The Improper Wife Read Free Page B

straightened her posture. “John Grayson is my husband. You most certainly are not.”
    He laughed, the sound malevolent. “Indeed I am not.”
    Maggie wrapped the shirt he’d given her more tightly around her body. “Tell me where my husband is.”
    “Tell me
who
he is and perhaps I may do so.” In a mimicking gesture, he folded his arms across his wide chest.
    “I told you who he is. Who are you?” She met his insolent gaze. He stood at the foot of the bed, each hand gripping a bedpost. His bulk loomed over her.
    He let go of the posts and snapped to attention, a sneer on his lips. “John Grayson, Captain, 13th Light Dragoons.”
    The 13th Light Dragoons was John’s regiment. How could this man mock her so? Had John discovered her presence in London? Was this his ploy to prevent her finding him? Surely, he would not be that cruel. “You lie.”
    His eyes threw sparks. “If one of us is a liar, it is you, madam.”
    Maggie clamped her mouth shut. He was too deftly throwing her words back into her face, and she must not let him see the panic deep within her belly. She would proceed more cautiously. This imposter could be anyone, a gambler, thief—a murderer, like she’d thought herself until reading John’s name.
    “Do you know what I think?” he asked.
    She turned her face away and gazed upon the spare furnishings of the room, the bureau cluttered with his belongings. A cracked mirror. Clothing strewn about.
    He leaned down close to her face. “I think you are playing a rum game, madam. You knock on my door. Drop your baby into my hands, then blink those big blue eyes at me and expect me to believe you are searching for a husband who has my name.” His eyes flashed. “Cut line.”
    Maggie rose to her knees on the bed, bending toward him, forcing herself to stare directly into his flinty eyes, no matter how piratical they appeared. “I did not choose to have my baby in this place. With you.”
    Their gazes held.
    He drew back abruptly. Tapping his fingers to his lips, he paced to and fro, stopping again in front of her. “Madam, why were you required to search for your husband? Should he not have been by your side at this . . . delicate time?”
    Maggie made a pretense of checking the sleeping baby, remembering precisely why she must search for her husband.
    “Did he know of the child?”
    She shook her head, and mentally kicked herself for revealing so much.
    She’d been so foolish to marry John. As green as grass. All too ready to believe the first pretty words spoken to her. At the time a secret marriage had sounded so romantic.
    She’d grown wiser since.
    She lay back and ran her finger over the baby’s downy head. One thing she did not regret was this baby. She would never regret him. He was her family, her only family.
    Gray stood with hands on his hips, watching her. A street hawker’s song, “White turnips and fine carrots ho! White turnips and fine carrots ho!” sounded in his ears. What he would not give to walk straight out his door and lose himself in the throngs of peddlers, beggars, merchants, and thieves filling the nearby streets, to put distance between him and this woman who tempted him with her eyes and connived to cause him to assume responsibility for her.
    There was no husband, of that he was certain, though there obviously was a man who fathered the child. She was too clever by half, with this story of searching for a husband. How the devil she came upon his name was the mystery. And why the devil did she think she could twist him in her coil? Her trick was worse than any Lansing had masterminded during their days in the Peninsula.
    He trod over to the table, picked up the bottle of brandy, and shook it. No use. “Deuce,” he muttered.
    He glanced back at his unwelcome guest. She sat up and wrapped her arms around her bended knees, staring into the distance. With her dark curls tumbling about her shoulders she looked like a man’s fantasy. Her skin was smooth and pale as