Taming Beauty by Lynne Barron Read Free Book Online Page B

narrow bed under the eaves of a run-down rooming house in Cheapside.”
    “With the vermin-ridden bedcovers pulled up to her chin no doubt. Morrissey must have been livid. Surely you could have taunted and needled him into issuing the challenge so that you were given the choice of weapons. It isn’t terribly difficult to manipulate a man’s convoluted notions of pride and honor, after all.”
    “A female ploy a gentleman does not stoop to utilize.”
    “Is it any wonder we women must stoop to such trickery when all about us men invite chaos and lunacy to run rampant?” Lilith asked with a smirk, a quite fetching expression few women could pull off with such aplomb.
    “No wonder at all.” Jasper fought the grin forming on his lips. It wouldn’t do to encourage the lady to such trickery.
    “You’d do well to remember that in the coming days.”
    “As you are waving your family’s soiled undergarments about for my guests to ogle at will?”
    Lilith Aberdeen took two small, gliding steps, coming to a stop mere inches from where he’d remained in the shadows, content to allow her to bask alone in the candlelight. Tilting her head back, she captured his gaze and held it. “Mere warning shots, my lord, to test the battlements, so to speak.”
    Heat radiated from every inch of her long, lithe form, carrying her scent—anise and cinnamon and a hint of citrus—to him in undulating waves, buffeting his senses.
    “Release Sissy from this misalliance,” she continued, her voice a husky whisper. “Or I will be forced to call for reinforcements and lay siege to your impressive battlements until you surrender.”
    Jasper swallowed back a groan at her words, his mind addled simply imagining all the ways she might tempt him to surrender. “Do your worst.”
    Lilith laughed, her breath fluttering over his neck and jaw. She was so near, so blessedly close, Jasper had only to bend his knees and lower his head to have her lips, those wanton lips even now curling with a mischievous smile, beneath his.
    “For you, I think only my best will do.”
     

Chapter 6
     
    Miss Lilith Aberdeen had learned at an early age to appreciate mornings.
    Not, as one might suppose, for the beauty of the sunrise or the trilling of birds in the trees or even the promise of a new day and all the possibilities it might present.
    Lilith had learned to appreciate mornings for the privacy they afforded a girl raised in a courtesan’s household, where even the servants slept late after cleaning up after the previous night’s bacchanal.
    It had been nearly four years since she’d removed herself from Gwendolyn’s Hanover Square home to settle into the rather dilapidated old house on the Thames—one of the un-entailed properties Malleville had cavalierly threatened to sell off, though not the one in which the countess had been born and raised—and still she rose with the dawn every day.
    It mattered not at all whether she’d been out all night gambling, dancing or otherwise making merry with her numerous acquaintances. When the sun crested the horizon, Lilith came awake, suddenly and completely.
    So it came as no surprise whatsoever when Lilith awoke with a start the next morning.
    The only surprise was the silence surrounding her as she rolled to her back and stretched her arms up over her head. Opening her eyes she took in the wooden rafters on the ceiling, the unadorned stone walls and threadbare curtains shifting slightly in the cool breeze seeping through the cracks around the windows.
    Silence was a commodity rarer than diamonds in London. If carriages weren’t trundling down the street fronting her house, the servants were banging pots and pans below stairs or the two elderly gentlemen residing on either side of her were hurling insults at one another over their garden walls.
    Lilith lay still and listened to the silence until she realized morning in the country wasn’t silent at all, but rather a symphony of sound, soft and quiet. A faint