Sweet Bargain Read Online Free

young woman's hands were at her side, holding the skirts of her dress above the water. Little wavelets from the swimmers washed gently against her white legs.
    Nick had a sudden, futile impulse to check the momentum of his anger, but he couldn't. He dropped the rod and gear he carried and waded into the stream. "What are you doing in my river?" he shouted, wishing at the same time that he had come upon the girl silently so that he could watch her unobserved.
    At his words the girl in the middle of the pool looked up, startled, and the splashing and shouting stopped. Nick sensed that all the children were staring at him. He felt Farre step up behind him softly and deliberately, but he couldn't look away from the face of the girl. If spring had a maiden's face, it was this face, all blossoms of hawthorn and eyes of blue speedwell and curls as gold as honeysuckle.
    Bel looked toward the angry voice. She had been watching a school of silver minnows at her feet, and, looking up suddenly, she was momentarily blinded by the water's glare. Then she saw the man. He looked not much older than she and was dressed like a shepherd—such a shepherd as Paris must have been when the contending goddesses asked him to judge their beauty. Even anger couldn't mar his face, fine and lean, and oddly, she thought, suffused with wonder.
    "Your river? Who are you?" she asked the shepherd.
    "I am Nicholas Seymour," he said.
    Darlington's warning came back to her, and she feared she had landed them all in the briers. "I suppose you are the earl's man come to clear the way for him," she said. There was nothing for it but to apologize and take themselves off before he inquired too closely into their actions. "I assure you we mean no harm. Until now this stretch of the Ashe has been ours to f—enjoy, and we came to say farewell to our favorite places before the earl arrives. Pardon us, please. We will gather our things and be gone, and your master will never be the wiser."
    "I am not the earl's man," said Nick, annoyed by the girl's mistaking him for a servant and unready for their conversation to end. "I am Haverly, and by your own admission you are trespassers. Do you not know I can bring you up before the magistrate for such an act?"
    Haverly. Bel paused to adjust her thinking. The Earl of Haverly was this … rude young man? "And would you, my lord, bring such as these before the law for their enjoyment of your river?" She gestured with a broad sweep of her arm at the children, who stood still as statues. Even the dog appeared cowed.
    "Wouldn't I though. Don't think to excuse your intrusion by citing their innocence. You must see that you and your trespassing band of urchins have spoiled the fishing this day." There was a burst of laughter from one of the boys, and Nick turned to them. They stood in the stream, water dripping from their heads, rivulets gleaming on their arms and chests. Four pairs of blue eyes glared at him without any apparent fear of the law.
    When he turned back to the girl, he saw beyond her on the opposite bank the rods and baskets and nets the trespassers had with them. "You're poachers, too, aren't you?" He looked at the boys again. The slim, dark-haired boy who reminded Nick of himself had the grace to look abashed, but the others appeared as maddeningly unimpressed with his power and position as the girl.
    "You may think us poachers," said the girl, drawing Nick's attention back to her, "but you can hardly prove it."
    "Then you'll show me what's in that net you've got anchored in the stream," Nick said.
    The girl's eyes darkened, and she let her skirts fall into the water. "Certainly. Auggie," she said to the sturdiest, most sullen-looking of the boys, "show his lordship your net."
    "But, Bel," the boy began.
    "Do it," she ordered curtly.
    The boy waded across the stream reluctantly, his long, angry strides sending ripples in every direction. Defiantly he seized the net and lifted it out of the shaded pool where it