Forget Me Not

Forget Me Not by Melissa Lynne Blue Page A

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Authors: Melissa Lynne Blue
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knight floated through her mind. Brian Donnelly may very well be an Irish rogue, but he was not the knight of her dreams. The knight of her dreams would never take advantage of her, or weave outlandish tales of her being compromised and rushed off to the Gretna Green.
    Heavily she sighed, curling into a ball beneath the quilt. The dream man she’d concocted so many years ago hardly fit the Brian Donnelly she now knew. Lydia sobbed long into the night, all the while berating herself for the weakness. “He isn’t worth it.”  The words didn’t lessen the pain, but chucking a pot at his face might…  Just where had he gone?
    Hours later a dull thud pulled Lydia from the dregs of sleep. “Bloody chair.”  The curse pierced her head, clogged from hours of crying. Slowly she rose on one elbow, prying one gritty eye open and blinking against the gloomy shadows masking the room. Across the room Brian stooped, continuing to swear under his breath, and clutching his left knee.
    “Are you all right?” she murmured, brain too fogged to remember being hurt or angry.
    “Fine,” he barked testily. “Whacked me knee on that damned chair.”  His speech was suspiciously slurred.
    “Ugh. Are you drunk?”  Disgust fairly dripped from her tone.
    “Aye.”  He stumbled to the bed the sweet smell of whiskey swirling around him. “And a good long while it’s been since I’ve been properly sotted.”  The toe of his boot caught the edge of the bed, and he sailed forward, landing directly on top of her.
    “Oh!”
    He flashed a sloppy, almost comically, crooked smile. “Thanks fer breakin’ me fall, lass. Yer a fair sight softer than the floor, probably the mattress too.”  His face fell to the curve of her neck. The touch of his velvet lips on the sensitive flesh of her throat sent her pulse to a run. “Mmm… ye smell so good, love.”
    Lydia’s throat ran dry. I smell good?  One of Brian’s hands slid up her arm, lacing through her fingers as he trailed a path of feather light kisses across her jaw. She trembled when he reached her mouth.
    “If you’d be so kind as to hand me that pillow, lass,” he murmured against her lips.
    “What?”
    Abruptly he pulled away from her all but falling off the bed. “I’ll be beddin’ down here in the corner.”
    Testily she tossed the pillow into his face; inebriated as he was he caught it. “Why is it, Mr. Donnelly, that you are willing to sleep on the floor tonight when I could not have paid you a chest of gold to do so last night?”
    “Because tonight, me lovely, I can’t promise not to ravish ye whilst ye sleep.”  He chucked the pillow against the wall and collapsed in a heap on top of it.
    Her mouth flopped open. There at least was an honest answer.
    “Good night.”
    She rolled her eyes, pulling the quilt to her chin. “And to you, sir.”
    A good night was not forthcoming. Certainly not after his bizarre reappearance. Lydia tossed and turned, replaying their argument, picturing his drunken entrance, and contemplating the one thought nagging her brain…  If Brian wanted nothing more than to say he’d bedded a viscountess, why admit to such instead of continuing to seduce her?  He must know his effect on her. She turned to little more than a glop of jelly, trembling from the inside out if Brian so much as speared her with his eye. She feared her heart forever being on her sleeve or at the very least in her blush around him. It was as though he wanted to push her away, wanted to make her hate him. And that intrigued her all the more.
    Her mind was spinning again. Analyzing and overanalyzing even the minutest turn of events. Olivia was right, it was a wonder her head did not explode.
    Perhaps reciting the Greek alphabet would bore her overactive mind to distraction. Alpha, beta, gamma, delta…  Oh, blast!  It wasn’t working.
    She rolled to the other side and back again, letting her gaze rest on Brian. A plan took shape in her mind. For a few days Brian

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