Lord Ruin by Carolyn Jewel Read Free Book Online

heavily on Devon’s walking stick and feeling immediately something amiss. Distress swirled in the air, an all too familiar miasma. The air had turned oppressive like this on the day the magistrate told them how Lucy’s husband had died. Something had happened. Indeed so, she knew the signs too well.
    “Do sit.” Remembering himself, Aldreth brought her a chair.
    “What has happened?”
    She saw him then. The other man. The duke. A taller man, long-legged and not quite as broad through the shoulders as Devon, stood at the far side of the room. Everything about him announced wealth and rank and consequence. He practically reeked of command, an animus of vitality even Anne found hard to resist. Up close, he was more perfect than her memory of him from Aldreth’s wedding. Time had hardened the material from which he was sculpted. The granite core was no longer hinted at. ‘Twas exposed for anyone to see. Anne found it suited him vastly.
    Enveloped in a tenebrous silence, hands clasped tightly behind his back as if he were still a soldier, he was a breathtakingly handsome man. “Your grace,” she said uncertainly. He looked at her and something tightened low in her belly. The impossible green of his eyes held her. A drowning, captivating color. Another fragmented memory flashed into her head. It wouldn’t have been so bad except her body reacted to the image, sensations she knew she’d never had in her life. A mouth sliding along her throat, someone’s breath hot on her skin. A hand on her breast, holding with a firm grip, another on her backside, bringing her forward. An amazingly clear and intense recollection of a ravenous desire that he not stop.
    “A cushion for your ankle?” Aldreth’s hands clenched and unclenched.
    She looked from her brother-in-law to Cynssyr and back again. She didn’t dare look at the duke for long because for some reason he appeared to be the catalyst for the disturbing feelings flitting through her. She brought the whole of her practical nature to bear on the problem at hand, which was whatever Cynssyr had done to her sister.
    Feeling ashes in her mouth, she asked, “What has happened to Emily?” With a sharp look at the duke, she bit back rising anger. If he thought Emily could be discarded like all the others, he’d best think again.
    “Nothing has happened to Emily,” Aldreth said. He’d grabbed a silk-tasseled pillow from the sofa and now stood squeezing it.
    “Papa, then?”
    “Nothing.”
    “Lucy?” Keeping her eyes off Cynssyr proved difficult. The harder she tried, the more compelling the urge to look.
    “Is fine.”
    “Mary? The children?”
    “Quite well.”
    “Then what?”
    Cynssyr said abruptly, “Do you recall anything of last night, Miss Sinclair?”
    Slowly, Anne forced herself to look. The duke stood unmoving, a stark and beautiful man dressed in unrelieved subfusc but for white shirt and cravat. Mourning, it struck her. He lacked only a crepe band about his arm to complete the resemblance. The chest beneath that mourning black was broad and muscled. A scar ran white and jagged along his collarbone. Vividly, she saw his naked chest, could feel the heat of his skin. Impossible. How could she have another woman’s memories? Anne Sinclair could not have seen the duke of Cynssyr without a stitch of clothing.
    She was, she realized, staring at him as if he were some sort of oddity, a puzzle to be solved. Those pure green eyes stared back. Eyes of such haunting familiarity she started to shake. Eyes like gems. Even when she turned away, she felt his gaze on her. Impossible, what her memory suggested. Impossible. “Aldreth?”
    “Do you?” Ben asked so gently she had to believe him in earnest. “Remember anything at all?”
    “The doctor gave me laudanum.” Disturbed and humiliated by the images that danced through her head then disappeared like mist into the air, she stared steadfastly to one side, not looking directly at either of them. “Dreams,”