Free A Scoundrel by Moonlight by Anna Campbell

the same fatal weakness as her half-sister?
    Carefully she inched open the door to the marquess’s apartments. Although he was safely ensconced in his library, her heart skittered with fear that somehow he was in two places at once.
    She stepped into dark, cavernous space. She closed the door and raised her candle to reveal a sitting room, as masculine in décor as the marchioness’s was feminine. Flickering light glanced across a leather couch and two armchairs beside a cold hearth. Piles of books teetered on heavy mahogany tables. She’d lay money there wasn’t a novel among them. Light glinted off decanters on the sideboard.
    James Fairbrother’s presence was palpable, as though he stood right behind her. The muscles across her neck and shoulders knotted until she told herself to settle down. He was downstairs. She was safe, at least for now.
    She pushed open the door from the sitting room and entered a short corridor. Shelves lined the first room off the hallway. She inhaled to calm leapfrogging nerves, then wished she hadn’t. When had the marquess’s scent become so familiar? Her senses expanded with pleasure as she recognized sandalwood soap and clean, healthy male. Riffling through the clothes he wore on that strong, hard body seemed unforgivably intimate, and she fumbled the door shut with a loud click that made her heart jolt with alarm.
    Desperately listening in case someone came to check on the noise, she stood motionless.
    Nothing.
    She sucked air into starved lungs. Nell didn’t take easily to deceit. Sneaking around and eavesdropping and telling lies went against her character. Another reason to leave Alloway Chase sooner rather than later. Much more chicanery and she’d be a wreck.
    The next door revealed a bathing room of a luxury beyond anything she’d imagined when her world was confined to Mearsall. At last she found proof of sensual self-indulgence. The marquess presented a restrained façade to the world. Something at Nell’s deepest level insisted that beneath that proper exterior lurked a man who appreciated pleasure.
    The thought of James Fairbrother standing naked in this blue-tiled magnificence heated her blood. She couldn’t help seeing him as he doused himself with water, stroked soap along his wet skin, lounged in the huge bath.
    This time, although she closed the door carefully, panicnipped more sharply. Her invasion of the marquess’s rooms inflamed her senses in a way that appalled her.
    One door remained.
    Only her piercing need to run away made her proceed. If she failed at this hurdle, she was likely to fail altogether.
    As she opened this last door, her hands shook so violently that her candle cast wild shadows over the walls. She felt like Bluebeard’s bride breaking into the locked room. A discomfiting thought, as the nosy girl came to a nasty end in that tale. At least she did in the pragmatic version told around Mearsall’s firesides.
    The bedroom was so enormous that the candle’s light didn’t penetrate its far reaches. A fire burned in the grate, but the flames left most of the room in shadow. The room was circular with tall windows facing three directions. She must be in the castle’s west tower. Quietly she closed the door behind her.
    The huge four-poster bed sat on a dais, curtained in gold brocade. The ceiling was so high it dwarfed even this lofty structure. The covers were turned down, ready for the marquess’s powerful body. Nell shivered with a dread that, she was ashamed to admit, included a dollop of forbidden excitement.
    If she’d felt like she infringed the marquess’s privacy elsewhere in these apartments, here where he slept, he could be standing at her elbow. A book lay open on the nightstand as if he’d just laid it down. A shirt draped across a chair. A black velvet dressing gown as soft as panther fur spread across the base of the bed, waiting for its owner to shrug it over his long body. She could picture him wearing it as he enjoyed a last