Mistress of Scandal (Greentree Sisters 3)

Francesca stretched out on her front, trying to spread her weight evenly over the quivering ground. She secured one end of her cloak beneath her. “Are you ready?”

His hand was outstretched, fingers spread wide. “Do it.”

She flung it.

He caught it. Just as the branch finally snapped in two. He clung to her cloak with both hands. With a grunt of effort, he twisted the woolen cloth around his arm, so that it was tightly drawn between them.

He grinned at her without humor. “My life is in your hands.”

Francesca tried to think of some clever retort, but she was beyond it. Besides, she wasn’t sure she could save him. She was tall and strong for a woman, but he was a big man. Then Wolf tugged at her skirts with his teeth, doing his best to pull her back to safety, and she knew this was the moment. It was now or never.

“Now!” Francesca shouted, and began to haul on the makeshift rope, moving back as she pulled him in like a huge fish.

Dear God, he was heavy! Her muscles burned; her arms felt as if they were being torn from their sockets. The mire made that awful sucking sound again, as if it were loath to give up its prey.

“I’m moving,” he gasped, and when she looked into his face she saw the strain, a mirror of her own, his lips drawn back into a snarl. His dark eyes glittered. “Pull harder!”

Francesca, who was sure she couldn’t pull any harder, pulled harder. She came up onto her knees, and then her feet.

His hips came free. He wriggled wildly, and now his thighs were free, and then his knees, and he was crawling toward her. Francesca gave a last tremendous heave and found herself stumbling backward, onto the area of solid ground that Wolf had found for her. The stranger was moving toward her, so quickly that there was no possibility of his sinking.

His body knocked hard against hers. As she fell, he fell on top of her. They landed together, and all the breath went out of her. He was heavy and warm, and he was covered in wet mud. She was aware of his chest heaving up and down, violently, pressing to hers. He’d dropped his face to her shoulder, and now he began to shake. In the back of her mind she could hear Wolf barking, crazy with excitement, but he seemed far away. Everything seemed so far away.

That was when Francesca realized she was going to faint—there were black dots forming in front of her eyes. Perhaps she said it aloud, because abruptly his weight was lifted from her. She drew in a great gulp of air. A large hand gripped her chin, holding her face up.

“Better?” he asked, examining her with an intensity that unnerved her.

Francesca looked up into his eyes. She still felt light-headed, and the question just popped into her head. “What did you mean?” she said. “When you said, ‘It’s you’?”

“When I said…?”

“The first time you saw me, you said, ‘It’s you.’”

He shook his head. “I don’t know why I said it. I was dreaming, I think. I’ve been imagining things alone here in the dark. I thought I’d imagined you.”

He was telling the truth. She read it in his eyes. Dark eyes, black as pitch, whereas her own were a warm brown. He lifted his face to the sky, and she realized it was raining lightly, washing the mud away. He helped it along by scrubbing his hands over his skin, and then shaking his hair like a dog, sending droplets of mud and water in all directions.

“That’s better,” he said at last, and looked down at her again.

His hair was longer than the fashion, and stuck out wildly from the shaking he’d just given it. He was so close that she could see every feature, every line, from the scratch on his unshaven jaw—the sort of strong, uncompromising jaw that a man who had kept himself alive all night in Emerald Mire would have—to his blunt nose, and the dark brows that slashed so boldly across his forehead. His mouth was thinned, tightly closed, as if he kept secrets, but there were faint lines at the edges, as if he had once smiled a great deal.

Energy and vitality seemed to spark from him. Francesca thought he was one of the handsomest men she had ever seen in her life, but he would not be to everyone’s taste. He was far too dark and dangerous. If he were a character in a novel, he wouldn’t be the hero, oh no.

This man would be the villain.

It occurred to her that neither of them had spoken a word for some time. Was he examining her as she was him? The idea made her squirm. Francesca valued personal privacy, and she had the sense that this man’s bold dark eyes could strip her bare.

Naked.

As if the word was a switch, she became aware of the heavy heat of him on her. Although he was using his forearms to take some his weight, there was barely any space between their upper bodies, and his legs lay half on hers and half on her skirts, pinning her beneath him. It was the closest she’d ever been to a man, and she should be protesting and demanding he remove himself at once. But the words wouldn’t form in her head; she couldn’t summon up the will to speak them. She felt languid, sensual, as if she might reach up and slip her arms around his neck, and pull his mouth down to hers.

A tingle of dismay made her catch her breath.

To kiss this dangerous stranger in the middle of a storm on the moors was surely the ultimate in shocking behavior? Worthy of Aphrodite herself! And that was why Francesca couldn’t let it happen…must not let it happen.

“We need to find shelter before the weather gets worse,” she blurted out, trying to wriggle out from under him. “You’ll catch your death.”

“After what I’ve been through, a little rain doesn’t seem worth worrying about,” he said, not moving an inch. There was a glint in his eyes, and she knew then that he was thinking of kissing, too. She licked her lips, and his gaze narrowed. His breath was warm and slightly ragged against her skin. “I’m alive, thanks to you.”