Practical Widow to Passionate Mistress by Louise Allen

Author:Louise Allen
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: England, 1800-1815, Fiction, Romance, Napoleonic Wars, Historical, Widows
ISBN: 9781459209473
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2010-01-02T07:00:00+00:00

Half an hour later, after one cup of tea and one tiny lemon-drop biscuit each, they fluttered out.

‘Hell and damnation,’ Ross exploded as the carriage rolled away down the drive. ‘That’s the first of the flood, I suppose. I am obviously naïve, but I was not braced for matchmaking mamas.’ He was the baron now, he should marry, father an heir. He had not even thought about that before. Now it was staring him in the face, his fundamental duty to his name.

‘What did you expect, my lord?’ Meg had come back to supervise the clearing of the tea things and now stood, hands neatly clasped at her waist, her lips twitching with what he strongly suspected was an almost irresistible desire to laugh at him. ‘You are an eligible bachelor, therefore you must be in want of a wife.’

Ross reached out a hand and palmed the door closed with a thud that sent the smaller pieces of jade shaking on their stands. Her smile vanished. ‘What I am in want of,’ he said harshly, ‘is you in my bed. As you can no doubt see,’ he added with deliberate crudeness, almost as he might have picked up one of the jade bowls and thrown it into the hearth to assuage his temper.

He was aching with arousal and it had not been the pretty feminine tricks of the three Pennare ladies that had caused that. It had been Meg’s closeness in the study and then the startling contrast between her reality and the other women’s artificiality. And those young women and their like were the ones it would be suitable for him to court and to marry.

Meg gave a little gasp. ‘You gave me your word…’ she began.

‘I promised not to touch you. I said nothing about attempting to persuade you.’ Ross stalked over to the window to put the width of the room between them and caught his still-bandaged leg on the sharp corner of one of the little tables that had been brought in for the tea things.

He couldn’t bite back the grunt of pain as he grabbed one of the long window curtains to steady himself. The wound had been healing well and he had been able to walk and ride with less and less pain each day, but it was not ready to stand a sharp corner of solid mahogany being driven into its centre. Ross swore viciously under his breath, taken aback by the wave of nausea that hit his stomach. Then there was a flurry of skirts and Meg was on her knees in front of him, her hands gentle on his leg.

‘Oh, no! Has it opened it up?’ Her head in that ridiculous cap was so close that its frills brushed his groin, with predictable results. One small warm hand was resting on the inside of his thigh while the other touched the bandage through the thin barrier of his knitted pantaloons. ‘There’s no blood,’ she said, her voice anxious.

‘Meg,’ he managed through

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