An Unmistakable Rogue Read Online Free

of his neck, looking up at Sunnyledge, the house was so damned big, he could search for years and never find the truth of his birth. As for secrets, the place fairly reeked of them.
    Even the cryptic note he had received added to Sunnyledge’s aura of mystery—a note that roused an anger, tempered oddly by hope. Such anger, he usually reserved for the people who gave him life and threw him away. And the hope? Well, that just made him madder ... until Sennett killed expectation by saying the note must be a hoax. The solicitor said he’d seen more than one, worded exactly the same way. He also suggested that a Barrington by-blow had no claim, here.
    Still, Reed could not give up. As a child, he would have settled for knowing who his parents might have been. Now he bloody well wanted to know why he had not been good enough for them to keep. Who gave a helpless babe to the Gilbrides, of all people?
    He led his horse around back to find it shelter.
    Why did the woman who raised him—if you could call it that—refuse to talk about Sunnyledge? Why act as if the devil would swallow her whole, if she did? Could this place hold the key to his past? Him, the Earl of Barrington, as the note suggested?
    Reed mocked himself with a chuckle, raised his collar against a cold drizzle, settled Stealth in a rickety old stable, returned and picked up his satchel.
    He might be a bastard in more ways than one, but with or without Sennett’s approval, he needed to find out.
    Now that Boney had been defeated, and he’d retired from the Guards, Reed looked forward to a life of peace and quiet, and the occasional willing woman. But first he must search for his roots, this being the place to start.
    “Damn, it’s cold.” As if fate heard, a blast of wind and rain smacked him in the face and opened the door with a flourish—the thunderous crack of it hitting the wall loud enough to wake the Sunnyledge ghost herself.
    Reed saluted and stepped inside, a sense of inevitability filling him, as if he had arrived after a thirty-year sojourn, turned an invisible corner, and could not return the way he had come.
    What was more, he did not want to.
    In the kitchen, Chastity jumped at the thunderous sound, and shot to her feet. After a frozen heart-pounding beat, arms and legs prickling, she located a meat cleaver in a kitchen drawer and closed her trembling fingers around its smooth bone handle.

CHAPTER TWO

    As Reed knelt and searched his bag for a candle, the room seemed actually to brighten. He raised his head to see shadows shivering in slow motion. “What the devil?” He rose to his full defensive stance, and the room grew brighter still.
    Silhouettes of stags’ heads stretched into grotesque shapes as a phantasm holding a candle appeared from behind the stairs.
    Two things became etched on Reed’s brain at once; she had a face so white, she might be a specter, and the knife in her unsteady hand, sparkling off her candle’s flame, was not a figment of his imagination.
    Did the mystical goddess, with an artless halo of russet waves, mean to end his journey here and now?
    Not bloody likely.
    She stopped, keeping between them the breadth of a stately foyer in decay, and she lifted that blade higher, her brazen scrutiny of his person gaining his grudging respect. “Who are you?” she asked—bold demand and stroking whisper in a French accent, her beguiling voice bringing him an unsettling sense of reliving the moment.
    That her aspect bore a true netherworld quality, Reed dared not contemplate. “Who are you?” he countered.
    “I— It isn’t polite to answer a question with a question.”
    Despite her spectral beauty, her trembling response firmly adjoined her to an earthly plane, which moderated Reed’s disquiet and slowed the thumping beat of his heart. “What are you, a governess?”
    At his question, the candle in her hand trembled the more, but she conquered her trepidation—he saw the effort it took—and squared her shoulders.