Read The Reckless One for Free Online

against his naked skin, her body molded to his. Even now, while his mind unraveled the next few minutes into a hundred possible ends, his body was still preoccupied with hers.
    The minutes ticked by, the interior of the carriage grew warm with their shared heat. From outside came the clatter of an occasional passing vehicle, the sharp clink of shod hooves on cobbled streets, men’s voices, distant and muted.
    “Why were you so crude, so rough with me?” The stiff leather seat creaked as the girl shifted.
    Her sudden query surprised him. He’d been relaxed, simply enjoying her scent, her warmth, and the sight of her. She repeated her question grudgingly, her gaze anchored firmly outside. “Why were you so crude?”
    “The woman you impersonated
is
crude,” he said, perplexed. Surely she knew the sort of woman her aunt was, especially since she had used her proclivities so effectively to obtain his release.
    “But you touched me even when I made clear that I did not want it.”
    He was unsure of what she wanted and so remained silent, waiting.
    “Yet you speak well, in the accents of the aristocracy. Are you? Are you well-born? Is your crime against the well-born?”
    “Madame, is it not a bit late to be asking for a letter of introduction?” Raine asked, amused by her accusing tone.
    “Why were you in prison?” she blurted out, this time accompanying the question with an anxious glance. “Did you … did you assault some woman? An aristocratic lady?”
    She thought him a rapist? Ah well, the mistake had been made before. Still, at one time, he would have been affronted. He would have politely damned her to hell and proceeded to spend the night proving his irresistibility to the opposite sex.
    But yes, he supposed she would think that, given how he’d nearly forced himself on her earlier. He rubbed his cheek consideringly and for the first time in years he wondered what a mirror would reveal. He smiled and she misread his reaction, shrinking back against the cushions.
    “No,” he said to ease her fear, “I have never taken a woman against her will.”
    “Then”—she hesitated—“then why were you in prison?”
    “ ‘Political reasons,’ a phrase I give you leave to interpret into meaning someone hoped to profit by my incarceration.”
    “I don’t understand.”
    “And you an ambassador’s wife?” he taunted lightly; but she’d turned that disconcerting gaze upon him again and he answered with a small sigh, amazed at her seeming youth and perturbed by it.
    “What did you do?”
    “What didn’t I do?” he muttered, and then, “I was imprisoned because I could be and I was
kept
imprisoned because of some French bureaucrat’s fantasy that someday someone might ransom me.” He leaned closer and was rewarded by her faint, heady fragrance. “ ’Twixt we two, however, I can assure you that no one other than yourself would ever have found a reason to set me free. My thanks.”
    He smiled again, this time without rancor, suddenly heedful that, indeed, were it not for this woman he would not be sitting in a warm carriage, clean and clad, astonished by his unexpected freedom and fearful he might yet lose it.
    But instead of reassuring her, his smile seemed to make her even more anxious. The corners of her mouth dipped unhappily and her fingers worried each other in her lap. “You hated being caged.”
    He laughed this time, in spite of himself, and heard Jacques shift atop the carriage in response.
    “Rest easy, friend Jacques,” Raine called out in a low voice, “your mistress would play the wit. I simply appreciate her sallies.”
    He studied the girl. She looked fresh and vulnerable and, he allowed, a bit piqued that he’d laughed at her. Jacques was right to worry about her. Raine had once known a hundred men who would have feasted on such innocence as hers. They’d once been his boon companions.
    “Aye, Madame. I hated it. But never so much as now.”
    “Why is that?” She moved