The Earl's Mistress Read Free

drew back her hand and struck him a cracking good blow across the face.
    Startled, Hepplewood stepped back, one hand going gingerly to the corner of his mouth. The little wildcat hit like a man, by God.
    “Why, how dare you!” Mrs. Aldridge’s eyes blazed with outrage as she scooted away from him. “How dare you, sir, shove me up against a wall and speak so vilely! Indeed, you are every bit as bad as they say!”
    Lust thrumming through him now, Hepplewood glanced at the blood on the back of his hand. “Ordinarily, Mrs. Aldridge, I’d put a woman over my knee for what you just did, and spank her bare bottom,” he said. “But the way your lashes just dropped half shut? The way your lips so delicately parted? Oh, be glad, my dear—be very glad—I’m not hiring you, because the fire that flared just now would scorch us both.”
    “You cad, ” she hissed.
    “I don’t deny it,” he acknowledged, “but I also know a woman’s invitation when I see it, my dear, and you were well on your way to my bed. One of your hands, by the way, had already slid beneath my coat and was halfway up my back—not, alas, the one you just slapped me with.”
    “You are utterly depraved.” She strode past him to snatch her paperwork from his desk. “Kindly forget, Lord Hepplewood, that you ever laid eyes on me.”
    “I take that to be a no, then?” he murmured. “How frightfully awkward. Still, I console myself with the knowledge that you were fully aware of my less-than-sterling reputation when you walked in here.”
    Mrs. Aldridge was shaking all over now. “How very much you must despise yourself, Lord Hepplewood, to behave with such lechery,” she declared, one hand seizing his doorknob.
    “Spoken like a true governess, Mrs. Aldridge,” he said mordantly. “Perhaps you might like to take me upstairs for punishment? Sauce for the gander, hmm ?”
    A sneer sketched across her beautiful face. “You may go to the devil, Lord Hepplewood, and be served a proper punishment,” she replied, yanking open the door. “It would have to be a cold day in hell before any respectable woman would lie with the likes of you.”
    At that the door swung wide; so wide the hinges shrieked and the brass knob cracked against the oak paneling behind.
    As to the lady, she plunged into the shadows and vanished.
    Lord Hepplewood sat back down and wondered vaguely if he’d gone mad.
    How very much he must despise himself!
    Oh, the woman really had no clue. . . .
    And now he was supposed to forget he’d ever laid eyes on Mrs. Aldridge and her softly parted lips? Well, be damned to her, then, the purple-eyed bitch.
    He would do precisely that.
    Hepplewood got up again and kicked his chair halfway across the room.

 
    CHAPTER 2
    I sabella’s tears had run dry by the time she reached King’s Cross two days later. Indeed, they had dried before she’d left Northumbria, since she’d been obliged to put up another night at the damp coaching inn near Loughford in order to be hauled rather gracelessly in a farm cart down to Morpeth to catch the morning train.
    So much for Lord Hepplewood’s noblesse oblige, she thought bitterly. The man was a cad and a bully.
    But he was not quite a liar, was he?
    Isabella could still hear his rich, deep laughter ringing in her ears. Dear God, would she have kissed him?
    The truth was, she did not perfectly remember the moment when he’d seized her and lowered his mouth to hers. She could remember only the overwhelming strength of his grip and his warm scent drowning her. The sensation of her knees buckling beneath a wave of sudden longing. The shiver of his muscles as her hand went skating up his back.
    Stupid, stupid, stupid woman!
    Until that moment, she could have saved the situation. She was sure she could have done, for she’d needed that job so desperately.
    But then the man had tried to kiss her, and rather than hold the course, her bloody brain had gone to mush! She had proven his very point—that