Oxford Whispers

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Book: Read Oxford Whispers for Free Online
Authors: Marion Croslydon
naked body covering her was enough to send shivers down her spine.
    His tongue tickled her lips, but she resisted. Impatient, he grabbed and lifted her against him.
    She opened her eyes and stared into … the dark blue of his. Not dark brown as she had expected. Her mind registered his face, his features, as fragments of a satellite image.
    When she knew who the man lying on top of her was, she woke up.
    Sitting in her Oxford single-bed, her hand on her chest to calm her elevated pulse, Madison cursed herself.
    Dreaming of sex with her young history tutor would have been disturbing enough, but Rupert Vance had no right invading her dreams.
     
    “DON’T WORRY, HE’LL come. The dude has too much to lose.” Ollie tried to reassure Madison.
    They’d been waiting for ten minutes in the morning gloom, Madison pacing on St. Aldate’s pavement, Ollie flicking through the pages of his book with his black curls falling over his eyes.
    It was colder than a well-digger’s butt in Dakota.
    And if that wasn’t enough, Miss Lindsey stared at them from the porter’s lodge.
    “We agreed he’d pick us up at nine.” Madison got a faint smile back from Ollie, one that said “I wish the girl would shut up.”
    She had a packed agenda for the day, going through the personal diaries of Godfrey Dallembert, the first earl of Huxbury, a benefactor of the arts in the seventeenth century.
    No way was she going to let that English brat compromise her first chance at proving Doctor McCain what a damn good research assistant she could be.
    “He has my cell number. At least the idiot could have called me. I’m calling him now .”
    “Calm down.”
    But Madison didn’t want to calm down . She hadn’t yet recovered from her bike accident yesterday, her skinned elbow a sore reminder of the ghost she’d bumped into.
    She forgot about the itching when Ollie’s wideset puppy eyes popped out of their sockets. Madison followed his gaze.
    Rupert had arrived. So had his car.
    “What the hell,” she muttered, “How are we going to …”
    “A Morgan Roadster,” Ollie interrupted.
    She turned toward him with a frown. “It’s a two-seater. There are three of us.” But this detail didn’t seem to bother her friend. Saliva almost dropped from his gasping mouth.
    Madison crossed St. Aldate’s, blind to the traffic. From behind the wheel, Rupert’s smile spread from one ear to the other. She knocked at the window and he rolled it down.
    “You’re ten minutes late and when you turn up, it’s to show off your little toy.”
    He clasped his hands in a fake prayer, but Madison wasn’t going to be pushed around. “Is this a revenge on Doctor McCain for forcing you to take me to your family nest?”
    He bit his lower lip and apologized, his good humor now down by a notch. With a conscious effort, Madison took a deep breath. By the time she regained her composure, Ollie was by her side.
    “Which model?” he asked.
    “1991, 3L9 injection fully loaded.” Rupert chortled with the glee of owning this precious object, which meant oh-so-little to Madison.
    She interrupted their exchange on full-stock engines. “Only one of us can go today.”
    Rupert looked back and forth between Madison and Ollie. “Sorry. I forgot it was the two of you. It’s a genuine mistake.”
    Madison believed him, but she could have slapped his arrogant face on the spot. For the heck of it. Ollie didn’t seem to share her irritation, so she decided to cut him loose. “I’m sorry. Rupert will take you there another time. Won’t you, Rupert?”
    Without waiting for his answer, she walked around the car, opened the door and sat on the red leather passenger seat. She didn’t spare a glance for the wooden dashboard. Instead, she focused her eyes straight ahead on the road.
    “So it’s you and me together all day.” Rupert’s brow arched and snapshots from some old James-Bond movies flashed through Madison’s mind.
    “Don’t sit there like a frog on a log. Take

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