Maggie MacKeever Read Online Free Page B

latter, Kate was puzzling over herself. Quin could only be inconvenienced by her presence in his house.
    Once outside, he released her. Kate surveyed the garden, or what remained of the garden, as she rubbed her abused wrist. Naked honeysuckle bushes, the ruins of morning glory and camellias and various shrubs, trees stripped of vegetation to the height of a man’s head—
    Wisteria drooped forlornly. The remnants of an orange tree protruded from a neoclassical urn. “Good Lord. What happened here?” she said.
    Quin motioned her toward a shell-shaped bench. “The previous owner kept a goat. I brought you outdoors not to enjoy the scenery but because this is the only place I can be relatively certain we won’t be overheard.”
    Kate conceded that it would be difficult for anyone to hide in the sparse shrubbery. “Precisely what is Moxley’s?” she inquired.
    “You don’t know?”
    “Brothel, bedlam, bachelor establishment — I can’t make up my mind. Mademoiselle Liliane gives every appearance of being bachelor’s fare.”
    “Mistress Liliane,” corrected Quin. “The lady — and yes, I use the term loosely — is no more French than you and I. In answer to your question, you’ve taken refuge in a gaming hell.”
    A gaming hell? It needed only that.
    Kate wondered, though she surely shouldn’t, how many mistresses Quin had.
    She wanted Quin herself, if the truth be told, which was shocking in her, because if anyone should know better, it was Kate.
    Harsh unforgiving daylight deepened the lines in his face, revealed threads of silver in his dark hair.
    The skeleton of a rambling rose spread over the old stone walls. Quin snapped off a withered branch. “Cat got your tongue? Or have your delicate sensibilities been overcome?”
    Kate refrained from remarking that her delicate sensibilities had not survived the occasion when he’d spread his jacket on a bed of fragrant straw. “It is beneath you to amuse yourself by baiting me,” she said.
    Gravel crunched beneath Quin’s boots as he moved toward the bench. “If anything is beneath me, I have not yet discovered what it might be.”
    He was angry with her. But why? Surely she was the one with a right to bear a grudge? Kate longed to ask him, and at the same time was reluctant to venture down that particular conversational path.
    Still holding the rose branch, Quin sat down beside her. Kate had not realized the bench was so small.
    She took a sudden intense interest in her hands, which were folded in her lap. Beside her sat a philanderer who had corrupted countless women and fought numerous duels, a man of libertine propensities who had engaged in every vice not once but many times, who had driven at least one lover to suicide; the sort of scoundrel damsels were warned against, lest they find themselves with their skirts around their ears and minus a maidenhead. But he was also Quin, who long ago had held her heart in his hand, and she glimpsed traces of the boy he had been at eighteen in the tilt of his head, the twist of his mouth, a fleeting expression in his dark eyes.
    Kate didn’t think she could bear that Quin should touch her now.
    And yet she wished him to, intensely.
    She was the worst kind of fool.
    Quin turned his head to study her. “You are quiet,” he remarked.
    Kate felt her cheeks redden. “I was remembering.”
    “Memory frequently eludes me,” said Quin. “I am more often grateful for it than not.”
    Kate supposed she should be grateful he no longer shared this physical attraction. “You do not mind that you cannot recall portions of your life?”
    He shrugged. “Why should I? The past is dead. Liliane is right about one thing: that is a dreadful dress. Have you nothing else?”
    “I— No. If you are determined to insult me, I will take my leave.”
    “You are insulted by the truth? In that case, I declare a truce. Now perhaps you will explain why you are here.”
    Kate hesitated. How best to proceed? “I’ve been residing