Lady Killer Read Online Free Page A

—on the girl’s face.
    She was not afraid. She was not afraid. She was not afraid.
    She cleared her throat and said, “Excuse me.”
    The man resettled himself in the crook of his arm, but did not stop sleeping—or snoring.
    “Excuse me,” Clio said again, this time louder.
    Still nothing. Rationalizing that Jake would not allow her to be killed center stage in his tavern, Clio ventured closer. She tapped the man on the crown of the head while bending near his ear and whispering “excuse me” directly over it.
    Miles Loredan, Viscount Dearbourn, was feeling belligerent. He would not kill whomever had replaced his head with a pumpkin, that was all right, but the scurvy villains who were trying to carve it out were going to find themselves facing the sharp point of a sword. Wasn’t it enough that they had pulled him from wonderful oblivion? Did they need to compound their sins by beating his head with cudgels? What had he—
    A vague thought seeped into his ale-soaked head, a memory of his cousins towering over him several days earlier, as they left the Turkish bathhouse, and promising that if he was not home by four bells to prepare for his betrothal ball, they would send an escort who was sure to rouse him. Aha, Miles realized triumphantly, the devils playing squash-the-squash with his head were his cousins’ minions of evil. Perhaps if he showed a sign of alertness the minions might go away. And if that didn’t work, he would fight them to the last man.
    With great effort, he snarled and opened one eye.
    Then very quickly opened the other one. What he saw in front of him, a dancing monkey and an elf, was surely an apparition. He had not reckoned on real demons and was beginning to worry that they might be harder to kill than normal men, when he raised his head completely and saw that he had made a mistake. There was a dancing monkey. But the elf was a woman. A woman with a smear of dirt on one cheek and a tattered gown and long brown hair and enormous, challenging brown eyes. An absolutely stupendous looking woman.
    There was only one thing to do with a woman like that. Reaching out, Miles pulled her toward him and pressed his lips hard against hers.
    She tasted like a memory, like summer, and youth, and his favorite kind of ink all rolled together, and he could have gone on kissing her all day if she had not pulled away, leveled a knife-sharp look at him, and said, “You moldy mongrel.”
    It was not the kindest thing anyone had ever said to him, but coming from her it sounded lovely. As did the “You contemptible, cantankerous cur,” and the “You repellant rat terrier,” that followed, along with the probing question, “How dare you sit there and stare at me with such insolence?”
    Miles would have liked to reply it was because he could not help himself, that he had never before been pegged down by the Dog Breeders Almanac, but he was completely speechless, another first for him. Instead he smiled.
    “You would grimace at me, bug-eating beagle?” Clio demanded, her glare intensifying as she rubbed the place on her chin where his overgrown whiskers had abraded her.
    His cousins had really outdone themselves, Miles thought. Listening to her was almost better than kissing, he decided, brushing a lock of dark hair from his forehead so he could watch her more easily, but only almost. Taking advantage of a lull in her tirade, he reached out, this time pulling the woman all the way onto his lap. She smelled delicious. He licked the comparison between himself and a spineless spaniel from her lips and kissed her deeply.
    That was when all the demons of hell attacked him. Someone punched him from behind and the girl pushed away from him from below, and nearby someone else was twittering. When he could finally collect his thoughts, he saw that the monkey seemed to be making a toast to a young boy standing behind him, who had the defiant posture of a pugilist. Next to the boy, speaking soothingly, was the woman,