Valentine Read Free Page A

as before. Rolling over, she sat up, squinting at him against the sun. “We shoots trespassers in these parts, too. An’ you’re on Belmont land … boundary’s just beyond those trees.” She gestured with an outflung arm.
    “If I am trespassing, I’ll lay odds I’m in good company,” he said, his eyes narrowing as he examined her face. A gamine face, brown as a berry, with a pointed chin and small, straight nose. A fringe of black hair wisped on a broad forehead over a pair of large pansy-blue eyes. Quite an appealing little gypsy.
    She merely shrugged and scrambled to her feet, shaking down the folds of her coarse linen smock, tossing the heavy black plaits over her shoulders. “Not your business what I do. You’re not from these parts, are you?”
    She was standing with her bare feet slightly apart, her hands resting on her hips, and there was a distinct challenge to her stance and the tilt of her head. He wondered if it was unconscious—her habitual way of viewing the world. It amused him. And she really was quite an appealing gypsy.
    He stepped toward her, smiling, reaching out a hand to catch her chin. “No, I’m not, but I’ve a mind to become better acquainted with them … or rather with their Romanys.” His hand tightened and he brought his mouth to hers.
    The Earl of Stoneridge never fully understood what happened next. One minute he was standing upright, his lips pressed to hers, the sun-warmed scent of her skin in his nostrils, the firm line of her jaw in his palm, and the next he was lying on his back in the stream. Someone had instructed the gypsy poacher in the martial arts.
    “Rat … cur …,” she yelled at him as she stood on the edge of the bank, dancing on her toes, her eyes almost black with outrage. “That’ll teach you, you filthy toad … tryin’ to take advantage of an honest girl. You come near me again and I’ll cut your—”
    The rest of the tirade was lost in an indignant screech as he lunged off the bed of the stream, braceleting her bare ankles with finger and thumb. A violent jerk and she thumped onto her backside onto the hard ground. She yelled, grabbing at tufts of mossy grass, trying to save herself as he yanked her off the bank until she was sitting, hissing and spitting, in the thick mud of the shallows.
    Sylvester stood up, glaring down at the livid girl. “Sauce for the goose, my girl,” he declared. “Whoever taught you to wrestle omitted to teach you not to crow too soon.” He dusted off his hands in a gesture that he realized was futile and squelched out of the stream, clambering onto the bank.
    The girl picked herself up out of the mud. “Don’t you call me ‘your girl’!” she yelled, gouging a lump of mud from the bank and hurling it at his retreating back. It caught him fullbetween his shoulders, and he swung round with a bellow of anger.
    She had scrambled onto the bank, and there was murder in her eyes. He looked at the sodden, mud-smothered figure all set to do battle in whatever fashion presented itself, and suddenly he burst out laughing as the absurdity of the situation hit him.
    He was soaked to the skin, his boots full of water and probably ruined beyond repair, all because that bedraggled bantam took exception to a kiss. How was he to have guessed that a gypsy girl would react with all the outrage of a vestal virgin?
    He threw up his hands in a gesture of appeasement. “Let’s declare honors even, shall we?”
    “Honor?” she spat at him. “What do you know of honor?”
    The laughter died in his eyes and his body became rigid, his hands dropping to his sides, curling into fists.
    You
stand accused of dishonoring the regiment. How do you answer, Major Gilbraith?
    He stood again in the crowded courtroom at Horseguards, heard again the dreadful hush from the benches of his fellow officers of His Majesty’s Third Dragoons, felt again the gimlet eyes of General, Lord Feringham, presiding over the court-martial. How had he answered?
Not