An English Lord's Love Affair

Chapter 3.1. Unexpected Visitor

   The door opened before Benedic could twist the tarnished knob. It took him several moments to assess the woman's face, heart-shaped, pretty, the refined features reflecting total disbelief. The odd thing was that she had been speaking in low, worried voice. She had been whispering a man's name as she opened the door. The concern in her midnight-blue eyes had rapidly darkened to horror.

   Had she been expecting to find her lover, instead of Strathmere Ghost, on the other side? The butterflies embroidered on her silk robe blurred before his eyes.

   It was impossible to tell which one of them had suffered the strongest shock, the woman or himself.

   He knew her, didn't he? He felt a prickle of recognition before self-preservation took over. Now that she realized he was not the man she expected, she was reacting as would any normal female in her place.

   She turned in panic to escape.

   He would lay odds she'd start to scream before she reached the outer door. It felt like torture to force his abused body into action. It even hurt to breathe. But he could have been dead a hundred times over and still have able to overpower a woman of her build.

   He caught her by the waist and was surprised by the strength of her resistance. She swung her body back at him in reaction. His shoulder burned like hell, aggravated by the movement, but he hadn't held a woman in a month, and his natural instincts ran to inflicting pleasure, not pain. As a general rule, when Benedic wrestled a woman to the floor, she was in for the experience of her life.

   Not that such a pleasurable activity was even a remote possibility.

   She was half his size, but more than his match in determination. His fingers tangled in her short raven-black hair as he brought his hand up to cover her mouth. It didn't help either of them that she had been caught half undressed, her bottom pressed into his groin. Her soft flesh beckoned him to forget what he must do. He knew what she must be thinking, what he wanted. He felt a fleeting stab of desire as her robe fell open. How easily he could take her. How vulnerable she was, for all her struggling.

   He also knew suddenly who she was, the  blue-eyed woman in the rain. He remembered the day he'd met her, how angry he had been that she had interfered with his plans. It was the same day he had discovered that someone wanted to kill him. The day he had been shot at while walking in the woods. He had been hunting the would-be assassin when this young woman intruded, tempting him for a few moments to ignore how ugly his life had become.

   He'd suspected he had been stalked for weeks. Why? Perhaps because he'd been about about to reveal that the deaths of Sebastian Farningham and Bernard Brumidge last year had not been the result of an ambush by Gurkha warriors at all.

   Perhaps because he had been gathering evidence that the murder of the young soldiers had been arranged by their own commanding officer. Benedic had been on the verge of a discovery. He'd sensed it. So had the man who had murdered Sebastian and Bernard.

   Would a young woman as frivolous and beautiful as Charlotte Brumidge have wanted to kiss him in the rain if she knew his life was being threatened? No. Not for a minute. And he would not have wanted her to either. As desirable as he found her, he dared not endanger her. Even his mistress had hinted that she intended to leave him at the end of the month to seek a new protector.

   The best he'd been able to do at the time, all he could offer, was to rescue her from a puddle, steal a kiss.

   He almost laughed aloud at the irony of it. He had been more than rude and distracted, not giving the exiled daughter of a marquess the attention to which she was accustomed. At any other time he might have flirted at length with her, formally escorted her home. Perhaps turned his charms on her to see if that electrifying kiss he'd stolen developed into something even more interesting.

   Well, he was certainly going to make up for that lack of attention now. In fact, he thought as he half carried her struggling form toward the bed, he was going to spend more time with her than any woman he had ever met, whether she liked it or not.

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