Woo'd in Haste by Sabrina Darby Read Free Book Online Page B

mind like water in the stream. Luc. Luc. Luc .
    “Why not? It is my name.”
    “Your Christian name, and . . . it would hardly be proper.”
    “As if that matters to you.” Flirtatious now. Dangerous even.
    “What would you know of it?” she demanded, surprised.
    “We are here together. Your Miss Smith nowhere about to guard your virtue.”
    “Is my virtue threatened?”
    “Not by me,” he said quickly, one hand lifted to his heart in what was likely supposed to be a reassuring matter. But this very conversation was rather rakish, and more fitting of a Sir Clement Wetherby than a Lord Orville. A Mr. Elliot rather than a Captain Wentworth. “But that you don’t think of it. That you go fishing and hike your dress up as if you were still a girl. And as if I were not a man.”
    “As if you were not a man?”
    “As if I were immune to the sight of well-formed ankles and the glimpse of smooth skin above stockings.”
    She blanched. Went hot and then cold. Gaped at him and then frowned. She had not once thought of her lower limbs. Thought herself so on display.
    “I mean it not as an insult but as a compliment. And no disrespect to Miss Smith’s teaching. In the drawing room at night, you do great credit to her. But here, outdoors, it is as if there is a different Bianca. One who is freer. A woodland nymph.”
    “A dryad?” she offered, still reeling from his comment about her limbs.
    “Just so.”
    He leaned forward, and though the distance he was crossed was ever so slight, her stomach fluttered as if he had taken up all the space between them. She hovered there on the edge of being that freer Bianca, the one who wished to lift her skirt ever so slightly more.
    S he looked so pretty with that pink flush staining her cheeks, lashes sweeping over her cheeks. He wasn’t entirely certain what had come over him. But it was as if her teasing, her light flirtation, had awakened something in him, some instinctual male need to let her know of his interest. To make her see him.
    He had asked her to call him Luc because every time he heard her call him Mr. Dore, he was reminded of the deception he played upon her. And because he thought of her as Bianca.
    “Look at him,” she said, and it took him a moment to realize she was referring to Thomas. A safe topic. Hardly full of the charged intensity of the last few minutes. He wanted to touch her chin, draw her gaze back to his. Tell her it wasn’t just her eyes he admired, or her limbs, but her rosy lips, too. “He’s doing so well. Three months ago we thought he might die.”
    She closed her eyes for a moment, her expression pained. Perhaps not such a safe topic after all.
    “Was he as ill as that?”
    “Yes. Henrietta almost returned home.” Derision was thick in her voice and he understood. How could a mother leave her son when he was near death’s door? His own mother would have hovered until he improved just to make her go away. “But the doctor thinks his asthma was merely a phase.”
    “I thought it an intermittent but chronic illness, gradually sapping away at a person’s strength?”
    “Sometimes a child grows out of it,” Bianca explained. “We are hoping it is so for him.”
    “I shall hope so as well. Illness aside,” Luc said, “remaining at home an extra year or two is a good thing. Many boys don’t even go until their thirteenth year. The youngest boys always receive the brunt of the pranks and tricks upperclassmen like to play. Much better to attend when one is strong enough to fight back.”
    “You make Eton sound like torture.” She sniffed, wiped at her eyes, and then smiled. A watery sort of smile, as if she weren’t entirely past the emotional turmoil of thinking about her brother’s recent illness.
    “Well, I wouldn’t know, but my first year at Harrow, at the age of ten, was only alleviated by my friendship with Reggie, whose humor and knack for schemes had made him much in demand, and my great height.”
    “Your great