Wicked Nights With a Lover Read Online Free PDF Page B

head.
    “Perhaps, Marguerite, you’ve no wish to return lily-white. Perhaps you came to the rook for a taste of what you can’t get in your clean little world across the river.” He cocked his head, studying her as if he had never seen anything quite of the like. “Is that it?” He brought a hand back to her face and stroked the soft flesh of her jaw.
    Then she smelled it—blood. Coppery rich on his knuckles. An inch from her mouth. Her stomach rolled, heaved.
    It was all the reminder she needed. He was a savage. Seductive or not. Dark-angel mien and all. She was a fool to let such a scoundrel lull her with his mesmerizing gaze.
    Without thinking, she turned her face and bit down on his finger.
    He hissed and pulled his hand back, shaking it. She held her breath, waiting, certain he would strike her. Certain he would turn the savagery she had witnessed in him on her.
    Instead, he merely glared at her, his glittering gaze furious. And something else. Something that made her belly fill with dancing butterflies.
    She thrust out her chin. “Remove yourself from me!”
    The driver shouted down. “Eh, we going anywhere or you just going to shag the wench in there, guv’nor? Whatever yer business, I need coin for time in my hack!”
    “If you know what’s good for you, you won’t come back to St. Giles. A pretty bit of muslin like you, with that saucy mouth …” He shook his head, frowning. “You’ll only meet with trouble. Run into the sort of man you so gallantly saved from my fists this day.”
    “How considerate,” she sneered, certain she would never come face-to-face with a greater threat to her person than he. “I thank you kindly for the advice.”
    He rose up, hovering, looming within the narrow carriage door, overfilling it, blocking out all light. His eyes gleamed from within his shadowed features. She loathed that she couldn’t make herself move, that she lay on the floor of the carriage like a quivering mouse.
    “Just do as I say. If you know what’s good for you, stay out of St. Giles.”
    All her wrath bubbled to the surface at his terse command. How dare he speak to her like she was his to command? Words she’d never spoken before, dared not think—except perhaps when she was enduring one of Master Brocklehurst’s unjustified beatings—rose on her lips. “Go to hell.”
    For a moment he did not move. Did not speak. Then he threw back his head and laughed. “Perhaps the lady isn’t such a lady, after all.” She felt his gaze then, raking her, traveling over her with familiar insolence. “But then I don’t find that such a surprise.”
    Sputtering, she clambered to the carriage seat.
    “You beast!”
    His laughter scraped the air, dragged across her stinging nerves. “Never fear. I’m certain I shall find my way to those fiery pits someday. Just do me a favor, sweetheart, and don’t wish me there before my time. And in case you didn’t notice"—he waved a hand about them and her gaze drifted to an ugly lodging house with broken, gaping windows. Stained rags were stuffed into the cracks in a weak attempt to ward off the cold—"this is fairly close to hell.”
    He vanished from the hack then, his laughter receding, a drifting curl of sound, strangely provocative, winding itself around her where she shivered on the stiff squabs.
    A sound, she would later learn, that would follow her to bed that night and haunt her dreams.

Chapter 5
    A sh Courtland strode down the streets that stank of rot and acrid smoke from the nearby factory. The odor was as familiar to him as his own shape and form, and yet he smelled only the chit he left behind. The whiff of honey lingered in his nostrils.
    Stepping over a gutter, he cursed low beneath his breath. He shouldn’t have let her go, he realized with an uncustomary pang of regret. He shook his head at the irrational thought. She was not a puppy one discovered on the streets, to be kept and coddled.
    Still, he could not shake the feeling that he