The Temptation of Your Touch Read Free

over the hill toward the village as if the Beast of Bodmin Moor were snapping at his heels. Since he had publicly sworn he would never again set foot on the property, she had anticipated he might sell the manor or foist it off on some unsuspecting relative. She just hadn’t expected it to be so soon.
    “And then there was the one before that,” Dickon reminded her.
    They’d barely avoided an official inquiry over that one. The village constable still looked at Anne askance when she did her shopping at market on Fridays, forcing her to don her most guileless smile.
    “That one wasn’t precisely our doing,” she reminded Dickon. “And I thought we all agreed we would speak of him no more. God rest his lascivious soul,” she muttered beneath her breath.
    “Well, if you ask me,” Dickon said darkly, “the rotter got just what he deserved.”
    “No one asked you.” Anne plucked the note from Dickon’s hand to give it a more thorough reading. “It seems our new master is to be a Lord Dravenwood.”
    Something about the very name sent a shiver of foreboding down Anne’s spine. Once, she might have recognized the name, would have known exactly who the gentleman’s mother, father, and second cousins thrice removed were. But the noblelineages immortalized between the covers of Debrett’s Peerage had long ago given way in her brain to more practical information, like how to beat a generation of dust out of a drawing-room rug or how to dress a single brace of scrawny partridges so they would feed ten hungry servants.
    She squinted, trying to read between the lines, but nothing in the letter from the earl’s solicitor gave a clue as to their new master’s character or whether the man would be arriving with a wife and half a dozen pampered bratlings in tow. With any luck he’d be some potbellied, gout-ridden sot in his dotage, already half-addled from decades of overindulging in too many overly rich plum puddings and after-dinner brandies.
    “Oh, no,” she whispered, dread pooling low and heavy in her breast as her gaze fell on the date neatly inscribed at the top of the page. A date she’d overlooked in her haste to read the rest of the letter.
    “What is it?” Dickon was beginning to look worried again.
    Anne lifted her stricken eyes to his face. “This letter is dated nearly a month ago. The post must have been delayed in reaching the village. Lord Dravenwood isn’t scheduled to arrive at the manor a week from today. He’s scheduled to arrive . . . tonight! ”
    “Bloody hell,” Dickon muttered. Anne might havechided him for swearing if his words hadn’t echoed her own feelings so precisely. “What are we going to do?” the boy asked.
    Gathering her scattered composure, Anne tucked the letter into the pocket of her apron, her mind working frantically. “Fetch Pippa and the others immediately. We haven’t a second to squander if we hope to give our new master the welcome he deserves.”

Chapter Three
    T HE JOURNEY TO HELL was much shorter than Max had anticipated. It seemed the abode of the damned wasn’t located in the stygian depths of the underworld but on the southwest coast of England in a wild and windswept place the unbelievers had christened Cornwall.
    As his hired carriage jolted its way across the stony sweep of Bodmin Moor, rain lashed at the conveyance’s windows while thunder growled in the distance. Max drew back the velvet curtain veiling the window, narrowing his eyes to peer into the night beyond. He caught a brief glimpse of his own scowling reflection before a violent flash of lightning threw the bleak landscape into stark relief. The lightning vanished as quickly as it had come, plunging the moor back into a darkness as thick and oppressive as death. Given how ridiculously overwrought the entire scene was, Max wouldn’t have been surprisedto hear the ghostly hoofbeats of King Arthur and his knights as a spectral Mordred pursued them or to see the Bodmin Beast, the phantom