Read Online I Loved a Rogue The Prince Catchers by Katharine Ashe - Free Book Online Page A

elsewhere.
    Then abruptly she walked toward the barricade that ran along the top of the beach. Grabbing up her skirts under her elbow awkwardly, she set off across the rocks. She stumbled and slipped.
    He moved forward. “You will—”
    “No!” she called over her shoulder, her fingers tangling in the ribbons of her bonnet. “Don’t.”
    “Don’t what?”
    “Don’t stop me.” The ribbons flailed in the wind, and the bonnet jerked from her head. It tumbled away along the rocks. She took no notice, instead continued on.
    “I don’t know what you’re doing to try to stop you from it,” he said across the wind.
    Strewn with rocks above, the crescent beach stretched to the water, a cove of lapping waves protected from the force of the sea by the wharf. She walked straight for the water’s edge, slipping and tripping on the stones, her skirts billowing out in the cold wind.
    He crossed the rocky border and followed at a distance. The sun was dipping low over the ocean, setting the water aglow in bronze and pink. Gulls overhead called as though urging her on.
    Two yards from the water she paused to throw off her shoes. Then she rucked her skirts to her knees and strode into the water. She yelped, and laughed, and continued walking.
    That water had to be half a man’s body heat. At best.
    “What are you doing?”
    “There is a shallow rocky shoal a few yards ahead,” she called back, her ankles entirely submerged, steps fumbling. Her lips were pulled back from her teeth. “You can see it from the inn.” Her skirts dipped into the ocean. She grappled with them and her knees peeked out. “Since the tide is now low, I’m going to stand on it. I’ve never waded in the ocean before.” Her voice pitched high. The frozen water, no doubt. “I have gotten very close. I’ve sat on beaches for hours. But never once in my twenty-seven years have I waded.” She cast him a glance of wide-eyed mischief that went straight to his gut. “And now you must too.”
    “Yet I have waded in the ocean before, and in fact I mustn’t now. It’s February.” Pleasure collected in his chest. This was the girl he’d known, the girl of erratic modesty and absolute delight.
    “Oh.” She took another unsteady step deeper into the frigid sea. “You poor thing. I suppose you’re only brave when it comes to safe little ponds.”
    His throat caught. Safe little pond . Years ago. Temptation and torture and pleasure so acute he could practically feel it again now. Safe? No. Not with her. Never with her, he was beginning to see.
    Clearly she was not shy today of the wager they’d struck.
    “The climate is somewhat different now than on that occasion.” That occasion that had changed his life. And now she teased, as though it had meant nothing to her. But he’d long since known that.
    “Don’t tell me you’re worried that I will take a chill and perish?” she said without turning. “You never were before.”
    Before, she hadn’t been curved in every place he wanted to put his hands. Some. But not all. And there hadn’t been tiny lines of laughter at the corners of her eyes. Before, he’d been a boy, driven by a boy’s devotion. Now a man’s desire drove him. God’s blood, she was beautiful with the wind whipping at her tightly bound hair, threatening to tear it free of its bonds. More beautiful than she’d been as a girl, with her sharp nose and gentle lips and laughing eyes that sought him with such longing. And her legs—legs he’d only seen glimpses of before, slender and long—legs that had fed his fantasies night after night.
    She stood like a flame, vibrating with daring, the gentle waves lapping around her knees. “Frightened?”
    The same taunt he’d thrown at her eleven years ago.
    “Not on your life.” He pulled off a boot, then the other, then his stockings. By God, even the rocks were cold. But she had never shied from a challenge. He’d known that when he goaded her last night on the moor. He had