Sail Away by Lee Rowan Read Free Book Online Page B

the words.
    "Your home, for the most part. You should consider that, my dear. Much as I want you for my wife, I think that it would be best if you were to come back to England and meet my family. It would be ideal if your grandmother were to accompany you, and your father, too, if we can pry him away from his business."
    "You would wait so long?"
    "I don't want to.” He touched her cheek and bent to kiss her with a gentleness surprising in so large a man.
    The first touch of his lips was strange, but the second seemed to open a floodgate within her, and the thrill she had felt from his resonant voice was a pale shadow of the intimacy of the kiss. She did not want to wait, either—and she wondered, if a kiss was this splendid, what the rest would be like. “I won't change my mind,” she said.
    "But you must have the chance,” he said in that deep, rich voice. She could hear the control that he was exerting over himself.
    "Kiss me again?"
    "Aye-aye, ma'am."
    The third kiss was better, and the next better still. What a joy it would be to have a man who wanted her for who and what she was, not in spite of those things. A man strong enough to stay calm in the face of her father's inevitable furor, and overcome it. A man who thought she was beautiful.
    This man.
    The End

SEE PARIS AND LIVE

London, 1792
    "You must go, Kit.” Arethusa, Dowager Baroness Guilford, fixed her only son with a steely eye. “You simply must, or those French madmen will leave us high and dry."
    Her son settled into the armchair on the other side of the fireplace, exasperation battling with affection. “Mama ... You know I begrudge you no task, but is that really necessary?"
    "I believe it is, yes.” She flounced the loose edge of the needlework that had occupied her attention until he entered the room. “There are some situations that require a man's firm hand."
    Christopher St. John, eighteen years of age and the youngest Baron Guilford to head his family in the past century, was startled by this change of attitude. Ordinarily he had to move heaven and earth to escape her watchful eye. “I beg your pardon, madam—did I hear you correctly?"
    She laughed at his astonishment, and when she smiled he could see how this still-handsome woman, with her Titian locks and perfect skin, had made his father the envy of his set. “Yes, my dear. Your uncle Douglas came to call while you were out riding, and he reminded me that although you will always be my dear boy, you are nearly a gentleman grown! I must accept that you have reached an age that demands I treat you according to your station."
    By sending me into a nest of vipers. Thank you so much, Mama! Kit felt certain that his uncle had not intended that she acknowledge her son's arrival at a man's status by sending him on a fool's errand into the catastrophe that was the French Republic. But his mother's knowledge of politics was—well, he would be doing her a kindness to call it “narrow".
    Some ladies possessed much acumen in the way of the larger world. Sadly, the Dowager was not one of them. She possessed a limited intellect but a deep capacity for affection; her special talent lay in the closed circle of the nobility, staging entertainments and helping to launch her daughter and many nieces into Society. She was an affectionate parent, a superb hostess, and had been a great asset to the previous Baron before his untimely end in a hunting accident when Kit was only nine. Her brothers, Douglas and Eugene, had stepped in as trustees to guide the family fortunes until Kit was old enough to take the reins himself.
    He was beginning to suspect that the time had arrived. “Mama, the family's been doing business with M. Monfort since long before I was born. He's been entirely reliable."
    "He has been, dear, but just this past week my friend Hyacinth-that's Lady Rownham, you know—told me that half her last order from Monfort's went missing."
    "That does happen from time to time, you know. Accidents,