Wedded in Sin by Jade Lee Read Free Book Online Page A

Mr. Morrison changed. He squared his shoulders and lifted his chin. Then he slowly, carefully turned back to look at her. And she saw as clear as day that he wanted her as a man wants a woman.
    Penny licked her suddenly dry lips, and then roundly cursed herself for doing so. His gaze riveted on her mouth.
    “Mr. Morrison,” she began, wondering all the while what she intended to say.
    “Never fear, Miss Shoemaker,” he returned, “I shall sort things out to end up just how they ought to be.”
    She raised her eyebrows at his arrogance. He truly believed he was that powerful. And yet, everything she’d seen of him so far proved him to be an extraordinary gentleman. “But what if I think your arrangement is completely wrong?”
    “Well, then,” he said with a wink, “I expect we will have a jolly good row. But eventually you’ll come around. Everyone always does.”
    She snorted. Really it was hard not to laugh at such vanity. “Do you know, Mr. Morrison, I believe you are every bit as managing as your sister-in-law, but in your own way.”
    He reared back. “Now you are being needlessly insulting.”
    “No, sir, I don’t believe I am. But as our wager has you working toward my ends, I think I’ll let you have your head, so to speak. Go on,” she said, waving airily at him. “Manage my home back.” Then she began to walk away, her back prickling the whole time with an awareness of him watching her.
    He didn’t stay behind her for long. His longer steps easily caught up to her. But what made things all the more disconcerting was that he never said a word. He just matched pace with her. And when she glanced his way, she found him watching her with a rather intense expression. The kind of expression that made her breath catch as shivers slipped down her spine. It was part awareness, part terror, and wholly disconcerting. And it didn’t help in the least that he seemed as unsettled as she was.
    Good God, the woman was whip smart! Samuel could barely keep his pace steady as he thought on that remarkable fact. Miss Shoemaker was perhaps one of the top twenty females of his acquaintance for intelligence. It wasn’t her education, of course. Like most females, she was sorely lacking in that area. As the daughter of a successful merchant, she probably had the equivalent training of a vicar’s daughter or a forward-thinking cit. That was deplorable, given her natural talents, but the way of things for a female. He did not fault her for it. Far from it, actually, because it made her abilities all the more impressive.
    He tallied up her accomplishments in his head. First, as a woman alone with a child, she had still managed to find a way to ply her trade—shoemaking—without anyone realizing their foot ware was being made by a woman. Second, when armed thugs appeared at her door, she had not lost her head to hysterics, but had grabbed the most valuable thing she owned—the foot molds—and staged a drama such that she could escape with her booty intact.
    Third—and this was most significant in his mind—she had quite accurately read his character regarding his sister-in-law. He roundly hated Georgette for the exact reason that Miss Shoemaker stated: his sister-in-law was immune to his usual mixture of flimflam and cool logic. Georgette’s stubbornness stemmed from a marked arrogance. She simply could not understand that her way was not always the best. Miss Shoemaker, on the other hand, accurately saw right through his charm and his logic, then coolly manipulated things to her liking.
    He was both horrified and horribly impressed. And that led to a situation . Whenever he was horribly impressed, two completely separate things happened. The first was that his mind rapidly went about searching for a way for him to become less impressed. Like a boy searching for the magician’s trick, he scrambled for some way to explain away the magical and replace it with something terribly mundane.
    And the second, at least