A Most Unladylike Adventure by Elizabeth Beacon Read Free Book Online

very likely have fallen in a heap and gone back to sleep as sweetly as Kit’s watchman, and nothing they’d done in the last half-hour had caused a stutter in Coste’s impressive snoring. The world ticked on and she and Captain Darke ticked with it and suddenly it felt as if their bittersweet interlude had been little more than a wicked daydream. She put a hand out as if to grasp it, but a picture of him ardent and wholeheartedly wanting her with every sense evaporated under her touch. Such fantasies weren’t for the likes of them; she knew too much and he’d learnt too much for that sweet pipe dream to ever come true.
    ‘I’d curtsy to acknowledge your extraordinary graciousness,’ she told him in the hard, cynical voice she thought Eloise would use to protect herself from her enemies, ‘but somehow I’ve forgotten to be suitably servile these last few years.’
    ‘Aye, it’s easy to grow accustomed to luxury and money. Harder than I hope you’ll ever know to manage without them when they’ve become such a part of your life you can’t imagine losing everything,’ he said and shewasn’t fool enough to think he was worrying about her future.
    ‘I started out with nothing more than the clothes I stood up in, Captain, but you fell a lot further, I think?’
    ‘You may think what you wish, but don’t expect me to confirm or deny your fantasies,’ he told her abruptly, the story of his sorry downfall obviously forbidden ground.
    ‘I can pick out the nob in a crowd any day of the week, so don’t try to pretend you’re not one, Captain.’
    ‘Then be content with being right and leave it at that, my dear.’
    ‘Again, I’m not dear to you in any way, Captain Darke. Let’s stick to the truth as often as we may.’
    ‘And if that’s as often as usual, it won’t be heard much.’
    She shrugged and reminded herself how little she wanted him to know her true self, even if she would dearly love to know his. ‘So be it,’ she said carelessly.
    ‘Not much point in me asking what you’re really doing here then, I suppose?’
    ‘Not much,’ she confirmed with a nonchalance she hoped masked her shudder at thethought of what she’d escaped tonight—and how she’d done it.
    ‘Well, I suppose we’re done with each other for now then, at least until morning.’
    ‘Yes, I really suppose that we must be, Captain.’
    ‘For good, if I had my way, Miss La Rochelle,’ he informed her gruffly enough for her to know he still wanted her and bitterly resented her for it.
    ‘Now your way would be downright boring and I make it a rule never to be so tedious that gentlemen of my acquaintance truly prefer my room to my company,’ she fantasised cheerfully.
    Perhaps from now on she would be herself, as she’d seldom dared to be while she had tried to move amongst his true kind as if she belonged—and blatantly did not. Whatever it cost her to be the girl who’d belonged nowhere in particular once again, that girl was who she was. And to be that person she had to sleep. At least she’d be safe from the predators who stalked the night-time streets, so until it was too early for Charlton and his ilk to be abroad, she could allow herself the luxury of sleep and hope she’d have resolve enough to take up her new life come morning.
    She took the candles he carefully didn’t offer her and lit a new one off them, after fetching some from Kit’s dusty and unused drawing room, handing the guttering ones back to him and giving him a significant look she recalled her mother darting at her when she wanted her to go to bed and saw no reason to tell such a grown-up girl to actually go there. By saving herself the fact and almost the feel of his all-too masculine gaze on her nether regions, outrageously outlined as they were by Charlton’s breeches, she had to watch his lithely masculine legs, narrow hips and lean body as he effortlessly scaled the stairs ahead of her instead.
    She decided she was turning into some sort of