When a Scot Loves a Lady Read Online Free PDF

surely chase a mere mister from my parents’ house.”
    Kitty’s throat caught.
    Emily’s green eyes went wide. “Oh, I am terribly sorry, Kitty,” she rushed. “Madame Roche told me I should not mention it, but I am horrid at remembering such things, you know.”
    None of her acquaintances had yet spoken of it aloud. Leave it to Emily.
    Three years earlier, after a masquerade ball at which she had told Lambert Poole she no longer cared enough to even hate him, she had locked away all the sensitive information she’d collected on him. For two and a half years that file sat untouched in a drawer. But six months ago, as the season was drawing to a close, Lambert had threatened her brother Alex, accusing him of criminal activities to disguise his own. And Kitty finally unlocked her files. Along with information provided to the Board of Admiralty by another source, her knowledge of Lambert’s untoward activities had damned him.
    Of course, no one was supposed to know the part she’d played in his banishment. But the information leaked out, and for months now gossips had made a feast of the spinster Lady Katherine Savege’s astounding involvement in bringing to justice a criminal lord, those same gossips who even now still snubbed her because she had given her virtue to that very man.
    â€œYou mustn’t allow it to concern you, Marie. I am quite—”
    Boots scuffed on the stairs. In sticky relief, Kitty looked up. Her stomach turned over.
    On the landing above stood a gentleman of considerable height, broad-shouldered and loose-limbed, yet without particular merit to those estimable masculine qualities unless one were enamored of natural beauty of form wholly lacking in companion beauty of mind. Or character. Or education. Or taste.
    Good heavens. She had wanted to escape London, but not to eschew civilization altogether.
    No . This was not the entire truth. Yet only now, as her hands went damp, did she realize it. She wanted to escape a great deal more than London. She wanted to escape the gossips, the association of her name with Lambert’s in drawing rooms across town, her misguided past that clung no matter how she wished to escape it.
    The presence of this man in the middle of nowhere abruptly made all of that impossible.
    Lord Blackwood smiled, a lazy curve of his mouth amid a veritable forest of whiskers, his gaze fixed on her. She curtsied.
    The smiled broadened. It was, in point of fact, quite a dashing smile. Despite the outrageously barbaric beard, she had noticed this once before. The streak of white running through his dark hair lent him a comfortably roguish air as well. Then he opened his mouth, and out stumbled that which ought to have remained on the battlefield with Robert the Bruce six hundred years earlier.
    â€œMaleddy, ’tis a bonnie surpreese tae meet wi’ ye here.” The rough words lumbered across his tongue like a flock of black-faced sheep running from wolves. A massive blur of gray streaked around his long legs and leaped down the stairs. Kitty braced herself.
    â€œHermes, aff .”
    The beast flattened itself to the floor at her feet, its tail wagging frantically.
    â€œSir!” Emily sprang up.
    â€œHe winna harm ye, miss.”
    â€œHow do you do, my lord?” Kitty drew in a steadying breath. “Marie, allow me to present to you the Earl of Blackwood. My lord, this is my traveling companion, Lady Emily Vale, who at present goes by the name Marie Antoine.”
    â€œMa’am.” He slanted Emily a grin and started down the stairs. Kitty rooted her feet to the floor. She would not retreat. But this sort of man nearly required retreat.
    He stopped on the other side of his dog and bowed, perfectly at ease. “Maleddy.”
    Not retreat. That was foolish. Because there was no this sort of man . There was only this man, a man she had only spoken with once before, three years earlier, barely to exchange