A Most Unladylike Adventure Read Online Free Page A

his mouth, that he’d got that many words left in him.
    ‘It’s nothing to do with you what I choose to do, or where I decide to go while I’m doing it,’ she told him and wrenched her arm out of his slackened grip at last so she could fold it belligerently across her body, trying her best to look as if she’d every right to go about dressed in black breeches and a dark shirt with a black cravat knotted about her slender neck. Her crow’s-wing dark locks suddenly cascaded down her back, like the wickedest promise he’d seen in a long time, when she shook her head defiantly at him and her neat black-velvet cap finally gave up trying to contain so much dusky luxuriance.
    ‘You just made it a lot to do with me, Witch,’ he informed her hoarsely and let his eyes rove as they pleased over the very feminine body he’d reluctantly fantasised over since the black day he’d found her waiting in Kit’s office, looking as if she had every right to be there and he was the intruder.
    ‘Men!’ she condemned impatiently, as if his sudden fascination with her long slender legsand those neatly rounded, womanly curves, so blatantly on show, was entirely his fault and nothing to do with her unconventional garb or extraordinary behaviour at all. ‘You’re all the same.’
    ‘Now there you’re almost certainly mistaken,’ he lazily informed her, making no attempt to disguise his wolfishly thorough appraisal of her well-displayed charms, for if she aspired to meet some impossibly gallant chevalier who’d be so overwhelmed by her sensual beauty that he’d offer her anything she demanded of him during her peculiar night wanderings, she should never have embarked on a career of selling herself to the highest bidder in the first place. ‘We’re all different, but we
think
alike when presented with nigh-irresistible temptation, such as you pose any red-blooded male by going about dressed like that.’
    ‘On the contrary, it seems to me that you don’t think at all,’ she muttered darkly and frowned at him as if she had the right to find his blatantly sexual scrutiny of her outrageously displayed body ill-mannered at best and deeply insulting at worst.
    Hugh wondered how she expected any red-blooded male to actually
think
while she wasstanding there displaying her assets so generously that he’d soon only function on pure, or impure, instinct alone if she wasn’t very careful.
    ‘You could be right,’ he told her with a wickedly unrepentant grin as he forgot his headache and began to enjoy himself by living down to her expectations. ‘At the moment I’m too busy fantasising about the feel of your magnificent body writhing under me as you desperately beg me to take you to paradise to waste much of my energy on rational thought, my darling.’
    ‘I’m not your darling and I’m prepared to bet you don’t know the first thing about what would truly transport a woman to paradise,’ Louisa snapped back, wishing she felt as cool as she sounded as she stood in front of this outrageous, drunken and dissipated man in her shirt sleeves with everything going wrong with her wonderful plan of escape, even now she’d finally got away from Charlton.
    She’d shed her jacket and been forced to leave it behind when it had been caught on a spike put there by an inconsiderate neighbour of Kit’s to prevent the stealthy and desperate using their roof for nefarious purposes such as hers. Doing her best not to remember howterrified she’d been then, swinging between safety and a forty-foot drop to her death by one hand as she had wrestled the inextricably trapped coat undone so that she could finally wriggle out of it and haul herself to safety, she shivered in the unreliable light of those untrimmed candle wicks this sot had lit to inspect her by.
    Until her brother or Ben came back to put the world right for her, she might still be discovered and marched up the aisle so fast the vicar wouldn’t have time to ask what she’d been up