Rogue Angel 50: Celtic Fire Read Online Free Page A

filtering in and drivers allowing one another enough space for safety. It wouldn’t have been like that back home, she thought, letting a black Jaguar XJS slip into the lane ahead of her. It was only when the traffic had eased to a steady fifty-five pushing sixty that she realized how tightly she’d been gripping the wheel. Annja relaxed her grip and eased back on the accelerator, signaling to move into the slower traffic of the left-hand lane.
    She glanced across to see that the car beside her was the same guy who had flashed her a smile in the queue at the tollbooth. He slowed down and gave her room to pull across in front of him. This time she smiled back.
    The off ramp she needed came upon her sooner than she’d anticipated, and almost disappeared into the rearview mirror before she’d seen it. It took a bit of emergency maneuvering, but she managed to cut across the chevrons painted across the road and up onto the ramp before she ran out of room, half expecting the driver behind to hit his horn in protest. But she saw the smiler was still behind her, still smiling.
    It was just her luck he was turning off the motorway, too.
    Annja followed the brown signs with the outline of a Roman helmet, indicating a tourist attraction, as the road took her through the outskirts of the city of Newport with its run-down houses and seen-better-days factories, before steering the car out into the countryside proper. The short journey from the motorway to the outskirts of Caerleon only took ten minutes or so, but the change of pace with the speed limit dropping by thirty miles per hour made it feel like so much longer.
    The approach offered a spectacular view of the town and castle. An old stone bridge too narrow for two cars to pass side by side spanned the River Usk before the road swept right to a wonderful holly-and-ivy country pub. The place had a thatched roof that made it look like something that had slipped through a crack in time from the 1800s. It stood invitingly on the river’s bank, promising refreshment and a nice warm hearth. Just the sight of it brought on a sudden thirst and gnawing hunger so Annja decided to take care of both, even though she was only a short distance from her hotel.
    The gently swaying sign had the gold-painted words Miller’s Arms and a crest. A smaller blue plate on the wall explained that the building was originally a sixteenth century coaching inn and lots of the oldest features seemed to have survived into its new life. It took Annja a few minutes to get used to the landlord’s accent as he offered her his very proud spiel, but after a while she found her mind singing along with the rise and fall of his speech.
    “You from America, are you, then, me love?” he asked, pulling a bottle of water from one of the fridges behind the bar. She’d never heard anyone call her “me love” before; “my love” was more northern, but the “me” seemed slightly tortured. She smiled as he offered ice by holding a scoop over a plastic ice bucket but she declined.
    “For my sins,” she said, taking a sip of the water, realizing just how thirsty she really was. The label on the bottle was in Welsh and seemingly unpronounceable, which she thought was cute. “Hope you won’t hold it against me.”
    “We get quite a few of your sort through here over the summer, people coming to take a look at the ruins and stuff. That why you’re here?”
    “That’s me.” She laughed. “Just another tourist.”
    He reached to a dispenser on the side of the bar that was stuffed full of slightly faded leaflets about the various attractions and places of interest in the area and plucked a few of them out for her. “Then you might find these useful,” he said.
    “You on a commission?” she joked as she glanced through them.
    “Well, the museum is free, and so is the amphitheater, so it’s not going to make me rich. There’s a charge to go and look around the old Roman baths, but hard as I’ve tried to