Read Online The Wild One by Danelle Harmon - Free Book Online Page A

touching Juliet's sleeve as they
walked side by side. "He can be a monster even at the best of
times, but he's been particularly bad-tempered ever since Lady
Hartfield tried to blackmail him into marriage last month. Needless
to say, my brother does not have the highest opinion of women at
the moment! But never mind. Would you like to say good night to
Gareth before you retire for the evening?"
    Still reeling from the thought of sleeping
in Charles's bed, Juliet was caught by surprise. "I, uh...."
    Lady Nerissa mistook the reason for her
hesitation. "It would make him very happy, I think," she prodded
softly.
    "But is it proper?"
    "Of course. I shall be with you."
    She beckoned Juliet to follow her and,
skirts whispering over ancient stone, led her up a flight of stairs
so magnificent and wide that five people standing arm to arm could
have climbed them with room to spare.
    At their top was a long, paneled corridor
with several doors leading off it. From behind one of them came a
drunken verse of song and an answering roar of laughter.
    Without hesitation, Lady Nerissa pushed the
door open and the guffaws immediately stopped.
    " Gentlemen? " she said, stressing the
word in a way that led one to think she didn't consider the
inhabitants of the room to be such at all. "I have a visitor to see
Gareth. Behave yourselves."
    She opened the door wide for Juliet,
motioning her forward.
    Hesitantly, Juliet stepped over the
threshold and paused just inside. The room was velveted in gloom
and shadow. Ornately plastered ceilings rose some fifteen feet
above her head. A few burned-down candles, their tongues of flame
swaying in the drafts, struggled to give the huge chamber light.
Juliet blinked, trying to adjust her eyes to the rich dimness.
    And then she saw Lord Gareth's friends,
lying about the bedroom in various states of repose — Chilcot,
perched on a window seat, his forefinger stuck in an empty bottle
and swinging it back and forth; Perry, sprawled in a damask-backed
chair with his waistcoat unbuttoned, his cravat askew, and a bleary
smile on his handsome face. The names of the others had escaped
her. There was the one with the big nose, his eyes bloodshot
beneath the straggles of wavy brown hair that had escaped his
queue; the one who was as wide and burly as a draft horse, flat on
his back and snoring, his wig looking like a dead rat on the floor
beside his head; a third, thin and cocky, hiccuping drunkenly and
saluting Juliet with his bottle: "To the lady ... hic ! ...
o' the hour!"
    And Lord Gareth de Montforte.
    He lay propped against a mountain of
brocaded pillows in a massive bed of carved oak, his hair tousled,
a sheet drawn loosely over his bare torso, a sleepy little smile
flirting with one corner of his mouth. His gaze lifted to Juliet,
and for the second time that night, her hand went to her heart to
still its sudden wild palpitations.
    Beneath that sheet she knew he was
naked.
    It was suddenly too hot in the room. It was
suddenly too hard to breathe. Juliet felt every part of her that
made her a woman go up in flames, thrumming and tingling in wild
response to the sight he made against the bedsheets and pillows.
She would have turned and fled had Lady Nerissa not been standing
just behind her.
    Candlelight made his skin glow like honey,
bathing his upper body in warmest gold. It picked out the hollows
created by bone, sinew, and beautifully honed muscle, flowed over
the taut bulges of his upper arms and the base of his neck. Whorls
of brown hair brushed his chest, but in the kiss of the bedside
candle, each one glinted a mellow gold, as did the stubble just
hazing his jaw. As he looked up at Juliet her knees went suddenly
weak, for he had a certain, lethal charm that even Charles could
not have matched. The thought — and her own physical reaction to
the seductive picture he made against those sheets and pillows —
made her feel oddly guilty, as though she was betraying the man she
loved. She swallowed,