Private Arrangements by Sherry Thomas Read Free Book Online

seasons. They understood each other's plight without ever needing to speak a word of it.
    But it was not thoughts of Theodora that kept him awake. It was Miss Rowland.
    Even before their accidental meeting, he had more or less expected Miss Rowland to propose a merger between his future title and her fortune. He had also expected a great deal of regret over turning down those sweet stacks of pounds sterling, after having lived in want of them his entire life.
    What he emphatically did not expect was Miss Rowland herself. She was unsentimental, hardened, and cynical beyond her years—but her greatest cruelty was reserved for herself, in her insistence that she would be perfectly fine, thank you, if she could only cosh a duke senseless with his own ledgers and haul him to the altar.
    For someone who was otherwise levelheaded and manipulative, there'd been an odd, poignant transparency to her this evening. She liked him. She liked him enough to be not just disappointed over his unavailability, but unhappy.
    He liked her too, surprisingly. How could he not like a girl who called him an “impoverished nobody” to his face? Her frankness was refreshing and welcome after the nuanced subtlety and selective narratives that had characterized his exchanges, all his life, with people outside his immediate family.
    But what caused his fidgeting at this witching hour was not her overly simplistic approach to things and people, but her brooding sexuality.
    She'd wanted to touch him. That desire had been there in every full-on stare and every sideways glance all throughout the evening. Once our marriage is consummated, you need only to come back to me when you need heirs. The girl might be a virgin, but she was neither pure nor innocent. She knew about these things.
    What she probably didn't know yet, but he already did, was that with her single-mindedness she would be a force of nature in bed. No man could roll out of her bed and walk away. His overriding objective, despite his exhaustion, would be how he could get her to lie with him again.
    * * *
    Camden dozed fitfully. Then suddenly he was awake. He had left the curtains and shutters open, out of years of habit, so that he could look out and recall in which country, which city he found himself. The blizzard must have passed; a shaft of silvery moonlight drifted through the window and lit the way clear to the door. A woman stood just inside, in a long nightgown, her back against the door. He couldn't see her face but he knew instinctively that it was Miss Rowland, she of the entirely unfitting, too-childish pet name Gigi.
    The Rowland manse, while not a cumbersome behemoth like the ducal manor at Twelve Pillars, still had some eighty, ninety rooms. He had been put to bed in a different wing from where his hosts had their bedchambers. She had not accidentally returned to the wrong room after using the water closet. She had to have walked a good two hundred feet to visit him.
    And he was naked beneath the covers. The late Mr. Rowland's nightshirt, kindly supplied at bedtime, had been too restricting.
    She stayed in that spot, unmoving, for a long time, until he was tempted to tell her either to get on with whatever in the blazes she had planned or leave him to his tossing and turning in peace. Abruptly, she moved, coming toward the bed in long, determined strides, her feet silent on the Persian carpet.
    She knelt by the bed, her eyes even with his elbow. Her hair was loose, dark as the fabric of the night; her white nightgown almost glimmered. He could not see her features clearly, but he heard her uneven breaths, a long, slightly trembling inhalation, a few heartbeats of breath being held, and a short rush of exhalation. Repeat. Repeat.
    But she remained still. What was she waiting for? Hadn't she yet satisfied herself that he was really, completely asleep? He squeezed his eyes shut, pretending she wasn't there. But her breaths tickled the hairs on his forearm, triggering seismic tremors