Read White Regency 03 - White Knight for Free Online Page B

one side of the house to the
other without notice. It would indeed serve her purposes very well. She started
walking, hoping to find a doorway that would lead her to the parlor. Halfway
down the length of the hall, however, the door she had come through suddenly
closed behind her. What followed was the rather disquieting sound of the latch
being turned on it. Oh, dear, she thought, this wasn’t at all a good thing.
    Grace stood a moment in the dark,
contemplating her next move. She had but two options. She could go back and
knock on the door in hopes of summoning someone, but then she’d be no closer to
finding her uncle than she had been when she’d started. Even worse, she would
look very foolish for having gotten herself locked into a servants’ corridor.
Her other option, of course, was to proceed a bit further down the passageway
to see where she might end up.
    Grace prudently chose the latter.
    With one hand against the wall to guide
her, she made her way slowly in the darkness. But there didn’t seem to be any
openings at all, just smooth wall along a corridor that seemed only to grow
blacker with each step she took. She stumbled on some stairs and slowly she
made her way up. At the top of the steps, she flattened both hands against the
wall, moving along until, blessedly, her fingers found an opening in the wall.
It seemed to be some sort of panel. Grace felt around the edge of it, but could
find no mechanism, nothing that might release it. She listened but didn’t
hear any sound coming from the other side. She tried to fit her fingers around
the outside edge, but the seal was too tight. So Grace placed her palm flat
against the panel and gave it a push. The upper corner seemed to give a bit, so
she slid her hands upward and gave it another try, and then another, this time
putting the weight of herself against it and—
    The panel gave way and Grace tumbled
through headfirst, landing with a thud on her hands and knees. The fall set the
weight of her coiffure forward. She looked through the fallen mass of curls to
see the polished toes of a pair of boots standing directly in front of
her—boots that were most assuredly attached to a body.

Chapter Five
    Grace
drew her breath and held it as she looked up past long legs and a trim waist to
a chest that was both broad and—
    —Bare. Surely this couldn’t be real. He couldn’t be real. Grace blinked, but he did not vanish. Good God, it was real.
    “This is certainly a first.”
    His voice was deep and rich and he had the
most startling pair of eyes she’d ever before seen. They were silvery blue and
the way they were looking at her so candidly made her feel as if it was she who
was unclothed, not he. Grace had never before seen a man in any state of
undress and was appalled to find herself staring at the muscles that lined his
abdomen as he took up his shirt and slipped his arms inside.
    “Oh my goodness!” was all she
could manage to say. Her next mistake was in wondering how the situation could
possibly get worse.
    She soon had her answer.
    “I suppose, given the circumstances,
I should introduce myself,” he said as he fastened the buttons on his
shirtfront. “I am Lord Knighton, your host this evening. And this”—he
smiled, a half-grin that was anything but warm—“is my dressing room. But
then you already knew that, didn’t you?”
    Good God—of all the dressing rooms she
could have fallen into in this vast house, how had she managed to choose his?
With anyone else, she could quickly beg their pardon and leave, knowing she
would likely never see them again. But this was the man she was supposed to
marry, the man who didn’t yet realize that the woman who had just come
tumbling through his dressing room wall was his intended bride. Could she dare
to hope he would forget this night and this meeting within the next fortnight?
    The marquess turned and folded his
neckcloth with an ease Uncle Tedric would have applauded, all the while staring
at her