Auctioned Virgin to Seduced Bride Read Free

disappeared, and where she might have ended up,’ Patrick said. ‘An urchin at the inn where she would have arrived from Suffolk thought he remembered a woman who looked like her, and the driver of the carriage she got into, he thought, was one of the bullies from this place. The lad gets tips from travellers who want directing to places like this,’ he added.
    â€˜How can he remember? It is months since Lina vanished.’
    â€˜I know that, damn it. She probably no longer even looked like the girl her sister described. But I cannot ignore any clue.’ He shrugged, his face grim. ‘I succeed in my work because I am thorough and because I have an instinct I cannot explain.’
    He reached out and touched her shoulder and she shivered, passive under his hand for a moment while she wrestled with what he was telling her. Trust . He wants me to trust him.
    All her life she had trusted people, even when her parents died and no one would help her with the debts. She had trusted Lady Palgrave’s heirs to treat her decently after three years of good service, give her a reference, but they simply turned her out. She had trusted the pleasant, smiling woman who had offered her a ride in her carriage to the inn where the Falmouth coach would leave.
    Patrick told her she was bloody stupid to trust people. Well, she would start to learn with him. ‘Let me go!’ She twisted away and her shift tore in his grip. ‘I don’t believe you,’ she shouted at him, her hands frantic on the few scraps of fabric that still shielded her body. ‘You came here with your disgusting needs and—’
    â€˜Damn it, woman—I kept my disgusting needs in check for three days while you trotted round that village like an innocent, helpful kitten with those big violet eyes and that mass of hair I ached to unpin and the scent of you like apricots. Why didn’t you say you wanted to travel to Falmouth? Why were you so pig-headedly stupid not to tell me?’
    â€˜What? Ask you to take me with you? What would you have assumed from that, pray?’ What does he mean, he wanted to unpin my hair? If he wanted me, why didn’t he say something? Show me? Or am I just too inexperienced to read the signals?
    â€˜That you needed help? That you trusted me to escort you? I could have taken a letter to your friend, if you drew the line at my company on a common stage.’
    â€˜I didn’t. It wasn’t that. I didn’t understand how you made me feel. I didn’t… You didn’t…’ Laurel’s voice trailed away as she realised what she had said.
    â€˜How I made you feel?’ Patrick repeated. ‘How the hell do you think I feel? You accuse me of being a perverted libertine and all the time I was with you, I kept a bridle on perfectly natural, perfectly normal desires—’
    â€˜Normal?’ Her voice rose in an undignified squeak. ‘I’m a virgin! You shouldn’t have any desires as far as I’m concerned.’ I’m a virgin and I want you so much I’m ashamed of myself. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself!’ she flung at him, knowing as she spoke how unjust she was being.
    â€˜Don’t be ridiculous,’ Patrick snarled. ‘I’m a perfectly normal man. Of course I’ve got desires. I’m a gentleman—I just don’t show them to unmarried girls.’
    â€˜Really?’ Some shocking instinct drew her gaze to his thin silk evening breeches and the unmistakeable, flagrant bulge that betrayed just what he wanted. ‘I don’t think you are a gentleman at all.’
    â€˜In that case, you ungrateful little cat,’ Patrick said, ‘allow me to demonstrate what I have been bottling up in a gentlemanly manner ever since I met you.’
    He flung his coat to one side, reached out and yanked her toward him. The tatters of her shift flew apart as she lost her grip on them and the full length of