Free The Earl is Mine by Kieran Kramer

recognition that she was all woman beneath her manly garb.
    “I might have,” she said, “but I wasn’t myself. I regret that now—a great deal, I assure you.”
    “ I don’t.” He enjoyed hearing her phony gasp. She knew damned well he didn’t regret it. “But I did think the whole deliciously wicked episode behind me.”
    “It wasn’t delicious!” she insisted.
    “Are you sure about that?” He stared her down a few heated seconds until she looked away. “As I was saying … I thought it was behind me, yet here you are, dressed as a man in my carriage when I’m on my way to a house party to which you’re not invited.”
    “If I’d known it was you—”
    “Don’t tell me you wouldn’t have gotten in. We both know your survival instincts outweigh your pride.”
    “Yes, they do—which is why I’d have run in the opposite direction had I known this was the Brady carriage. A haystack would have served me just as well till the storm died down.”
    “I’d like to throw you in a haystack right now and leave you there with your beloved field mice. It would serve you right.”
    She didn’t seem to hear him. “Damn my fragile sensibilities. They’re to blame. Seeing you made my heart lurch. In terror, of course. And just like in a bad dream, my knees turned to jelly—and I couldn’t run. Or I would have.”
    Imp. “Am I like Frankenstein, then?”
    “Nearly,” she said with enthusiasm tempered by agitation.
    Both were good to see. They meant the blood was flowing down to the tips of her toes. He yanked sharply on her sleeve—which seemed to get tighter and more slippery the more he worked on it—and refused to remark on her answer to the Frankenstein question.
    See what she made of that.
    “Well, you’re a man without a heart, at the very least,” she said into the silence. Was it guilt making her tone uncertain?
    “I am, aren’t I?” He gave a long pull, and the sleeve moved forward a good four inches. “Would that you never forget.” He stopped pulling and did his best to look as if he were the most menacing man on earth, one who’d crush her heart under his feet were she sorry enough to ever fall in love with him again.
    It was all true. So it wasn’t difficult.
    Her pupils widened, but he went straight back to work on her sleeves, pretending he hadn’t noticed the frisson of worry etched into her brow.
    “There,” he said when she was finally free.
    “Thank you.” She gave a little shiver. And no wonder. Beneath leather braces holding up her pantaloons, she was sheathed in a voluminous shirt that was also soaked through and clinging to her skin. Underneath that was a swath of white fabric binding her breasts.
    Too well, he couldn’t help thinking in the rakehellish recesses of his brain.
    She wrapped her arms around herself. “Please get behind the blanket again.”
    “Yes, madam.” He held the makeshift curtain back up. “Let’s finish this off promptly.”
    “Uncle Bertie’s trunks are filled with costumes,” she said, and then her voice came to him muffled: “I’ve played with them for years.” Her hands grappled with bunches of the shirt over her head, and then her head must have popped out because her next words were clear. “I’m rather expert,” she added proudly, and dangled the sodden garment over the top edge of the blanket, where it landed on the floor.
    As both his hands were occupied, he’d have to wait to shove the blasted thing under the seat. No use opening the door to wring it out, either—the sheets of rain came steadily on.
    “Unwind the band of cloth,” he said. “We’ll need to dry it out.”
    She paused. “I shouldn’t.”
    “You’ll be wearing a shirt and a coat, remember.”
    “True,” she said hopefully. “And it’s not as if I’m…” She trailed off.
    “Go on and take it off,” he said, ignoring her implication. She might not be bursting out of her bodice as so many fashionable women were, but she was proportioned like