A Midsummer Night's Sin by Kasey Michaels

Author:Kasey Michaels
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: HQN
Published: 2011-12-30T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

WHAT HE WAS THINKING was criminal, on so many levels.

She was just as he’d told her. Vulnerable. Young, just awakening to what it was to be a woman rather than a girl. Her cousin had gone missing, most probably to a terrible fate impossible to conceive in its brutality. Her mother clearly was not a stable woman, not the sort Regina could turn to for advice.

She was in his house, beneath his roof. The bastard’s roof. There could be no future for them; she knew it, he knew it.

All he could bring her was disgrace and her father’s wrath.

All she could bring him was a desire unfulfilled or a memory that would never leave him, with the empty years stretching in front of him, his heart forever lost.

God, how his mother would swoon with it, enjoy the drama of it all. She’d think it all delicious. And yes, inevitable. She’d always liked Shakespeare’s tragedies best. As Juliet, she must have died on the stage five hundred times. Lovely as she still was, in the past few years an audience couldn’t be faulted for thinking her Juliet now succumbed to old age.

Puck smiled at the thought and then mentally slapped himself. Even when he was serious, deadly serious, there was always that spark of ridiculousness in him, trying hard to get out. It was a curse.

He watched as Regina used a thin taper to light more candles around the room. The full moon shone in the windows, the draperies not yet closed. Did her maid forget to draw the draperies, or did Regina always sleep with the drapes pulled back over the sheer silk curtains? Did she like to watch the stars or wake to greet the morning sun?

He knew so little about her. She’d waved away the beets tonight at dinner. She didn’t like beets. She might like the morning sun on her face.

She loathed or feared her father. Or both.

She felt, tasted, like Heaven.

They could flee to Paris. To America. He had the money; she’d want for nothing. He’d take the mother, if she insisted. The mother, the maid, her pet spaniel, if she had one. He’d go anywhere, dare anything, to have her.

And he knew nothing about her.

Was love insanity, or insanity love?

And did either condition explode into a man’s life in the space of only a few days?

She walked over to the small fire and sat down on the hearth rug, her virginal dressing gown puddling around her, the firelight catching in her hair, casting warm shadows over her perfect features, her flawless skin. She looked across the room at him and smiled, in embarrassment, in trepidation and with some hidden sorrow.

Yes. The answer to his question was yes. Yes, it could. Full-blown. Without rhyme or reason.

“There are any number of chairs in this pile,” he said as he joined her on the floor. “But you’re right. We’ll be most comfortable here. Naughty children, gathering around the fire when they should be in bed, fast asleep. But you’ve already said that you won’t sleep.

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