Free These Haunted Hearts: A Regency Ghost Story by Anna Campbell

chose a lover. And Kinvarra had always suffered
an overabundance of pride. There wasn’t the slightest hope that
he’d mistake Alicia’s reasons for traveling on this isolated road
in the middle of the night. She stifled a rogue pang of guilt.
    Curse Kinvarra, she had absolutely nothing to feel
guilty about.
    “I’ve recalled your existence every quarter these
past ten years, my love,” her husband said equally smoothly,
ignoring Harold’s dismayed interjection. Although the faint trace
of Scottish brogue in Kinvarra’s deep voice indicated that he
reined in his temper. His breath formed white clouds on the frigid
air. “I’m perforce reminded when I pay your allowance. A
substantial investment upon which I receive woefully little
return.”
    “It warms the cockles of my heart to know that I
linger in your thoughts,” she sniped. She refused to cower like a
wet hen before his banked anger. He sounded reasonable, calm,
controlled, but she had no trouble reading the tension in his broad
shoulders or in the way his powerful hands opened and closed at his
sides as if he’d dearly like to hit something.
    “In faith, my lady, you speak false. Creatures of ice
have no use for a heart.” A faint, malicious smile lifted the
corners of his mouth. “Should I warn this paltry fellow that he
risks frostbite in your company?”
    She steeled herself against Kinvarra’s taunting. He
couldn’t hurt her now. He hadn’t been able to hurt her since she’d
left him. Any twinge was merely the result of temporary shakiness
after the accident. That was all. It couldn’t be because this man
retained the power to stick needles into her feelings.
    “My lord, egad, I protest.” Fortunately, shock made
Harold sound less like a frightened sheep. “The lady is your wife.
Surely she merits your chivalry at the very least.”
    Harold had never seen her in her husband’s company,
and some reluctant and completely misplaced loyalty to Kinvarra
meant she hadn’t explained why the Sinclairs lived apart. The
accepted fiction was that the earl and his countess were polite
strangers who by mutual design rarely met.
    Poor Harold, he was about to discover the nasty truth
that the earl and his countess loathed each other.
    “Like hell she does,” Kinvarra muttered, casting her
an incendiary glance under long dark eyelashes.
    Alicia was human enough to wish the bright moonlight
didn’t reveal quite so much of her husband’s seething rage. But the
fate that proved capricious enough to fling them together tonight
of all nights wasn’t likely to heed her pleas.
    “Do you intend to present your cicisbeo?” Kinvarra’s
voice remained quiet. She’d long ago learned that was when he was
most lethal.
    Dear God, did he plan to shoot Harold after all?
    Her hands clenched in her skirts as fear tightened
her throat. Lacerating as Kinvarra’s tongue could be, he’d never
shown her a moment’s violence. But did that extend to the man she
planned to take into her bed? Kinvarra was a crack shot and a
famous swordsman. If it came to a duel, Harold wouldn’t stand a
chance.
    “My lord, I protest the description,” Harold bleated,
sidling further away. He’d clearly also heard the unspoken threat
in Kinvarra’s question.
    Oh, for pity’s sake. Was it too much to wish that her
suitor would stand up to the scoundrel she’d married as a silly
chit of seventeen? Alicia drew a deep breath of freezing air and
reminded herself that she favored Lord Harold Fenton precisely
because he wasn’t an overbearing brute like her husband. Harold was
a scholar and a poet, a man of the mind. She should consider it a
mark of Harold’s superior intelligence that he was wary of
Kinvarra.
    But her insistence didn’t convince her traitorous
heart.
    How she wished she really was the callous witch
Kinvarra called her. Then she’d be immune both to his insults and
to this insidious attraction that she’d never conquered, no matter
how she tried.
    “My lady?”