Curse of the Nandi (Society for Paranormals Book 5) Read Online Free Page B

as if I needed to justify myself.
    “Oh, and you certainly have been enjoying,” he said with a leer.
    “Gideon!” I admonished him just as I felt a presence behind me.
    “Mr. Knight,” Mr. Timmons hailed my former husband in an exaggerated drawl, “I find your presence at my honeymoon rather inappropriate.”
    “As I find your presence,” Gideon quipped. “But you don’t hear me complaining, now do you?”
    Jonas had ceased his grumbling and was studiously admiring the frying pan while silently chuckling, his hunched shoulders trembling with suppressed mirth. By any standard, this scene was surely the most entertaining one in the vicinity.
    “What is it, Gideon?” I asked wearily.
    “I can’t congratulate my wife on her marriage?” he asked with all the innocence that he was capable of mustering.
    “Congratulations are noted,” Mr. Timmons said as he draped an arm around my shoulders. “I’m sure you can find your own way out and back to whatever transcendental hole you crawled out of this morning.”
    Gideon eyed the two of us, and I was torn between irritation and sympathy, just as he was between love and loneliness. Then, with a cavalier shrug, he began to whistle a familiar tune while floating away, leaving me wondering why he’d bothered to come at all.
     

 
     
     
     
    Chapter 6

    Upon first hearing of our engagement, my cousin Lilly’s husband Mr. Elkhart had conspired with Lord and Lady Hardinge, his adopted parents, to provide a small workforce to construct a home. They were all of the same mind that we needed one more suitably apportioned and located than Mr. Timmons’ wood cabin. Upon arriving back in Nairobi that evening, we didn’t approach the tented construction camp, where the wood cabin was. Instead, we circled the outskirts of town to arrive at a stone cottage set among the Jacaranda trees, not too far from the Hardinge house.
    “You go ahead,” Mr. Timmons suggested after assisting me off the wagon. “I’ll…” He glanced warily at Jonas. “I’ll help Jonas with the horses.”
    Disappointed that I wouldn’t be carried over the threshold in a romantic fashion, I asked, “You don’t trust him with them?”
    “Absolutely not,” he responded sharply and led the horses to a small structure that, in a pinch, could pass as a barn. Nelly, tied to the back of the wagon, sniffed about her, searching for flowers, and settled for the aromatic but poisonous white bells of an Angel Trumpet bush.
    Suffused in what could only be described as marital bliss, I entered my new home distracted by all the happy memories and hopeful dreams that the honeymoon had evoked in me. Even the sight of our new set of Chinaware (a wedding gift from the Stewards), laid out in proud display across our dining table, thrilled me far more than bits of porcelain had any right to do. That will have to serve as an adequate explanation for why I didn’t notice the Adze until he attacked.
    The creature had me caught up in his arms before I’d even set down my valise and walking stick. While I couldn’t resist appreciating the muscular grip and firm, toned chest I was pulled up against, I was a properly married woman now, my husband being neither dead nor unappealing.
    It was most fortuitous that I was not so startled as to lose my grip on my items, and thus was in a position to use them to great effect. I dropped the valise on one of my assailant’s feet and poked the other foot with the pointed metal end of my stick.
    Yao whispered in my ear, his breath causing a delicious tickling sensation, “There’s no need for that, lovely lady.” His grip hadn’t let up in the least and I wondered if African vampires had steel feet, for he hadn’t any shoes on to protect himself from my counter-attack.
    “Rubbish. You’re manhandling me in a most inappropriate manner,” I rebuked him as I commanded my wolf energy to leave my metal hand and latch onto my assailant’s throat.
    “What witchcraft is this?”