Free Scandal by Pamela Britton Page A

lord. The kite.”
    She nodded. “Aye. It’s a smaller scale version of my design.”
    He’d wondered why she’d been flying such a childish toy. Now he knew.
    Egads, not just beautiful. Brilliant.
    And for a moment, envy filled him, but he quickly covered it up by saying, “I am most impressed.”
    “Thank you,” she said, standing suddenly. “I have work to do,” she said, looking away and stepping past him.
    He caught her elbow as she went by, his hand sliding down her arm until it reached her fingers.
    She gasped, staring at their connection for a moment before looking up to say, “Unhand me.”
    Rein immediately let her go, though not because of the steel he saw in her eyes, but because as he’d touched her, he’d suddenly realized that he shouldn’t have done so, for to touch her felt… dangerous.
    Dangerous?
    “Beg your pardon,” he said.
    “Don’t come up here again,” she said. “I have few pleasures in my life and my privacy is one of them.”
    And with that she jerked her head up and turned, leaving the roof without a backward glance. Rein watched her go, motionless, thinking he must be afraid to touch her for fear she might order him to leave her home, and then what would he do? That must be what concerned him, for it certainly couldn’t be her.
    Could it?

Chapter Seven
    He’d touched her hand.
    It was the first thought on Anna’s mind when she awoke the next morning.
    He’d touched her. Her worn and battered hands… and he’d not flinched at their coarseness.
    Ach, you’ll not be thinkin’ of
that
again.
    And she wouldn’t, she vowed. She wouldn’t think about how his hand had felt so soft against her own flesh. Or how embarrassed she was about her dry, red—and, yes, blistered—fingers. About how she’d wished for a second, as his handsome, noble face had stared down at her so enigmatically, that she’d taken the time to rub fish oil on her palms.
    Silly, silly, silly,
she thought as she pulled on the white apron that covered the skirts of her brown dress.
Fish oil won’t erase what you are. A woman what uses her hands for a living.
    She tied her white apron around her waist and then shoved a battered and worn straw hat atop her head. The ribbon beneath her chin looked frayed, Anna suddenly noticing the disrepair the lace around her dress’s collar was in, too. Bloody hell, what a sorry state she’d been reduced to.
    So far away from a world of balls and castles.
    “I often wondered,” her best mate Molly said from behind her as they headed for the market that morning, the two of them taking turns trailing each other through the busy streets like ducks on a pond, “what type of man it’d take to get your attention.”
    “Molly, if you don’t stop badgering me I’ll clout you with a masher.”
    “Mornin’, ladies,” Bertie the tobacco seller said as they passed by his shop, the gray-haired old gent giving them a tobacco-stained smile. This part of town was filled with storefronts, and Anna and Molly sometimes entertained themselves by staring into the windows of them. Fine hats, premade dresses and shoes were sold. The lovely, soft shoes Anna swore one day she’d have made for herself. But today it was too cold to do much more than hurry toward Covent Garden Market, Anna certain it would rain before the sun fell behind the ocean.
    “Evenin’,” they called back over the sound of the dustman’s cries. But the minute they passed him, Molly hurried alongside Anna. Molly didn’t have a cart, Anna listened to the whiz of her barrow’s wheel as it passed over sucking muck, she rather envied her friend.
    “Charlotte said she saw ’im the first day he arrived,” she said with a twinkle in her green eyes. “Told me he’d had a jacket as fine as spun silk. Is that true?”
    The jacket
had
been made of silk, Anna thought as they passed between the three- and four-story buildings, not that Molly would know. Molly was what Anna would call local—London bred and born,