Read Charlotte Boyett-Compo- WayWard Wind for Free Online Page B

had enough clout to negotiate a society match for his son?” She opened the oven to put the biscuits in.
    "Sloannie's grandpa was a Duke or something of the kind," Snake said.
    Harper growled as he bent forward to take off his boots. "You talk too much, old woman."
    "Your father was a member of the royalty?" Peyton inquired.
    "From the wrong side of the blanket, aye," Harper snapped. "He was the bastard son of Lord Edward Ferguson, the Duke of Warenstone. He came here to get away from all that crap and especially away from the sixty-four year old woman my grandfather was trying to tie him to."
    "How old was he?"
    "Twenty-four."
    "But he must have eventually gone back to Scotland with his bride since you were born ...."
    "My Anna-Lucia never married Gilbert Harper," Snake said. "Sloannie is just as much a bastard as was his father."
    "She wouldn't marry him," Harper said, a muscle flexing in his jaw. "You know that."
    "Yeah and you know why!" Snake threw at him before hiking herself up and stomping out of the cabin, slamming the door behind her.
    Peyton watched Harper set his boots beside the fireplace. He was scowling fiercely so she left him alone as he leaned back in the rocker and stared up at the ceiling. Though she tried not to show it, she was afraid of him. He was a dangerous man and what he had done to her in the cave—even if it had been something she had secretly desired for many years—had been wrong and despite what he'd said, it had been rape.
    She stared at him, thinking no phantom man of dreams who had scaled the balcony to take her could have ever been as handsome in her imagination as Sloan was in the flesh. Since she had wanted to be deflowered—although if truth were told not in the way he'd gone about it—she could have done much worse in her violator.
    His hair was midnight black and curled lightly and thickly around his head. He wore it long to his collar and she could well imagine him tying it back with a leather thong when the mood struck. His eyes were a pale hazel green color that darkened noticeably when he was angered. A dark tan that set off the stark whiteness of his teeth only added to the allure of his purely masculine face. With broad shoulders, muscular arms and a chest that had just the right about of hair darkening it, he was a superb male specimen. Thinking back on how his bare chest had looked, she thought of the way a boarding school friend had described the ideal male chest ....
    "The man must have a moderate amount of chest hair that grows just beneath the Suprasternal notch and across his collarbones. Just enough to run your fingers through. Let it taper nicely over his pectoral muscles and then arrow down into that sweet little tiger line that disappears below the waistband of their pants. Then it should return to full glory across the pelvic arch."
    Sloan was a perfect example of what Dawn had described and then some.
    She frowned sharply as she remembered his poor, ravaged back and her heart ached. How that must have hurt him. The scars were vicious and they crossed his back in wide stripes that would have taken days--if not weeks--to fully heal.
    "What are you thinking, wench?" he asked her and she noticed his brogue was more pronounced.
    She shook her head to clear it of the image of his torn flesh. "Nothing," she said and put a lid on the pot of stew.
    “You looked like you were about to cry,” he accused.
    “I wasn’t.”
    “If you are worried about bearing a child out of wedlock, you need not be,” he told her.
    Peyton’s forehead creased. “I don’t understand what you mean.”
    “I mean we’ll be saying our marriage vows as soon as I can get you to a priest.”
    She stared at him. “What did you say?”
    “I didn’t stutter, wench,” he snapped. “I’ll not have a child of mine born illegitimate like his father and his father before him was. That’s a curse I wouldn’t wish on any child.”
    She came over to him and took the rocker beside him. “We