Wicked Nights With a Lover by Sophie Jordan Page B

doing?” she demanded between chattering teeth. “You’ve ruined my dress.”
    “And, I imagine, your credibility. I don’t intend to risk you prattling on that I’ve abducted you. I’ve spent a time or two behind bars as a lad. It’s not an experience I relish repeating.”
    She sputtered, at a loss for words. Could he read minds? How had he conceived it was her intention to see him locked away?
    He continued, “Should you heap pleas upon sympathetic ears, I shall confess, to my shame, that I have a very drunken wife.” He mockingly clucked his tongue. “Have you ever heard of such a thing? Quite embarrassing. A sickness, really. I don’t know what to do with her.”
    “You wouldn’t dare!”
    In the gloom, he waved a hand over her person. “Oh, it’s quite done already, my love.”
    My love. The empty endearment puckered her skin to gooseflesh. The cad was a stranger, an utter malcontent. His potent voice and empty endearments should not stir her in any way.
    “No one would believe such drivel! I’m not a drunkard.”
    Taking hold of her arm again, he said lightly, “Why should this bother you so greatly? You promised you would hear me out and give us some time to become acquainted. Unless you lied and planned to escape me all along.”
    She snapped her lips shut, unwilling to admit that was precisely what she had hoped to do, and loathing that she should feel a flash of guilt.
    Her captor strode toward the inn, his long fingers looped around her wrist. She stumbled after him, trying to recover her composure and not appear the drunkard he sought to portray her.
    With the front of her gown soaked, she shivered as they entered the inn’s toasty confines. Still, she suspected her trembling had more to do with her anger than the cold wet.
    Stepping into the large well-lit room, she blinked like a mole emerging from the earth, searching, seeking a friendly face—someone who might aid her.
    Her gaze locked on a cheery-faced man, nearly as round as he was tall, waddling toward her at what must be quite the clipped pace for him. He wiped meaty hands on his apron, exclaiming, “Welcome, welcome, my fine friends!”
    Marguerite opened her mouth to declare the brute beside her the lowest scoundrel, an abductor of innocents. With those hot words burning on the tip of her tongue, she turned to face her accused, ready to condemn him before he bandied his lies about her.
    Mouth open, words hovering so close, she froze. Utterly robbed of speech, she stared.
    The hard lines of his face reflected her own surprise. Or was it horror?
    The innkeeper had reached them by now, but still they continued to gawk at one another. Her abductor’s dark eyes crawled over her as though he had never seen a female before.
    It was he. Him. The man from the St. Giles. “Courtland,” she whispered.
    “Marguerite,” he returned, mouthing her name so quietly she scarcely heard him.
    Now the bothersome effect of his rumbling voice made sense. It had been the same then, when he’d pressed his body to hers, when he’d touched her so intimately and had spoken near her ear. On some level, she must have recognized him. She must have known.
    “You,” she hissed. She shook her head as though dizzy, struggling to reconcile the scoundrel from St. Giles with this man who claimed to possess great wealth. Wealth enough to tempt her into matrimony—at least to his thinking.
    He blinked and whatever emotion she had awakened in him vanished. His dark gaze stared at her coolly, the light lost, dormant. Once again, he was in control.
    “Of course, my dear,” he soothed in the beleaguered voice of an afflicted husband. She followed his gaze to the watchful eyes of the innkeeper. “It’s always me. By your side.”
    Understanding at once that he was attempting to establish the pretense that they were married, she pulled her arm free in a wild jerk. “Oh, no you don’t,” Marguerite hissed in low tones. She lunged for the innkeeper, eager to