Read Midnight Scandals for Free Online

rain count as humiliation, I’d like to know?”
    The skies opened. Unbelievable as it seemed, it was actually raining harder, and cold enough now that there were tiny pellets of ice. He thought she meant to pretend she hadn’t heard him, but then she made a rude gesture. And kept walking. This was the Portia he remembered. Passionate. Always passionate.
    “Stop.” He took three long steps and caught her arm, pulling her around to face him. Her mouth was rimmed with white but there was a telltale tremor around her jaws. “We can’t stay in this downpour.”
    “I don’t care.” Rain plastered her awful pink gown to her body.
    “I don’t care much if you think I’ve humiliated you when I haven’t.”
    She stared him down. He did not know this woman. She was not a girl. She’d lived ten years without him, and in ten years, people changed. They left behind fancies of love and passion. They married and went on to live dutiful lives.
    “Thank you for telling me how I feel. Now that you are Lord Northword, of course you know all.” She pulled away. He didn’t let go of her arm, and a good thing, too, because she slipped, and it was only because he steadied her that she didn’t fall.
    He brought her close and raised his voice to be heard. “It’s bloody hailing. We’re going to freeze if we stay out here much longer.”
    “You needn’t have come after me.” Her chin tipped up in an expression so familiar to him he lost sight of those ten years.
    “Yes, I did need.”
    “You didn’t.” She tugged on her arm. “Let go.”
    “You know me better than that.”
    “I don’t think I do.”
    “You don’t at all if you think I’d leave any lady outside in this weather, not one dressed as you are, and not when I know she’s upset and unable to think as clearly as she ought.”
    Her eyes widened, and not in recognition of his good sense. She was magnificently furious. “Let me alone, Crispin Hope, you booby-headed jackass.”
    He kept his grip on her arm. “Use your intellect, if you haven’t let it be worn to a blunt by listening to your sister-in-law prattle on about gowns and London and the proper forms of address. You know as well as I that you’ll freeze out here.” He pointed toward the dark gray stones of his childhood home. “Wordless is nearer than the Grange. Let’s go there and wait out the rain.” He brought her closer to him, and he forgot everything that had gone wrong between them, the wrongs they’d done each other. Whatever else had happened, he could not bear to see her unhappy. “You can tell me everything that’s made you so miserable. Will you do that much? Please?”
    Something of what he was feeling must have transferred to her, for she wiped water out of her face and nodded. “How long have you got?”
    “As long as we need. You know that.” He ached to touch her, to console her, but didn’t dare. She was too angry. And he was too much on edge. “Out of the rain, if you please.”
    She nodded again.
    “Thank you.” He didn’t give her time to change her mind or form an objection. He swung her into his arms and bodily lifted her over the fence. From the awkward way she reacted, he knew she hadn’t expected to find herself in his arms. Nor had he anticipated doing so until it was done.
    When she was safely down and steady on her feet, he stepped over the fence himself. He shrugged out of his greatcoat and put it around her shoulders. One did such things for ladies. As an afterthought, he clapped his hat on her head, too.
    “Come along then.” He managed a smile that at long last did not feel false. “Before we drown or are killed by hail.”
    He marched them toward the house and around to the front. He remembered the days when he had run up those twenty front stairs, often with Magnus and Portia in tow. He could see the house as it had been then—the servants, now long moved on to other positions, the interior of the house. How strange to think of those rooms as