Cates, Kimberly Read Online Free Page A

turned to see the man who had carried her away from the garden—a swarthy mountain of a man with ebony hair and a flashing grin that made her want to ram his white teeth down his throat. "Now let the lady up this instant," he commanded.
    Obedient demons? Rachel wondered incredulously as the pack of gnomes scuttled off her with groans of disappointment. She scrambled to her feet, her knees all but buckling as she braced herself against a rough stone wall. She towered over her tormentors, their faces shifting into better focus as one of them plopped a grimy thumb into its mouth.
    "Children," she gasped out, disbelieving. "They're... children." The notion horrified her beyond anything she had experienced, and the threats they had spewed out were even more unnerving because they had fallen from what should be innocent lips. "What kind of monster would keep children like animals."
    "I suggested the Glen Lyon drown the lot of 'em, but he says they'd spoil the water for drinking." Was the man actually smiling? "Now, we don't want to keep him waiting."
    He guided her through a twisted passageway that led deeper into the cave, to where a fresh-hewn door had been fitted to the stone. Is it the rebel's lair? Rachel wondered. Or a prison buried so deep in the bowels of the earth that no one would hear me scream?
    The lion's den. Rachel couldn't stifle the throb of fear. She felt as if she were about to become some monster's next meal. She steeled herself to confront her nemesis—the vile fiend who had ordered her abduction.
    But as her captor shoved the door open, revealing the makeshift chamber beyond, Rachel froze, her mouth gaping.
    A man sat at a wooden desk, a tousled dark-gold mane of hair tumbling in wild disarray about a lean face. Intense gray eyes peered through the lenses of spectacles at whatever was in his hands. He was spouting a string of words in perfect Latin. But despite the fact that Rachel had been educated far more thoroughly in the language than any other woman she knew, these were words she had never heard before.
    "Christ's blood," the man muttered to himself. "I'm going to murder that bastard when I get my hands on him."
    "On her, little brother. You did specify I was to bring you a woman."
    The man wheeled, stunned as if he'd been clubbed from behind by one of the demon-children. He leaped to his feet, his spectacles sliding farther down his nose, a bundle of garish scarlet velvet that could only be a woman's gown tumbling to the cave floor. A spool of thread bounced madly across the room to thump into the heather-stuffed mattress crammed against one wall.
    "Blast it, I've lost that needle again!"
    Rachel gaped at him, more stunned than if he'd been a naked savage gnawing on human bones. These two men were brothers? It seemed impossible.
    "Mistress de Lacey, may I present the dread rebel lord Glen Lyon."
    The golden-maned man stopped groping for the needle and straightened. He was tall, too thin, with the mouth of a poet, the expression of a scholar, and the eyes of a dreamer—the absolute antithesis of every raider Rachel had read about in her contraband French novels.
    Strangely, she felt almost cheated. It was upsetting enough that she'd been abducted—but to be abducted at the order of a man like this!
    The Glen Lyon? He looked more like a Glen Kitten! But couldn't a man like this be even more dangerous? Weak men were often the cruellest, to compensate for their own shortcomings. And it was obvious that this rebel had a whole brigade of minions ready to act upon his command. The man who had plucked her from the garden looked strong enough to tie iron bars into knots if the spirit moved him.
    "Miss Rachel de Lacey?" The Glen Lyon sketched her a bow, as if they were at a soiree. "I'm—"
    "You don't need to introduce yourself," Rachel shot back. "From the moment I arrived in Scotland, I heard tales of the coward of Prestonpans. But I had no idea that you were so craven that you wouldn't even take your own