Anne Stuart Read Free Page B

interested in something as mundane as a dead man, and the landlord was alone with Emma.
    He bit into the gold coin, then grunted with a fair amount of satisfaction. He looked up at Emma. “You there,” he said, his earlier deference vanishing. “We don’t need your sort here. I heard what his lordship said, and I don’t believe a word of it. Lord Killoran wouldn’t lift a finger to save his own mother. Be off with you, doxy.”
    He was the second person in a matter of minutes to assume she was a whore, though Lord Killoran had at least been polite enough to ask. “If you’ll have the horses put to…,” she said faintly, watching as the landlord knelt in the blood, going through her uncle’s pockets with a singular lack of squeamishness. He came up empty.
    “ I’m keeping the horses,” he said. “Something’s owed me for dealing with all this. They aren’t yours, anyway—they’re this poor, dead gentleman’s—and I’d be remiss in my duty if I let you take them without so much as a by-your-leave.”
    Frustration made her curl her hands into fists. She had no money—her cousin Miriam had always seen to that. She was alone, penniless, with no one to turn to for help, least of all her family. She considered this for a moment, feeling an unlikely surge of hope.
    Destitution was one side of the coin. Freedom was the other. No one to touch her, pinch her, hurt her. No one to watch her, questioning her every move. To force her to spend hours on her knees, recounting nonexistent sins. In Miriam DeWinter’s stern household, Emma had had little opportunity for sinning and no temptation to do so whatsoever.
    Suddenly she was free. She could simply walk out the door and not a soul would stop her. The thought was absolutely terrifying.
    Before the greedy innkeeper could change his mind, she ran into the hallway, racing down the narrow stairs, not daring to slow her pace for fear that reaction and reality would set in. She would escape, disappear into the city, and no one would ever find her. She would be safe from Cousin Miriam; she would be happy. And then she looked down at the blood staining her hands and shivered.
     
    Killoran stood alone in the private room, staring into the fire, a glass of brandy in his hand. Nathaniel had been sent to make certain the horses were put to with all possible dispatch. Apparently he’d decided to keep Killoran company a bit longer. Killoran viewed that prospect with a jaundiced air but he was too weary at the moment to bestir himself and send the young hothead home.
    The young woman upstairs was far more interesting, and he was requiring a surprising amount of self-denial to keep from taking her with them. Not that he had a great deal of experience in self-denial, but something told him the young woman would be more trouble than she was worth.
    For one thing, she was quite astonishingly beautiful. Not at all in the common style, she was possessed of a thick mane of impossibly flame-colored hair, a tall, lush body of dangerous voluptuousness, and the warm, honey-colored eyes of a complete innocent. That red hair called to him, a siren lure, but he assumed it was only nostalgia and misplaced sentiment. Not that he’d ever been known to possess those two qualities.
    She reminded him of another redhead, long dead, albeit a more subdued one. The creature upstairs, despite her shocked eyes, was far from demure. The blood on her hands only added to her allure.
    Ah, but innocent females could be very dangerous indeed, and it wasn’t anything as mundane as his worthless hide Killoran was concerned about. He’d had virgins before, and knew just how uncomfortable that could be. They tended to imagine themselves in love, and when they discovered their seducer was a man who simply didn’t believe in love—didn’t believe in much of anything at all, for that matter—they grew furious, subjecting one to tears, rage, bitter protests, and the like. All for the sake of clumsy, untried