How To Bed A Baron Read Online Free Page A

had never seen anything so lovely in her life.
                  Her old friend, his passion tamped down for the moment, slipped it onto her finger without ceremony. “Thank you for helping me.”
                  Serena knew she was lost when she did not argue with him. She did not take the ring off, nor did she point out the obvious fact that it was he who was helping her.
    “You’re welcome.”
     
    Arthur stared at his mother’s ring on Serena’s hand. The daughter of a baronet, she once would have been a suitable match for him. Long before her father dragged her off to Italy in the middle of a war to dig for buried treasure. He looked into her face and wondered if his mother would accept her now, if he found the nerve to marry her in earnest.
                  He pushed all such thoughts from his mind as soon as they entered in. He was not a green boy, to follow after fancies. He was a man of thirty, who needed an heir. He could no more marry Serena, a twenty-eight year old woman of little fortune and antiquated connections, than he might fly to the moon on a cloud. Even if such a goddess might have accepted him. Which this one decidedly would not.
                  Even in her ugly gray gown, Serena Davenport gleamed like a gem on velvet. An emerald set in rose gold, perhaps. Her skin was as soft as the day they had parted, her cheeks no longer rounded with girlhood but high. Her green eyes were the same slanted cat’s eyes they had always been, but now they seemed to take him in and measure him with thoughts he no longer knew. This woman had been his best friend once, and now she was a stranger.
                  A beautiful stranger, one he wished he knew a good deal better.
                  Arthur chastised himself for his ungentlemanly thoughts, even as he stood, the picture of decorum, and offered her his arm. “May I see you to my carriage, Serena? We must be off to Oxford before the hour grows much later.”
                  She stared up at him, and placed her hand in his without drawing on her gloves first. He could feel the supple softness of her fingers in his own, and as she stood, wrapping her cape around her, he took in the scent of cinnamon.
                  “Serena,” he said, after he had nodded to his man to pay the tab. “You can’t possibly have been baking.”
                  She laughed aloud at that. “I never bake. Anything I touch in the kitchen burns to ash.”
                  “You smell of cinnamon,” he said bluntly, wondering if his manners had wandered off with his wits in tow. She did not take offense, but smiled as he escorted her out of the tap room.
                  “It is a special unction I acquired in Italy,” she said. “It is a combination of orange oil and cinnamon that is said to have once warded off the plague.”
                  “Has there been a new outbreak of the Black Death in Tuscany of which I am unaware?” Arthur asked, handing her into the carriage. She had put her gloves back on between the table and the door, but he could still feel the heat of her palm when she touched him. It made him want to strip her gloves off, and run his hand up her arm, beneath the tight sleeve of her gown.
                  She laughed again, a dark, vibrant sound that made him want to kiss her. Instead, he adjusted the line of his cuffs, and did his level best to make himself attend to what she was saying.
    “No, indeed,” she answered, as the coach and four left the inn yard. “We are fortunate that no such thing has happened. Though God knows there are plenty of modern plagues to scourge us. I wear the oil in the hopes of warding off disease. My father’s man in Parma swore by it.”
                  Arthur nodded sagely, as if he actually gave such superstition credence. “Indeed. An Italian servant is always a