Free Black Falcon's Lady (Celtic Rogues Book 1) by Kimberly Cates Page A

slight body bound in arms he knew had perpetrated a dozen separate horrors, her wraithlike face just visible over Rath's beefy shoulder. She peered back in such haunting sorrow, her changeable eyes clinging to the cottage with resigned pain, her moon-kissed features shaded with a fragile beauty that made him want to pull her into the shelter of his body, destroying all who would do her harm.
    Tade stiffened as Rath bellowed an order and the English soldiers reined their mounts into position behind the colonel's gray gelding. Rath inclined his head toward Maryssa, an ingratiating smile curling his lips. Tade's fingers clenched, a fragment of the splintered door piercing deep into his palm. Cursing, he yanked his hand back and kneaded the injured place with his other thumb. Do her harm? Hah! Hadn't the girl made it perfectly clear that she was no "Irish trollop" for Rath's troops to abuse at will? Nay, she was an English lady who needed only to stamp her silk-shod foot to have an entire troop of Sassenach soldiers run trailing after her like a fat old dowager's lapdogs.
    She was Bainbridge Wylder's only child—daughter of the richest landholder in Donegal, in half of Ireland. Didn't she belong with Rath, with these Sassenach soldiers who shattered Irish lives with no more thought than they had given the oaken door that lay splintered at Tade's feet?
    Tade grimaced, suddenly shamed by his own cynical musings. God's teeth, he was sounding like his father, so bitter that he regarded even an act of compassion with doubt. For all her theatrics, this girl was no English belle whose nose was poked so far into the air she trampled over peasant babes in her path. She had lied to protect a man she had only just met, a man she knew had broken English law.
    Did she, in her highborn naivete, have any inkling of what the gallant colonel would have done to her if his men had discovered Devin in the loft? Or had she risked all, knowing what punishment might await her? Tade shuddered inwardly at the thought of her delicate wrists cased in iron shackles. The little fool! The winsome, beautiful little fool! He wanted to hold her, wanted to shake her. And yet if she hadn't lied . . .
    Tade's muscles tensed as he watched Rath knee the gray into a canter, the jarring movement nearly spilling Maryssa from the saddle. Though the space of the yard and three dozen horses lay between them, Tade could sense the fear in her slight frame, felt, too, an almost desperate urge to tear back the veils of darkness as they fluttered closed behind her.
    Damn, she could never be anything to him. She was English. A fine lady with riches and a hundred servants at her disposal, a lady who would scarce deign notice a lowly Irishman, regardless of the fact that the blood in his veins was more noble than her own.
    But Quentin Rath . . . he would be judged her equal, with his fine house and his commission, purchased with bloodstained coin from his admiral papa's purse. No doubt the despicable colonel would spend the whole ride to Nightwylde insinuating himself into her ladyship's good graces. He would be rapping at Nightwylde's door first thing next morning, his cockaded hat crushed beneath one sweaty armpit, an engraved calling card in his freshly manicured hand, and the wealth of Nightwylde tallied up in his greedy little brain.
    And Maryssa? Would she simper about before Rath, striking her hand to her brow and wailing about her ordeal among the barbaric Irish, as though she had been tortured in the crudest of dungeons?
    No. She had placed herself in danger to protect Devin, Deirdre. To protect him. She was no haughty witch, but rather a woebegone fairy who had strayed like a will-o'-the- wisp into his life, then fled back to the kingdom from whence she had come.
    From the first she had stolen into his heart, her very name seeming to trail petal-soft over his lips, lodging inside him with an aching sadness akin to that he had felt the summer he turned eight and found an