Free A Difficult Disguise by Kasey Michaels

It was no use—and it wasn’t because she wanted the fool man for herself, because that was the farthermost thing from her mind. Wasn’t it?
    Put her out with the horses, would he, while he rutted like a stallion in heat? Well, she’d see about that. He was the one who belonged in the stables—him and his overripe mare. A parade of images, the next more perverse and upsetting than the last, invaded Billy’s highly imaginative mind, her blind rage turning quickly to a deep, revenge-seeking anger.
    Dredging up every ribald story Hedge had ever told her, and seeking to remember every indiscreet word ever spoken in her hearing over the years by any of the family servants, she scraped together the semblance of a plan.
    The door to the private dining room opened at last and Beatrice came out, her smile, to Billy’s mind, nearly as wide as her broad hips, her hands busily retying the strings of her blouse. Her flashing green eyes narrowed with rage, Billy stuck out her arm—still holding the greasy chicken leg in her hand—to block Beatrice’s passage.
    “Hold it right there, slut,” she gritted out in her deepest possible voice, hoping she had remembered all the right words. “I don’t know what you’re planning, but hear this: that man is mine! He may trifle with you, only for a bit of slap and tickle, but it’s me he sleeps with, and I don’t want any filthy blowen like you giving him a dose of the pox.”
    The barmaid’s mouth dropped to half-mast as her eyes widened to the size of saucers. She looked over her shoulder at the closed door, then back at Billy, running her gaze up and down the groom’s thin body. “But he... But you’re a... But we were goin’ ter... Oh, no I won’t! That’s sick, that’s what that is. I heard ’bout such queer goins-on, an’ I’ll have no part of it, does yer hear me? Yer kin have him. I doesn’t want no man-milliner.”
    Billy dropped her arm to allow Beatrice to scamper past her, a small smile on her face as she realized she had achieved her objective. The innkeeper would be lucky if his barmaid stopped running before she reached Crook Common.
    Her smile faded slightly, though, as she realized two more things.
    First, she had no idea what she had said that had so frightened Beatrice. Had it bothered her so much that a small, flat-chested girl—for surely her disguise, which had so far deceived Fletcher, could not have fooled another woman—had dared to fight her for Fletcher? It made no sense.
    And second, and much more damning now that she had rid herself of Beatrice, she had fated herself to sharing a bedchamber with Fletcher.

Chapter 4

    F letcher and Billy climbed the stairs to the bedchamber that had been assigned to them. Beatrice, the flustered innkeeper had informed Fletcher earlier, had retired to her own quarters, complaining of a sick stomach, a scrap of information the innkeeper had imparted to explain why the buxomy barmaid was not there to personally escort them to their room, which was a personal triumph for Billy, who had the comfort of knowing that her tall tale had successfully routed the woman.
    Strangely, or so she thought, it also made her happy to see that Beatrice’s defection didn’t seem to bother Fletcher in the slightest. Obviously Fletcher Belden was the sort that flirted with anything in skirts—probably out of habit or some such nonsense—but did not really have a penchant for consorting with chance-met barmaids.
    They walked down the narrow hallway, the uneven floor of the old inn giving Billy fits as she readjusted the unwieldy bulk of their belongings. It appeared that Fletcher did not believe in leaving all creature comforts behind when he traveled. She nearly stumbled in the darkness, so that Fletcher at last reached out a hand to steady her, commenting dryly that Beatrice must be very sick to have been too overcome by her sudden illness to light the candles in the hallway, leaving her customers to curse the darkness as they