Columbine by MIRANDA JARRETT Read Free Book Online

his chest, almost a growl.
    She swallowed, “That, Master Sparhawk, is—” “Kit. Call me Kit, Dianna.”
    “That’s—that’s a decision you’ll make, not I,” she answered in an odd, throaty voice that refused to sound like her own. What is wrong with me, she thought uneasily. She felt giddy, almost light-headed.
    “Whether I like it or not, you own this ship, and I am only an unwilling passenger.”
    He didn’t answer, and her voice slipped even lower, to scarcely more than a whisper.
    “That is the way of it, isn’t it … Kit?”
    He heard the promise in her voice, and almost groaned aloud at the eager way her lips were parted, beckoning to him. The sound of his name on her tongue was heady magic. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d wanted a woman this badly.
    But the tears that still glistened like tiny diamonds in her lashes stopped him. She kept changing like quicksilver, by turns coyly shy, then seductive. She was playing with him, reeling him in as neatly as a fat, open-mouthed trout. Well, he’d be damned if he took her bait. If he could get his wits out of his breeches and back into his head, he’d realize there were too many things about the girl that. promised trouble. She was a convicted felon for one. She was also the niece of one of the most debauched noblemen in England, and she’d already made a fair start on a similar reputation herself. She might even try to kill him, too, the way she had her uncle; maybe Sir Henry himself had put her up to it. At the very least he might end up with a case of the French pox.
    Kit frowned and shook his head, almost as if he were arguing with himself, and for the first time since she had entered the cabin, he looked away from her.
    Slowly Dianna felt her heart begin to quiet, and the breath return to her lungs. Strangely, too, she felt an odd sense of regret that she couldn’t put into words.
    “Because Welles is the Prosperity’s master, I’ll honor your agreement with him,” Kit said carefully, looking somewhere over her head.
    “You behave yourself, and you’ll be treated as decently as any woman on board. GOd knows you don’t deserve it, and I don’t like it, but I’ll honor it just the same.”
    With a sigh, he dropped heavily into the cabin’s one chair. He stretched his legs out before him, and, with his elbows on the chair’s arms, touched his fingertips together and pressed them lightly to his lips.
    “You might,” he said at last, “thank me.”
    “For what, offering to treat me decently?” She knew that was not what he meant, not really, but she gambled that he wouldn’t correct her.
    “No, I don’t think I shall thank you for that. May I return to my quarters, Master Sparhawk?”
    So he was once again Master Sparhawk. Kit scowled and bent his head deeper against the arch of his fingers.
    “Aye, go.” Damn her nose-in-the-ak politeness!
    She made him feel as if he’d been the one dismissed, not the other way around.
    “No, one moment, stay.”
    She faced him again, waiting, and without any real reason to call her back, he asked the first question that came to his mind.
    “In the court, they said you wore mourning only as a sham to sway the judge to pity. Yet still you dress yourself in black. Why?”
    She hadn’t heard that before, and she stiffened at the implication.
    “My father was killed while hunting four months ago. It is for his memory alone I wear mourning.”
    “And your mother?”
    “She died birthing me. May I go now?”
    He should have said something to her then, for he knew too well the pain of parents lost. Instead he merely nodded and watched her go.
    But at the door she paused, her hands balled in tight fists at her sides.
    “Whatever else my uncle told you about me, about my—my being his mistress, I would have you know he lied. He lied!”
    She saw the disbelief on Kit’s face and fled before he could see the disappointment show on her own.
    He despised her, that was clear, and he had