Running Wild by Denise Eagan Read Free Book Online

Nick turned back to Miz Montgomery and
cleared his throat. “Feeling better? Waiter’s almost here.”
    She smiled a little and nodded. She was still god-awful pale
and his self-reproach hardened into anxiety.
    “Sir, the brandy you requested,” the waiter said. Nick
dragged his gaze away from Miz Montgomery and rose to take the glass.
    “Thanks.”
    “Is there anything else, sir?”
    “No, that’ll do. Thanks.”
    The man stared at him, and then nodded and slowly walked
away. Very slowly, as if he’d suddenly developed a leg cramp. Frowning, Nick
turned to hand the glass to Miz Montgomery. Her eyes, when she lifted her head
to him, looked gold. Not possible. People didn’t have gold eyes. “He was
expecting a tip, Nicholas,” she said with a throaty gurgle of amusement.
    “A tip? What, for fetching a glass of booze?”
    “Why yes, for that.”
    He glanced over his shoulder. The waiter had slowed down to
a creep. Nick shook his head and focused back on Miz Montgomery. “I thought it
was his job.”
    “His job is to pass around refreshments. Fetching something
especial for someone is beyond his duties. He did it hoping for a little extra
compensation.”
    Scowling, Nick sat down again. “Well he can just keep
hopin’. A man oughta help other people because it’s the right thing to do.
Hel—heck if I got paid every time I lent a hand to somebody, I’d be rich.”
    “You are rich. You forget, Nicholas, I’ve slept in
your house.” She tilted her head to the side and played with her earring, a
gesture meant to express guilelessness, but her eyes sparkled with intelligence
and she hadn’t a naïve bone in her body. Her gaze was, as always, direct and
honest, without so much as a flicker of doubt, making a lie of the
gesture—making it wickedly sensual. As did her comment about sleeping in his
house, which she damned well knew. It warmed his blood and pretty much all the
other interesting areas, too.
    Rescue her? Somebody oughta rescue him . Hell, he’d
even tip ’em.
    “How’s the brandy?” he asked abruptly, wishing he’d gotten
himself a glass.
    She looked down at the forgotten snifter. “Fortifying.”
    She’d only taken a couple sips. It couldn’t have done a
thing, not stop her trembling or return the color to her face, or ease her
inhibitions enough to accept kissing and canoodling from an uncouth cow—“You’re
a touch less peaked.”
    “I feel fine, now. Just a trifle shocked, really.” Then the
sparkle in her eyes sharpened to pain. She straightened and drew in a breath.
“Thank you.”
    His lust dimmed, overwhelmed by the urge to take her in his
arms and tell her everything was gonna be O.K. Soothe the pain, ease her
mourning, or do anything and everything to mend a wounded heart.
    I don’t even know her .
    But he wanted to know her, against all good sense, and he
couldn’t explain it for all the world. Two people could not be more different.
“Was she a good friend?” he asked.
    “We weren’t particularly friendly,” she said, a frown
between her eyebrows. “But we worked well together. In the women’s movement,
you understand. We were both reformers.”
    “All that voting stuff, right?” Nick asked.
    She gave him the ghost of a smile. “We wish for universal
suffrage, yes, but it’s about more than that. It’s about ensuring that women
have the same rights under the law that men have.”
    “O.K.,” he said, although it was too many for him. He
figured women mostly did have the same rights, and he never could figure why
they cared so much about voting. He voted; it’d never made much difference to
him. Not that he really understood why they couldn’t vote, either. The fact of
the matter was, it’d never interested him a whole helluva lot.
    She smiled. “You don’t sound at all certain of it,” she
teased. “Don’t you believe that women deserve the right to vote?”
    He turned to run his eyes blindly over the crowd as he
calculated how best to answer. And