Read Online Fletcher's Woman by Linda Lael Miller - Free Book Online

nearby, had ventured into Mr. Wilkes’s grand house for tea and a real bath, and been dragged off by that insufferable Griffin Fletcher in the bargain.
    He seemed to delight in hurling veiled insults at her, to hate her even. But why?
    The burning tears brimmed in her orchid eyes and slid down her cheeks. I don’t like him either, she mourned, knowing all the while that she did.
    Rachel wept, tossing and turning inside the thin blanket until she finally fell into an exhausted, fitful sleep.
    â€¢   •   •
    Griffin paused at the door of the tent Chang had pointed out to him, drawing one deep breath and running his hand through his damp hair. He was insane to go near the girl at all, considering the effect she’d had on him almost from the first moment he’d seen her.
    Still, he couldn’t very well leave her in Tent Town—she was too vulnerable to Jonas now. And Becky was counting on him to keep her safe.
    Griffin swore. Rachel hadn’t exactly been glad to be rescued from Jonas’s luxurious den, it seemed to him. For all he knew, she liked the bastard.
    â€œRachel?” he said, quietly.
    There was no answer, and a sudden and boundless fear overtook him. Suppose Jonas had already found her again and taken her back? Suppose, even now, he was caressing those delightful breasts or—
    Griffin stepped inside the tent.
    Nothing could have prepared him for the impact of seeing her there, asleep on that narrow cot, her thin blanket askew. The curve of one slender thigh glowed in the lamplight, and her left breast was revealed entirely. Beside the rosy nipple, a small, diamond-shaped marking caught the light.
    A miniature eternity passed before Griffin could move or even breathe. Never, at any time in his life, had he wanted any woman the way he wanted this purple-eyed, quarrelsome snippet of a girl.
    He tried to be impersonal about the matter; after all, there wasn’t anything on that delectable little body he hadn’t seen before.
    I am a doctor, he reminded himself.
    But Rachel was no patient.
    He turned away, and inside him, different facets of his complex nature did battle. The part of him that cherished honor prevailed at last, after a struggle, and he bent and gently covered the naked breast, the appealing thigh.
    There would be another time; he knew that. And he looked forward to it with both yearning and despair.

Chapter Five
    Pausing outside the great double doors of Jonas’s parlor, Fawn drew a deep breath. Perhaps it wouldn’t be as bad as she’d thought; perhaps the dramatic scenarios she had imagined had never taken place at all.
    She had only mentioned Rachel McKinnon’s departure from Tent Town, in Jonas’s company, in passing. For all she knew, Field hadn’t even bothered to repeat the conversation to Griffin. And even if he had, there was every chance that Griffin wouldn’t make the connection in his harried mind, wouldn’t realize that the new resident was Becky McKinnon’s kid.
    But if he had . . . Oh, Lord, if he had . . . And if he’d told Jonas, in anger, that the warning had come from Fawn . . .
    Fawn let her head rest against the polished mahogany framework of the French doors. Not for the first time in her eventful life, she found herself wishing that she had never separated herself from her people, never tried to stay with the Hollisters and go to school, never tried to make a place for herself in the white world.
    She laughed, ruefully, under her breath. There was no placefor her in that world, even though she could read and write and figure as well as any of them. She was Jonas Wilkes’s woman—and nothing else.
    Fawn lifted her head. All right. She was Jonas’s woman, and only one of many at that. But there was no point in standing around sniveling about it; she could not go back to her tribe now, and her pride would not allow her to return to Buck Jimson’s show to be stared at like a