Read Online The Pleasure Trap by Elizabeth Thornton - Free Book Online

easily with those animals than she does with people, but she is quite harmless.”
    Ash found himself warming to the vampirish lady. He had a soft spot for castoffs, whether they were people or animals.
    They spoke back and forth, but there wasn’t much more Fleming could tell him about this reclusive, private lady.
    The silence lengthened. Fleming grew restive. Finally, he said, “I’ve been frank with you, Denison. Perhaps I’ve told you more than I ought. I can’t believe, however, that a man of the world, such as yourself, would imagine that Lady Amanda would be in harm’s way from these inoffensive ladies.”
    “I don’t think it. But my original point still stands. If someone thinks that one of your writers is Angelo, then they may all be in harm’s way.”
    “I don’t understand it!” exclaimed Fleming. “There are other publishers who publish Gothic fiction. Why are my writers being singled out in this way?”
    “Because,” said Ash, “Angelo was good enough to mention your symposium at the end of each story, so naturally readers thought he would be there.”
    “Maybe he was there, but I know the voice of each of my authors, and I can say categorically that he is not one of them.”
    Ash didn’t know enough about writing to argue the point.

    He met up with Colonel Shearer later that evening in White’s club in St. James’s. When he left White’s and made for Grillon’s Hotel, Ash had cleared up one point: Shearer had had nothing to do with the hecklers at the symposium. In fact, he’d had to placate the colonel for even suggesting such a thing.
    “Conduct unbecoming in a gentleman!” had been Shearer’s opinion of anyone who had tried to disrupt an orderly, lawful assembly. If he’d been there, he would have read the buggers the riot act.
    Ash came away with something else. The colonel applied to one of the stewards, who obligingly found a back copy of the
Herald
with the first story that was published. Ash, however, did not recognize the landscape or the characters involved. This story was set inside a stately home where an elderly footman took a tumble down the stairs and broke his neck. There was no clue to indicate the year it had happened.
    He kept thinking that he was missing something, something that was in plain view, something that ought to have occurred to him.
    What was it? He dwelled on that question for a long time.
    His thoughts shifted to Eve Dearing. Before long, his lips were curling in a smile. She was a refreshing change from the docile society ladies who thronged the drawing rooms and ballrooms of London now that the Season was in full swing. If any of them ever had an original thought, he had yet to hear it. His smile lingered when he recalled Miss Dearing’s heated defense of her genre. The men in her stories were accessories, she said.
    It made a man want to make her change her mind.
    His smile vanished. Now that was a dangerous thought! Eve Dearing was, in the words of her publisher, a respectable lady who lived quietly and uneventfully with her aunt in the small village of Henley. And he never trifled with respectable ladies. That path could well end up at the altar.
    Pity.
    The smile tugged at the corners of his mouth again. He was safe from Miss Dearing. Everything about her proclaimed her as a confirmed spinster—the way she dressed, the way she spoke her mind, the way she looked directly into a man’s eyes.
    And those were lovely eyes, a cool gray when she was in command of the situation and a stormy violet when she was aroused. He’d wager that beneath that cool exterior there were other passions besides temper waiting to be tapped. It made him wonder—
    He stopped right there. He was going down that dangerous path again.
    Restless now, he looked at his watch. A little excitement, he decided, was all that was needed to banish the provoking image of Eve Dearing.

    It was Wednesday evening and Lady Sayers and her bevy of guests were driving home to her place