Charming the Devil Read Free Page A

escape a madman. Or perhaps he had just been a suitor. It was so demmed hard to tell.
    “Here we are. Hold up now,” Rennet said, tugging her to a halt, and she managed, just barely, to remain where she was, for the greatest threat seemed to be behind her. The noise, the lies, the peopled, opulent ballroom looming like an ogre in the background.
    Here, the gardens stretched quietly around her, garbed in vast, soothing darkness, dappled with compassion, imbued with hope. Faye filled her lungs and tugged her arm carefully from her self-appointed escort’s. The minty scent of pennyroyal calmed her, drew her in, enticed her to step deeper into the darkness, to drink in the night, to let it shiver across her senses. It was quiet here, away from the madness of the crowd. Thick,contented hedges grew in a curved row. Blooming vines twined cozily over arched arbors, and potted palms stood sentry atop the stone wall to her right.
    “Forgive me. I fear I’ve been quite rude,” said Rennet and eyeing her, took another sip from his flask. It gleamed dully in the moonlight. “I should have thought to bring you out of doors as soon as you began looking as if you were about to swoon.”
    She glanced toward the lighted doorway behind her. No demons poured out to devour her. Indeed, the yawning entrance was empty, but that hardly meant she was safe. “I was not about to swoon.” Perhaps.
    “Ahh, how disappointing,” he said. “I do so love to catch angels as they fall.”
    Maybe McBain hadn’t even seen her. Perhaps he had been looking at another, and it was simply her own “highly developed survival skills,” as Madeline called them, that had made it seem as if he were bearing down on her like a wolf on its prey.
    “That was a compliment,” Rennet said, and, grinning, bent slightly at the knees to look directly into her eyes. “Deserving of a smile. You can smile, can’t you?”
    “Yes,” she said, and scowled a little, trying to remember what she had planned to ask Rennet should the opportunity present itself.
    “Good.” His lips quirked up even more. He was probably charming, but she had known suchmen in the past. Tenning had been as cultured as a pearl, lavishing her with gifts, with compliments. There was, after all, a reason for her fears; she wasn’t completely mad. Perhaps.
    “I simply do not, ” she said, and dared him to think her eccentric. Better that than the truth.
    Rennet stared at her for a moment, then, “You don’t…smile.”
    “Not generally.”
    “How do you feel about laughter?”
    It was often false and therefore made her head pound like a smithy’s rounding hammer. She knew it was strange. Good God, she knew she was strange. No one had to tell her. But they had. Though the vernacular changed: odd, gifted, magical. It all meant the same thing.
    “So, you don’t smile, and you don’t laugh,” he surmised. “What do you do, then, Mrs. Nettles. When you are not setting men agog with your astounding beauty?”
    “I…” What? Tried to forget? Tried to remember? Tried to survive? “I…read a good deal.”
    “Read?” His brows were raised again, his lips quirked up in an expression that some might find beguiling. But she wasn’t beguiled. Terrified, maybe. A little nauseous. But definitely not beguiled.
    “Yes.”
    “And what does a rare beauty like you read? Sonnets to match your beautiful countenance?”
    “The Times mostly,” she said and glancedtoward the house again, lest someone spurt from the doorway and pounce on her. “Politics. But journals too.”
    “Journals.”
    “Yes.” It was why she was here, after all. Why she had forced herself from Lavender House, her home, her sanctuary. Because there was evil. And perhaps Madeline was right. Perhaps she could make it better. Negate a bit of the sort of pain she herself had caused.
    “What kind of journals?”
    “Those regarding battles mostly,” she said, and glanced behind her once again.
    “Ahh…” He laughed. “A