Read It Happened One Midnight (PG8) for Free Online

that, if they’d missed him? Pretty sorry shooting, if you asked her.
    Now Jonathan Redmond . . . in all likelihood, given what she knew about him, he wouldn’t miss his target.
    A little half smile found its way onto her face. The cheek of the man. She liked cheek. She liked a man who spoke to her as if she was a person, an equal, as if she were in on the joke. There was a freedom in not wanting anything from each other, which so seldom happened between men and women.
    There was much to be wary of about him, too. For instance, those vast shoulders, and those cheekbones that called to mind battlements, so chiseled were they, all of which contrived to whip female heads around like compass needles. But she suspected it was something else . . . she would have called it a fine veneer of cynicism, a sort of detachment, as if he’d seen things that others had not, knew things that others did not . . . that lured females into dashing themselves on the allegedly rocky shoals of his heart.
    Not her, of course.
    She liked a little wariness. The rest of the men were so bloody predictable. And there was something about Jonathan Redmond that felt like the first breath of air drawn after you leave a crowded smoky room. She liked him. She supposed it wasn’t more complicated than that.
    “It’s a gift you share with your mother, my dear,” the Countess of Mirabeau told her. “Men like themselves better when they’re around you, it’s just that simple. And Carolina, rest your dear mother’s soul, attracted a duke for a reason. Perhaps you’ll do the same.”
    As it turned out, the genteelly poor countess—who repaid a good turn done her by Tommy’s mother by taking in hand the fiercely clever, vivacious, half-feral scrap of a girl she’d been after her mother died, and done her best to polish her—had been right. Tommy had rapidly become the chief attraction at the countess’s Wednesday salons near Hanover Square. And it wasn’t as though Tommy didn’t enjoy the salons and all the male attention. And it wasn’t as though she’d never occasionally indulged her sensual curiosity and hot blood. But when she lost her virginity to a gorgeous boy who had promptly disappeared, Tommy’s native pragmatism—surely she hadn’t inherited that from her mother—put a stop to further indulgence. It was terrifyingly easy to be swept up in a current of desire. And she wasn’t about to live the way her mother had lived, or suffer her mother’s fate.
    And yet the money from the occasional, modest, serendipitous win at a hand of cards, and the shilling or two the countess occasionally pressed into her palm dwindled quickly. And though she was accustomed to challenge, the challenge to survive was ceaseless and wearing.
    And then the gift of pearls had arrived. Another way in which she was in just a bit over her head. They could very well represent the answer to all of her troubles. They most definitely represented another decision she would have to make. And soon. It wasn’t one she relished making.
    She shied away from it for the moment.
    Because thanks to something Jonathan Redmond had said, she’d just realized there might be another option.
    She stared down at the little charcoal letters and reread them, and the bands of muscle in her stomach tightened, and an additional beat seemed to join the rhythm of her heart.
    Ah, bloody hell. She was going to do it. There was no question that it was what she was born to do. That she couldn’t live with herself if she didn’t.
    She was forced to admit, however, that for the first time since it had all started . . . she was a little afraid.
    The problem was, she’d begun to think about it. And once you did that, you were sunk, she knew. Once when she was very little, she’d been able to walk the narrow stair rail in this very building, one tiny foot carefully placed in front of the other, arms outflung for balance like a circus performer. The very moment she’d begun to exult in