Read The Savage Miss Saxon for Free Online

of it. I can slink away and none will be the wiser. It certainly would save your bacon for you nicely,” she pointed out.
    “It’s too late for that, more’s the pity,” his lordship shot back rather nastily, “as Harold alone under my roof was enough to set the household servants buzzing around the village for a fortnight. Now that they know who you are—and let me assure you they do, as servants seem to know everything—there is no way I can dispose of you without someone thinking I have two bodies hidden under my azalea bushes.”
    This last exchange served to put an end to all talk between the two, and the inside of the carriage was once more reduced to a tense silence. It is possible this would have been the case for the remainder of the journey, except that as the carriage rounded a bend in the road that brought them for a few moments into a clearing where the view was not obstructed, Alexandra, who was once again staring out the off-window, caught sight of something that caused her to blink, stare, and then blink yet again.
    “If I didn’t know better, I’d say I just saw a castle,” she muttered under her breath. She was not so stupid as to think there were no castles left in England. In fact, she was sure there were dozens and dozens of them spread across the island. But this castle looked different from any of the others she had seen along her drive from the docks at Falmouth. As she caught another look at the building when they passed an opening in the trees, she realized what had struck her about this particular castle—all the other castles either had been in ruins or had been altered by additions or other improvements that had brought the buildings more in line with the nineteenth century. “It looks like something straight out of the Middle Ages!” she remarked, a bit of excitement in her voice.
    “I take it you have just caught sight of Saxon Hall,” Lord Linton observed matter-of-factly from his corner of the carriage.
    “It’s beautiful—simply beautiful!” Alexandra breathed, her dark eyes shining. “I would not be surprised to see the drawbridge come down and a knight in shining armor ride out to meet us. Oh, Chas never told me his home was a castle. A real castle! How could he have ever brought himself to leave it?”
    “I’d reserve judgment on Chas’s reasons if I were you,” Mannering broke in smoothly. “At least until you’ve had occasion to use the plumbing. It too is straight out of the Middle Ages.”
    Alexandra threw him a fulminating glance and was about to make some cutting remark when a loud blast on a yard of tin made her clap her hands over her ears. “What in thunder was that?” she yelled as the sound of the horn died away.
    “That bansheelike trumpeting is de rigueur when approaching Saxon Hall, madam. How else would Sir Alexander’s servants—I mean vassals—know to lower the drawbridge?”
    Alexandra allowed the Earl’s sarcasm to flow right over her head as she was at once caught up in the romance of having her arrival at Saxon Hall heralded by trumpets—or at least one trumpet. Leaning so far out the window she had hurriedly rolled down as to give Nicholas a much appreciated view of her rounded derrière and more than three inches of exposed ankle, she watched enraptured as the massive wooden drawbridge began its slow descent across a moat filled with some very green-looking water.
    Instantly, the sound made moments before by the coachman’s yard of tin was turned into a pleasant memory, as the ancient chains that held the drawbridge set up an earsplitting noise that sent shivers down her spine and made all the little hairs on her arms stand bolt-upright. She rapidly drew her head back inside the carriage, once more pressing her hands to her ears to block out all sound.
    “Did I forget to mention the fact that Sir Alexander has never been known as a stickler for upkeep?” Nicholas shouted above the din.
    “Oh, shut up!” Miss Saxon yelled back