Your Wicked Heart Read Online Free PDF

expected . . . something else from her. Not such insight. The virtues she named did not receive much glory in the wider world. He sometimes felt like the only man alive who understood the value of steadfast constancy . . .
    Christ. She had addled him, all right. “Enough conversation,” he said. “Lie back and don’t make a sound now. I require my sleep.”
    “Of course,” she said, and lay back.
    “‘Of course, my lord .’”
    But all she said was “Pleasant dreams to you.”
    He bit his cheek against the damnedest urge to laugh. Bloody cheek.
    Well. There was a quality one most definitely did not look for in a wife.

CHAPTER THREE

    The scrape of the door startled her. Looking up from her book, Amanda winced at the bright light flooding the cabin. “Have you brought food?” she asked. The breakfast her captor had fetched earlier had been a very sorry affair—a hunk of waxen cheese and stale rolls of bread.
    “Another hour yet,” he said as he ducked into the cabin. He looked windswept and aggravatingly virile, his golden skin glowing against his pale linen suit.
    His dark eyes moved pointedly down her figure. “Is there no other gown in that valise of yours?” he asked. “One would think you’d want out of that one.”
    She pretended not to hear this question, though she had spent a good hour after breakfast struggling to free herself from said gown—which, alas, buttoned up the back.
    He prowled past her to take a seat on the stool. She tried to concentrate again on the book, but this miserable cabin was too small to allow blithe ignorance. Go away, she thought.
    He shifted audibly, cloth rustling. She stole a glance at him. His adventures on deck had caused his color to darken by a degree.
    He lifted a brow, as though challenging her to speak.
    She turned back to her book. He had the air of a man who was bored and looking for entertainment. But he would not find it here. She would be glad to help him identify her former fiancé—indeed, she had passed happy minutes today imagining the satisfaction she would achieve by slapping that scoundrel’s face, once she located it. But that did not mean she felt any measure of kindness for this one.
    “Stony silence,” he said. “Preferable to tears, at least.”
    Yes, she felt quite pleased with herself on that account! Biting back a smile, she flipped to the next page.
    “Though not nearly as persuasive when it comes to performing your innocence.”
    She glared at the print. “Too much sun will addle the brain.”
    “Too much reading will ruin the eyes,” he said, in a perfect parody of her tone.
    She cast down the book and twisted to face him. “I thought you didn’t care for my protests. You must make up your mind.”
    His black gaze lit on the books stacked by the bunk, then rose to the pile that rested beside her atop the mattress. “ Mining in South America —that’s an ambitious choice.”
    She hesitated. This seemed a more courteous tack for a conversation.
    She decided to reward him with a nod. “The captain has curious taste in literature.” Mr. Papadopoulos was teaching himself English with the aid of books abandoned by his erstwhile passengers—among them a handbook of gambling strategies, a lurid tract about opium addiction, and two novels that Amanda felt certain would have been banned in Britain, had any company dared to print them. “I must say, if these books are representative, it’s a very shady lot that travels on this boat.”
    “Ship,” he corrected. “Tell me, then: Do you mean to wear that gown the whole way to England?”
    She realized she was scratching at the lace that trimmed her neckline. Snatching her hand back to her lap, she said, “Somebody left a guidebook to Italy. Malta sounds most picturesque! Listen here: ‘The isle of Malta rises precipitously from the sea in the form of a sterile rock . . . ’ All right, not that part, but a bit ahead . . . ‘The fields and gardens being enclosed by