Free Midnight Mistress by Ruth Owen

too-small eyes made her feel … well, it made her feel a little like a fat chicken being eyed for the dinner table. Instinctively she drew away, anxious to put distance between them. “Erh, many thanks for your offer, sir, but we are … waiting for someone. No need to trouble yourself.”
    “Oh, no trouble,” the man oozed, returning to her side. “Got what you want, I do. Make your dreams come true.” He moved closer, whispering into her ear. “You got needs, don’t ya, dearie? Needs that come to ya late at night, in the dark, in bed …”
    Sikes’s words were unbelievably forward. A proper lady would have pulled away immediately. But Juliana
had
had dreams such as Sikes described, dreams so intimate that she’d never shared them with anyone, even Meg. Dreams that woke her in the middle of the night, dreams of a man who wore Connor’s face.
    “Tell me you don’t think about ’em. Men. Not the pouf nobs you run with. I’m talking about a real man—a strong young buck who could take you to heaven. I can get it for ya, dearie. Pleasure beyond imagination—”
    Sikes’s words ended in a yelp. He was jerked back, and held in midair like a flailing marionette.
    “Leave her alone,” Connor growled.
    Startled, Juliana saw him holding Sikes by his collar. With effortless strength, he shook the man until his teeth rattled, then dropped him on the floor like a sack of old clothes.
    “Now get out,” he said, his words fierce with anger.
    Sikes scuttled backward like a crab. Once out of Connor’s reach, he stood up, his eyes narrowing to threatening slits. “This hain’t the end of it,” he promised. “No one meddles with Mortimer Sikes. And them that does is sorry they was ever born.”
    Good riddance
, Juliana thought as she watched the unsavory fellow disappear into the crowd. “La, what a dreadful man,” she commented as she waved her handkerchief under her nose as if to be rid of an unpleasant odor. “I suppose I should have expected such ill-mannered individuals in a place like this, but—”
    Her sentence ended as Connor grabbed both her and Meg by the arms and dragged them to an empty table in the corner. He deposited them in the chairs like a pair of unruly children. Then he put his leg on a third chair and leaned forward, glaring down at them.
    “What the
hell
are you two doing here?”
    Juliana’s recently regained composure dissolved like sand. Facing Connor’s anger was bad enough, but as she dropped her gaze, unable to endure his condemnation, she unwittingly focused on the boot he’d propped on the chair in front of her. The polished black Hessian hugged his muscular calf like a second skin. Her gaze slid over the gleaming surface up to where his dark breeches hugged the rest of his leg. The fabric stretched taut over the coiled strength of his thigh, putting her in mind of a finely carved Greek statue. But Connor was no statue. And after the interlude with Sikes and the disturbing dreams he’d made her recall, she had admit to the fact that she wasn’t one either.
    “Well?”
    Juliana’s head snapped up. Unfortunately, meeting his fierce gaze only added to her distraction. “We were … um, that is to say we were …”
    “We were looking for you,” Meg finished, perplexed by her friend’s apparent lapse of memory. “Juliana has something she wants to say to you.”
    Meg nudged Juliana in the ribs. She might as well have been nudging stone. For the second time that night Juliana was caught in a spell. She stared into Connor’s eyes, wondering why she’d never noticed how the flickering torchlight filled them with glorious light, like sunshine breaking on new snow. She drank in the harsh, lines of his face, the ragged crown of his hair, and the energy that seethed just beneath his ice-hard countenance. He was all angles and edges and ruthless power, yet there was a part of her that yearned to seek out the gentleness that had once existed inside him, that might still