehow disengaging her hands. “Me? For heaven’s sake, why?”
    “You know them?” Mrs. Quick demanded with an accusing squint as the two men stepped past her and removed their beavers.
    Fiona swallowed. “The Viscount Whitmore was a friend of my brother,” she said. “This is our housekeeper, my lord. Mrs. Quick.”
    Alex bowed to the rigid woman. “Mrs. Quick.” Then he motioned to his shorter, rounder, bespectacled companion. “Lady Fiona Hawes, may I present Charles, Lord Wilde.”
    “Chuffy,” the shorter man insisted with a bow and a smile that seemed to exude from every inch of him. “The rest is too much.”
    Fiona dipped her knee. “How do you do…er, Chuffy?”
    “Hawes?” she heard from behind her. “And who’s that when she’s at home?”
    Fiona flinched. “I prefer to be known as Miss Fiona Ferguson, if you don’t mind, Mrs. Quick. It is so much