Linda Needham Read Online Free Page B

her face in a methodical fashion, ending at her eyes.
    “I’m tired—”
    “So am I.”
    “And I’m not your Captain Spindleshanks fellow.”
    He raised a brow slightly, insufferably amusedand more than dangerously suspicious. “Obviously,” he said too mildly.
    Obviously! Then he still didn’t suspect the truth. There was hope after all, if she played this right.
    “Then, you finally recognize your error—the first step to righting a terrible wrong. Which means that you’ll also understand that I want to go home to my bed, where I belong.” She stuck out her hands, bound by the two D-shaped steel bands and the short length of chain between them. “Unlock me. If you please.”
    But he made no move at all. “I don’t please at all, madam. As I don’t please to have anyone running from me.”
    “I didn’t.”
    “You didn’t get the chance.”
    “You seemed to be finished with me, my lord, so I—”
    “I’m not finished with you, Miss Finch.” The flick of his dark eyes set her heart loose of its orderly rhythms, made it skid around in her chest. “Not nearly finished.”

Chapter 4
    H ollie swallowed hard, terrified that Everingham suddenly knew everything about her, that his favorite game was cat and mouse and she was now his plaything, to be tormented to her last breath.
    She’d seen his powerfully rugged profile hundreds of times: that strong blade of a nose, the hard-edged jaw, the precision of his brow as he pinned a man with his glare. Sketches of his features had been printed often enough in The Times ; in her father’s own newspaper, as well. Caricatures of the man, to be sure, etched into tin, inked, and then pressed by her own hand into the heavily taxed newsprint—but those caricatures hadn’t prepared her for the power of the man in the lifting shadows, and at this dizzyingly close range.
    Nor had the years of secretly, shamelessly watching him from the press gallery in Parliament, listening to his imperious speeches and meticulously committing them to her notebook for her father’s newspaper, wondering all the while how he could be so compellingly thick-headed. But far more disturbing, wondering how the man could sometimes be so wise.
    “We can be done with this quickly, Miss Finch.”
    “Good, my lord, because I—”
    “Where is he?”
    “He?” Blast the man and his unbalancing questions, for the dizziness he caused as he closed in on her and the darkness in his eyes that left her senses reeling, left her searching for light, for the normal sense of things. “Where is who, my lord?”
    “Your husband, madam,” he whispered, now just inches from her temple, his eyes starless midnight. “Where is he?”
    “My husband? ” Hollie nearly choked on the word, on the absurdity. On her relief at the earl’s poor sense of direction—away from her and onto some more capable man who existed only in Everingham’s misogynistic suspicions. But he’d managed to back her slowly against the round table heaped with all the evidence of her crime, the heat of him blending with her own, his scent becoming part of hers. “I don’t know what you mean, sir,” she said breathlessly. “I’m not married.”
    That seemed to please him in some way, though he made a dark, disbelieving sound in his throat and lowered one of his tall, broad shoulders, bringing him closer to her ear. “Your father, then, Miss Finch. Tell me where he is, and I’ll go easily on him.”
    “What do you mean, my father?”
    “Sheltering a criminal is a crime in itself, Miss Finch, punishable by long years in prison. Protecting him will only gain you more trouble.”
    The blackguard! She hadn’t been able to protect her father when he was alive, could only watch him fall under the yeoman’s blade and then hold him as he died.
    It was too late to protect him; honoring him was all that was left to her life.
    Tears stung her eyes, stuffed her chest and her throat, but she swallowed back the salty heat. She be damned