Free An Unforgettable Rogue by Annette Blair

and Alex the opportunity to, er, settle everything.”
    That fast, Alex and Bryce were left standing at the base of the main staircase to regard each other. Alex wished the foyer did not seem so drab for his homecoming, while he appeared, for all the world, like a raw boy with his first girl, the way she was certain he had never appeared in the whole of his life.
    “I do not want to put you out,” he said, wrapping dignity about him like a shield, much as he had done the evening before. “As you know, I do not sleep well these days. Any bedchamber will do.”
    Plague take it, Alex thought. Was not a husband expected to sleep with his wife? They were home now. She was no longer in shock. And if she did not begin the way she intended to go on, then she would deserve the consequences. “There is no other bedchamber,” she snapped.
    “There must be a dozen at least.”
    “If they have beds, they have no mattresses.”
    “Why ever not?”
    Alex gave a long-suffering sigh. “When we were forced,” she stressed, “to return here, the mattresses had been turned into mouse houses, so we turned them out of our house, leaky and dilapidated as it is.”
    Bryceson clearly bit back an oath, and that old impatient tic worked in his cheek. “The tower room in the attic,” he said, seeming to grasp at straws. “Isn’t there a chaise lounge, or a daybed, that would serve? When we used to practice our archery up there on rainy days, I am certain we proved the thing indestructible.”
    “You are able to climb so many stairs, then?” Alex asked, hoping to discourage him.
    “I climb better than I descend, it is true, but I can manage. Besides, I am convinced that the more I use my legs, the better they will work.”
    Myerson cleared his throat from the door of the servants’ hall, self-consciously turning his dripping hat in his hands. “Excuse me, your grace, but the horses?”
    While Bryce oversaw the stabling and feeding of the matched pair he had borrowed with the carriage, Alex carried a candle and bedding up three flights of stairs to the attic tower.
    Sure enough, the huge, sparse circular chamber appeared dry as toast and looked exactly as it had the last time they played there, except for the additional dust. Everything as they left it, including their old archery equipment and the dratted daybed.
    Thoroughly annoyed by the sight, Alex placed her candle on a table, and the bedding on the lounge. She went for a bow and arrow and set them up, crossed the room, and in a fit of pique, she let the arrow fly, hitting the target dead center.
    “Rotten roof leaks everywhere,” she muttered, choosing another arrow. “Wouldn’t you just know it would hold above this one blasted room.”
    She set the second arrow in the bow, but changed her mind about its destination and turned her sights, and her weapon, upward. “Bloody, stupid roof.” She sent the missile skyward.
    The arrow disappeared into the darkened attic rafters, and almost as it did, a drip hit the floor, then another, and another, until rain dripped down in a vapid, steady rhythm. “Oops,” Alex said. “Must have been ready to give at any moment.”
    Her mind worked and her smile grew as she chose yet another arrow and aimed it, unerringly, toward the rafters directly above the chaise lounge. But when she let it fly, nothing happened, and she could not tell exactly where it disappeared within the shadowed labyrinth of beams closer to the tower’s peak. “Drat.”
    Hearing footsteps on the stairs, she stashed the bow, saw the daybed was dry, and sighed with regret. Doomed to spending another night alone. Double drat.
    As Hawksworth entered, she beamed a bright smile. “Only one, small leak,” she said with feigned pleasure. “Your bed is fine. See.”
    Even as they regarded the makeshift berth, an arrow dropped, flat on its side, dead center of the bed, and rain poured, literally, down, soaking the bedding and the lounge, rendering it completely