Blue by You Read Online Free Page A

people.
    “Your mama let you out to slum, princess?”
    While the cottages and slim houses in Carolee’s neighborhood weren’t exactly the mansions of the Garden District or plantations of River Road, they were hardly the slums. Blue turned her head, and her gaze landed on a broad, muscular chest covered in a white T-shirt. Her eyes rose past a thick neck, square jaw, and full lips to the dark eyes looking down at her. She swallowed hard. Lord have mercy. From across the yard, he’d been a good-looking guy. Up close, he made her want to smooth her hair and check her makeup. She’d dated a few times in her life. When her school held dances, they’d invited boys from Holy Cross or St. Augs.
    “I’m not a princess.”
    His attention slid down her face and throat, then continued slowly over her breasts and bare belly. She felt his gaze in her stomach and the backs of her wrists. “You look like your grand-mère.”
    She’d been told that before, but for some reason, hearing it from Kasper Pennington made the tingles in her wrists spread to other parts. “Did you know my grandmother?”
    He shook his head and raised his gaze to her hair. “No. Never met her, but she used to yell at me when she’d catch me hauling away old boards from your property.” He returned his attention to her face. “You have her hair and eyes. Is that why they named you Blue?”
    She did have blue eyes, but she shook her head. “No. I’m named after relatives.” She curtsied and fired off the names written on her birth certificate, “Blue, Louretha, Dare, Toussaint, Butler,” she said.
    “That’s a lot of name.”
    She rose with a smile. “God forbid we don’t include a dead cousin and keep it all in the family.”
    He laughed and lifted a Solo cup to his mouth. “I suppose that’s fitting for a Toussaint,” he said, and took a drink.
    She watched his throat and his Adam’s apple as he swallowed. “What does that mean?”
    He lowered his beer. “Y’all have been known to marry your first cousins. Inbred as all hell.”
    Blue gasped as all those strange tingles pinged aimlessly through her body like a pinball machine. “That’s rich, coming from a Pennington. Everyone knows that the males in your family have a fondness for liquor and a taste for their brothers’ wives.” At least that’s what she’d always heard. “Not that I would know.”
    “Sure.”
    “Believe it or not, we have better things to do at Dahlia Hall than gossip about your family.”
    “Like marry your cousins and make big-headed babies?”
    Weren’t the Pennington men supposed to be sugar-mouthed ? “That hasn’t happened in a hundred years!” Or so. It was kind of a touchy subject, and he was purposely antagonizing her. She didn’t know what to do. She felt provoked even as she felt herself sucked into his dark eyes. It was bewildering as all heck. She smiled, and asked as sweet as a pecan praline, “Just how many sister-cousins are hanging on the Pennington family tree?”
    “That only happened once.” He chuckled, not in the least fazed. “And everyone always said Uncle Wade wasn’t right after the war on account of the bullet in his skull. His first wife died in childbirth, and Uncle Charles had died at Fort Delaware the year before. So it didn’t really count.”
    “Of course not.” She waved his explanation away with her hand. The war he referred to was, of course, the War Between the States. “What about Wilkie Pennington? He was rumored to have fathered three children with his sisters-in-law and some of his servants.”
    “And here I thought you didn’t gossip about my family.”
    Oh, that’s right. She took a drink, then folded her arms under her breasts. In the warnings she’d heard all of her life about the morally corrupt Pennington men, no one had ever mentioned that they were too big, too handsome, and too tempting. “I might have heard a thing or two over the years.”
    “Did you hear that Wilkie took care of all his