The Devil of Clan Sinclair Read Free Page A

this room with her husband’s body in a casket, she’d thought about nothing but him.
    Macrath.

Chapter 2

    London
    A year earlier
    W hen they’d arrived in London, Virginia had no idea she’d be heartily tired of the city within the month.
    Tonight’s ball was the third in two weeks, and the tenth engagement. Through it all, she saw the same people in different attire. The muscles of her face ached from smiling. Her feet hurt from walking on hardwood floors in her thin kid slippers.
    She wanted to put her feet up, first, and second, she couldn’t wait to read the broadsides her American maid had smuggled to her. Her father had come to her room, interrupting them, so she’d folded them quickly and stuffed them into her reticule, and all night she’d been dying to see what the talk of London was now.
    She slipped away, retreating to their host’s library. Settling into the corner of the settee and tucking her feet beneath her, she retrieved the broadside and smoothed it with her fingers.
    On Monday an inquest was held at the National School, before Mr. Worley, coroner, to inquire into the cause of the death of Thomas Newbury, a boy who was found dead with his throat cut in a pea-field, near Haversham.
    A sad, a cruel dreadful deed,
    To you I will unfold, The murder of a little boy,
    As base as e’er was told;
    Murdered by a cruel man,
    At Haversham we hear,
    Near the town of Newport Pagnell,
    In the county of Buckinghamshire.
    “There’s a better light over here,” a masculine voice said.
    Startled, she dropped the paper, then bent to pick it up, pressing it against her chest.
    “I do apologize,” she said. “I thought the room was empty.”
    She glanced toward the two massive leather chairs arranged in front of the fireplace. The speaker wasn’t visible.
    “As you can see, it’s not,” he said.
    “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt your . . .” Her words trailed off.
    “Reverie? Contemplation? Solitude?”
    “Yes, all that,” she said. “Your musing. Your considerations. Perhaps even your meditations.”
    He peered around the side of the chair, his smile surprising her. Or was it his intent blue eyes she saw first?
    Her father always said she looked half finished. God had certainly taken the hue from her pale blue eyes and given it to this man. His eyes were such a startling blue she noted them from across the room.
    The color reminded her of midnight over the Hudson, when the sky seemed like a curtain behind which a celestial lantern hid, revealing the night to be not black at all, but a deep and rich blue.
    “My escape, most like,” he said. “Are you doing the same?”
    “I’m afraid I’m doing worse than that,” she said.
    An eyebrow lifted. “Are you absconding with something belonging to our hostess?”
    “Of course not.”
    She debated whether to confess. To her father, a broadside was coarse and common. No one in proper company ever confessed to reading them. Nor was she to associate with people who did so.
    “I was reading a broadside,” she said. “About a horrible murder.”
    “Were you?” He didn’t frown in dismay at her. Nor did he suddenly seem coolly aloof. He merely relaxed there, a handsome stranger who had evinced more curiosity about her than anyone had since arriving in England.
    She stood, walked to the two chairs, and without invitation sat in the one beside him. What a handsome man he was. His mouth and eyes seemed paired in humor. His face was lean, the planes of it sharpened rather than shaped. Nothing about him was soft or genial, but she wanted to smile at him as she stared.
    While she couldn’t tell since he was seated, he seemed to be tall. His shoulders were broad enough, taking up the width of the chair. His legs were stretched out in front of him, crossed at the ankles. If there had been a roaring fire in the fireplace, she could understand why he’d escaped the entertainment. Since the evening was a temperate one, he must have retreated here