Read Linda Needham for Free Online Page A

seen him since then?”
    She shook her head. “He tells me very little about what he does and where he goes. He says that I’m safer if I don’t know.” She blinked her huge eyes at him, the innocent green of springtime, fringed by spiky, gold-tipped lashes. “ Am I safer, my lord?”
    “Great God, madam, look at yourself. You’re standing in a magistrate’s office, manacled and in your nightgown, defending an indefensible husband, and you can ask such a question?”
    She stiffened and frowned at him, in full possession of her earlier outrage, her voice huskyand low. “Do you intend to torture me just to discover that I know nothing?”
    His head had begun to ache, right at the base. This was still careening out of his control.
    “How long have you been married, madam?”
    Her face crumpled suddenly, and she swabbed her sloppy eyes with her sleeve, nearly clouting herself with the shackle.
    “Two months, my lord.”
    Two bloody months. Bloody hell, now he was nursemaid to the muddled heart of a newlywed bride deserted by her unworthy swine of a husband. More weeping and wailing, a gushing spigot of emotion. As though she were—
    Holy hell! A wildfire swept and through his chest, a jealous outrage that filled him with horror.
    “Are you with child, madam?”
    She dropped her hands and stared at him, wild-eyed. “Me?” It was a yelp, obviously an idea that the woman hadn’t yet entertained.
    Great Christ, he hoped to hell she knew where babies came from. The guilty thought pulled his attention to the young boy asleep upstairs, and to the unprovable claim on his name.
    He couldn’t remember a night that had disintegrated so swiftly and surely. Triumph turned to absurdity. He’d captured not Spindleshanks at all but the man’s magnificently unruly wife, who’d only stirred up more questions with every new answer.
    And there were boxes and barrels of questions waiting for him to unravel in his library. He’d be days sorting through it.
    Days and nights with Miss Hollie Finch MacGillnock.
    Bloody hell! “Come,” he said, starting for the door.
    “No.” She plunked her lovely backside down on top of his desk, stuck her shackled hands primly into her lap, and thrust out her defiant chin. “I’m not saying another word to you or taking another step until you’ve released me as you promised you would.”
    “I can’t do that quite yet.”
    “Then I’m staying right here.”
    “Like it or not, madam, since you refuse to tell me the whereabouts of your husband, you and I have an appointment in the library.”
    “I told you I don’t know where he is.”
    He stalked back to her. “Then you haven’t thought hard enough, Miss Finch.”
    He had intended only to lift her onto his shoulder and carry her off to find the key to the manacles, but her waist was small and curved exactly for his hands, and her breasts were shockingly warm beneath the flannel as they tucked themselves neatly inside the arc of his thumbs. So perfectly weighted, so buoyant, that his heart took off like a New Year’s rocket.
    “How dare you, sir!”
    How, indeed?
    “I’m a married woman!”
    “You’ve made that eminently clear.” He bent his knees and hauled her lightness up over his shoulder, trying not to think about the shapely, flannel-covered derriere that loomed at his cheek.
    “I’m going to scream.”
    “Please do.” Then he wouldn’t be thinking quite so precisely about her wriggling, or how he could manage to spend another moment conducting an interview with her dressed for bed, while he imagined her in his own, writhing beneath his hands, begging for his touch.
    Bloody hell! He gritted his teeth and then shouted, “Mumberton!” as he reached the hallway with his comely baggage and her threats.
    “My husband will come after you for manhandling me, Everingham.”
    “That’s a chance I’ll have to take.” It also sparked an astounding idea—an unsavory strategy that just might bring Spindleshanks finally to