Linda Needham Read Online Free Page A

carefully, silently worked on ridding herself of the remaining shackle, angling her toes just right.
    Clank, chink.
    She held her breath as they all looked her way again, Everingham’s piercing, devil’s gaze more suspicious now than ever, as though he could lift the hem of her nightgown with the power of histhoughts, as though he knew she’d freed herself of one of his iron bands. And that it pleased him.
    A wave of fear came roaring through her that she would fail her father if she were thrown into prison now. She was damned either way: running from the law would mean that she could never return to her print shop, could never again publish the Tuppenny Press on her father’s beloved Stanhope. But if living underground for the rest of her life was the only way to expose the truth of the massacre that took her father’s life, then so be it.
    She deliberately sighed impatiently and shifted her weight to her other hip with another clanking rattle. “You’re trying my patience, Lord Everingham!” she said for good measure.
    She felt wickedly prideful, because it was only a matter of time before Everingham would realize that he’d actually had Captain Spindleshanks in his office all along.
    And that I got away, my lord.
    The man studied her with his impossibly dark gaze, a muscle tightening beneath his clean-shaved jaw, before he finally frowned and returned to his deviltry.
    “My lord, there were a couple hundred issues of a newspaper—the Tuppenny Press , like the name of the print shop—all bound up neatly, looking like they were ready to be carted off to London.”
    Everingham studied the newspaper with care, and Hollie prayed.
    Please don’t look up! Not yet.
    She held her breath as she finally stepped completely out of the last shackle and stood blessedly free. Her pulse thrummed a deafening rhythm against her ears as she clasped her manacled hands together to keep the short chain between them from rattling.
    Just a half-dozen stealthy, sliding steps backward, and she’d be in the darkened hallway. And then out the door and away into the woods.
    But the beast looked up and into her eyes, as though he could hear her thoughts and see right down into her heart.
    “Leave us, gentlemen,” he said suddenly, gesturing for the others to scatter.
    “But, my lord—”
    “Now, Summerwell. Deliver the boxes of evidence to my library. That will be all, Bavidge.”
    They were alone a moment later, the door closed, the room darker and absolutely silent save for the thundering of her heart. The shadowed corners pressed in as he strode toward her, his mood changed entirely. He’d been a blur of powerful bureaucracy just a few moments ago. Now he was a stalking beast. A beast who wore his fine linen shirt with a dark and dangerous grace, an elegant silk neck cloth and the scents of bay, all the tones and textures of rank and privilege.
    He stopped in front of her, an overwhelmingthreat as he touched his searing fingertip to her breastbone, an intensely intimate pressure that set her heart spinning and sent her stumbling backward a step. She followed his slow, sinuously possessive gaze down the front of her nightgown, then to the damning tangle of chain and iron bands that now lay piled on the polished floor.
    “Clever, Miss Finch.” Everingham swiftly stooped and then dangled her ankle shackles from his finger, with a devilish, falsely admiring lift to his brow. “You were about to run from me. Perhaps I misjudged you.”
    His voice was dark and thoroughly personal, curling around the tips of her hair and against her ears, pulsing through her fingertips, threatening dire consequences if she didn’t quickly master her paralyzing fear and prove that she was innocent of his suspicions.
    Hollie scooted past him and put a chair between them so that she could think better. “It’s very late, my lord.”
    “Indeed.” A solitary, darkly silken word, a test, a challenge. He let it hang between them as his gaze swept across