Flirting with Ruin Read Online Free

scandal.’
    ‘My dear, your reputation, as you very well know, is as much undeserved as mine,’ Kate said acerbically. ‘You may keep company with rakes and harlots because by doing so you hope to make up for those years spent incarcerated with that puritan tyrant of a husband, but keeping company is where it ends. In fact, I am willing to bet that despite all your attempts to have the world think otherwise, there has been no one either before nor since Bartholomew to dock at your berth.’
    ‘Kate! Your language is quite shocking,’ Rosalind exclaimed with mock horror.
    Her friend grinned. ‘I learned that one from a streetwalker in Covent Garden. I have been working with a new charity to rescue such women, you can have no idea how colourfully they speak.’
    ‘Actually, I can.’
    Kate chuckled. ‘Yes, but my point is that while you undoubtedly have had any number of vicarious experiences, you have none that are first-hand.’
    Rosalind began to cut her crusts into small squares on her plate. ‘You are right. The sad fact is that I find the whole experience of intimacy really rather—well, off-putting. I thought it was simply a case of ousting Bartholomew’s disgust of the whole matter by some alternative experience but—’ She broke off, blushing wildly.
    ‘Ros, as you know, I too found it disappointing,’ Kate whispered. ‘I wonder if it’s simply that some women are not capable…’
    ‘Yes, that is exactly what I thought. Exactly. Until last night.’ Rosalind pushed her breakfast plate aside. ‘Kate, I still can’t quite believe it, I can’t believe what I did—I can’t believe that I actually regret not doing more, but it’s true. Last night, I met this man.’
    ‘Rosalind!’ Her friend’s eyes were wide, her narrow face avid with interest. ‘Who?’
    ‘I don’t know. A stranger. He is not from here, merely travelling through. A Scot. It doesn’t matter who, I will not see him again, but—Kate, for the first time ever I could understand why women cast their reputation to the winds. When he kissed me…’
    ‘He kissed you! In the Rothermere Arms!’
    Rosalind burst out laughing. ‘I thought you were unshockable.’
    ‘So too did I,’ Kate said wryly.
    ‘Not at the inn. We danced there, in the taproom, and then we went for a stroll in the woods and it was there that he kissed me. And when he did, Kate, I swear it was different from anything. I felt—I felt—I don’t know how I felt, but I didn’t want it to stop.’
    ‘And did it?’
    ‘Two grown people with only a tree for a prop,’ Rosalind said with a soft smile, remembering his words, ‘of course it did. Eventually.’
    ‘My God! So it is true what they say of the harvest moon then?’
    ‘Well he was certainly potent enough, but whether it was to do with the moon or not…’ Rosalind pushed her chair back and went over to gaze out the window, cooling her heated cheeks on the cool pane.
    ‘And now?’
    She turned back to face into the dining room and shrugged. ‘And now nothing, Kate. It was just a—fleeting fancy We were strangers who passed in the night, that is all.’ She threw herself back down in her chair with a swirl of petticoats. ‘Actually, that is not all. I think I will make some changes to my life. I’m bored, and kicking over the traces simply isn’t helping—I’m just as bored with that. I need something else. Some other excitement. Last night I felt alive. That’s what I want.’
    Kate smiled wanly. ‘That is what we all want.’
    Rosalind was immediately contrite. ‘I’m so sorry, that was tactless of me,’ she said. Her instincts were to give her friend a hug, but she remembered that Kate hated to be touched, and instead contented herself with leaning across the polished breadth of the breakfast table to press her hand instead. ‘You must miss your brothers dreadfully.’
    ‘I keep expecting them to come walking through the door. If they had been living at home, I think I would have