Read The Elusive Lord Everhart: The Rakes of Fallow Hall Series for Free Online Page B

what mischief looked like. The only thing was, she didn’t understand the reason behind his.
    “Yes. We’ve been introduced,” she said with trepidation. Crossing the threshold, she didn’t know if Everhart’s resentment toward her had lessened since their last encounter, nearly five years ago at Bath.
    The man in question was now bent at the waist and playing tug-of-war with a monstrously large dog over a baguette. The lean, gray beast gave a low growl, but the ferocity of it was undermined by his wildly thumping tail.
    On the opposite end of the loaf, Everhart’s scowl was genuine. Beneath a crown of short-cropped flaxen hair, his tawny brows drew together. The sharp angles of his nose, cheekbone, and jaw appeared hard as granite, and faint crescent-moon lines tightened the flesh at the corners of his well-defined mouth. Even in anger, it was impossible to dispute the fact that he was the most handsome man in all of England. Perhaps even the world.
    Then again, she’d always had a foolishly romantic view of the world.
    The exchange between man and beast only lasted a minute, each straining for a baguette that surprisingly did not give way. Everhart’s dark blue evening coat did nothing to disguise the lean musculature of his shoulders, arms, back, and even farther down to the outline of his thighs straining against the dove gray breeches and to his calves—
    Seeing the thick splint encasing his lower leg, she started.
    “You’re injured,” she said, her voice louder than she expected. Loud enough to draw Everhart’s attention and cause him to lose the battle.
    The dog scrambled back and then gave the loaf a vigorous shake, the ends of his short floppy ears swaying. On the floor between them was an empty silver platter, a knife, and a hunk of blue-veined cheese.
    “Everhart’s a veritable invalid,” Rafe Danvers said with a laugh. “So much for our evening snack, though.”
    Calliope couldn’t look away from the man across the room. She felt . . . arrested more than alarmed, as if every one of her organs had ceased functioning. Her breathing halted. Her heart sputtered. Her eyes could no longer blink. She simply stood there, staring at the splint and then up to those blue-green eyes. Eyes that had once shown her so much censure for refusing his friend’s proposal. Those eyes did not hold censure now but something equally as intense, though she could not name it.
    “Miss Croft,” Everhart said by way of greeting, his voice low and clipped. His gaze snapped to Danvers with what looked to be annoyance, and then back to her. “I trust you’ve found your cousin well?”
    She nodded, and with that simple motion, her heart started to beat again and her lungs expanded. “I have, thank you. It was very kind of you to allow her and her husband sanctuary here for her recuperation. Especially when it is apparent that you require rest as well.”
    “It is nothing—more nuisance than injury.” He waved in a gesture of dismissal. “I apologize for the state of the room and for the loss of the ‘evening snack,’ as Danvers said. We have made it somewhat a habit to have our bread and cheese here in the evening. While the bread is usually inedible, the cheese is quite—”
    The instant he said the word, the dog loped over, snatched the large hunk with his teeth, and gobbled it up in no more than two bites. Then, as if in thanks, the gray beast nudged Everhart’s hand with his nose, earning an absent scratch behind the ears.
    “He rather likes cheese.” Everhart shrugged, his tone no longer clipped but instead laced with the easy fluidity that one adopted with friends. She liked this far more than his censure.
    Her lips drew up into a smile. “Apparently. What is his name?”
    “So far, he has four: Boris, Reginald, James, and Brutus. The last was given to him by your aunt when she’d caught him in the vicinity of her small dogs and summarily declared him a brute.”
    Calliope could easily imagine the