Her Only Desire Read Online Free Page A

none of his foppish flamboyance.
    In her heart, Georgie knew him at once—not because of his fine London clothes, nor even because she had been expecting his arrival any day now at the nearby docks. She knew he was Lord Griffith because he did not draw a weapon on these unarmed people.
    A man like him didn’t have to. The famed marquess wielded more force with his aura and his eyes than other men commanded with a pistol.
    She watched him in awe. It seemed her illustrious guest had finally arrived, and from the first second, Georgie was more impressed than she liked to admit.
    Somehow, in short order, Lord Griffith began single-handedly bringing the riot under control. Deliberately creating a distraction, he drew the crowd’s fury away from her to himself, so that, at last, she could take a few seconds to try to breathe. But she knew they had to get out of here—both of them. At any moment, the whole thing could erupt in violence.
    When he threw her a piercing glance full of question—
Are you all right?
—she suddenly forgot to exhale, never mind the asthma.
    Good heavens, he was easy on the eyes!
    Having proudly doted on her two darling brothers all her life, a handsome face did not usually impress her. But in the midst of the fray, the diplomat’s striking good looks made her blink.
    Some of the local men now recovered their courage and moved toward the marquess again, yelling at him in various dialects with renewed pugnacity and wagging their fingers in his face. At any second now, it was sure to come to blows.
    His glower tamed them briefly when he looked back at them in warning, but the angry Hindus were doing their best to shout down his ever-so-reasonable-toned commands for calm.
    Steadying her horse, Georgie finally managed to take a decent breath, though it burned all the way down into her chest.
    She edged her mare closer toward him. “Lord Griffith, I presume?” she greeted him in a tone that strove for at least a show of levity.
    He looked over at her with a strange mix of surprise and exasperation, but then he watched the crowd again distrustfully. Rather in spite of himself, the stern line of his mouth crooked in a saturnine half smile. “Miss Georgiana Knight.”
    She coughed. “In the flesh.”
    â€œI got your note.”
    â€œCare to make a timely egress?”
    â€œDelighted.”
    He turned his back on the mob just for a moment and swung up behind her like a born horseman. Large, lordly hands encased in tan kid gloves reached past her waist. “Better let me take the reins.”
    She snorted. Men! “It’s my horse, and you don’t know the way. Hold on.” Shoving away one of Lakshmi’s in-laws, Georgie finally managed to wheel her mare around.
    At last, her powerful horse broke free of the crowd, and, with her newfound ally riding behind her like a hard wall of warm, male muscle at her back, they went racing homeward.

CHAPTER
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  TWO          
    H ellfire, what had the mad chit gotten him into? He had come here to stop a bloody war, not to start one.
    But the Marquess of Griffith was not a man who lost his temper. Ever.
    Displays of emotion were for peasants.
    Tapping into his formidable reserves of steadfast patience, Ian clenched his jaw and refused to say a word.
    For now.
    A true gentleman, not to mention a diplomat up to his eyeballs in protocol, habitually treated ladies with a degree of courtesy that placed them on shining pedestals; as a female member of the Knight family, this was doubly true of the consideration he felt compelled to show Georgiana.
    But it was not easy.
    Not when he had half a mind to wring her pretty neck for putting herself—and his mission—in danger.
    He couldn’t believe she had dragged him into disrupting the solemnities of a damn funeral and could only pray that those people back there did not include anyone he’d have