Free I Kissed an Earl: Pennyroyal Green Series by Julie Anne Long Page A

now, whatever it was everyone had sensed in him in that ballroom that night but would never have been able to identify. Savage. Or so they’d said.
    He was studying her face for the impact of his words. “I daresay you haven’t the faintest idea to what I’m referring.”
    And that’s when delayed shock settled fully in. A sweep of ice, then heat, washed her limbs and then settled into her stomach. For God’s sake, of course she knew to what he was referring. Take her. Animalistically, he meant.
    She’d never heard it referred to quite as “work” before, however. She imagined the “ladies” at The Velvet Glove viewed it as such.
    “I do know ‘of what you’re speaking.’” She mimicked him icily. Or, rather, she’d tried for ice. Her voice emerged hoarse and shock-frayed.
    What an absurd thing to say. It sent his eyebrows upward mockingly.
    “Well, then. I do wonder what makes you think that I won’t take you, on a whim. Brute that I am. And so forth,” he said as though he were merely idly curious. His eyes belied the tone, however. Imperious, impersonal, cold anger.
    They stared at each other.
    “Savage,” she corrected absently, “is what they say.” She possessed enough wits at the moment to not address the rest of his sentence at all.
    He gaze increased in incredulity.
    She returned it warily, unblinkingly, with a penetrating interest that unbeknownst to her made her look remarkably like her brother Miles, the naturalist, when he peered at man-eating plants and crawling things in order to understand them. The Earl of Ardmay was showing no indication of being anything like any of the other men she’d ever known.
    “Is it that you are accustomed, Miss Redmond, to treating men either as pets or servants? I’m curious—which one of those did you suppose I’d be?”
    This gave her pause. She’d never thought about it quite in those terms. And when she realized he was very close to correct, a fresh bolt of shock and anger shivered down her spine. As though she’d suddenly caught him peering at her through a keyhole. This was an entirely new angle from which she could be viewed, and it was hardly a flattering one. Occasionally, she supposed, she treated the young men who naively hovered about her at balls rather the way she did insects at a picnic: their presence—in swarms—was integral to the festivities, though they honestly seemed to enjoy being figuratively swatted away, as long as she was the one doing the swatting.
    “Definitely not a pet,” she concluded tightly.
    His expression went so odd then she thought maybe, just maybe, he was struggling not to laugh. Either that, or he was tolerating a gastric pain.
    “Miss Redmond, it astounds me that I need to tell you this at all, but on the slim chance you might have a conscience, in paying my erstwhile crew member to board my ship you’ve done something…unconscionably rash and selfish. Your reputation of course precedes you, but you’ve inconvenienced my crew and me, no doubt worried your family and created all manner of scandal, and all on what? A lark, a whim, a—”
    Suddenly it was enough.
    “Not a lark,” she hissed.
    He froze for a gratifying instant. The silence gathered an ominous density. She stormed recklessly onward.
    “Rash—very well, I’ll grant you that. Impulsive? Oh, very good use of the word, Captain Flint. But not a lark. My brother Lyon, my father’s heir, disappeared more than a year ago. You can’t know what his loss has done to our family, but I will tell you: everyone pretends all is well, but it’s a quiet sort of devastation. And I suspect…I suspect you’re trying to find him, too. And it’s the first I’ve heard anything of him in ages.”
    “What the devil does that mean?”
    “It means I think my brother Mr. Lyon Redmond may be Mr. Hardesty. Or as you call him, Le Chat.”

Chapter 6
    A silence.
    “You think…” His expression was indecipherable. “Go on.”
    “At the ball, your