Blade Dance (A Cold Iron Novel Book 4) Read Online Free PDF Page A

painted paneling, and added recessed lighting, tiled baths, and a state of the art kitchen.
    He thanked Dana for it now, because all he wanted was a cold beer, a comfortable chair, and peace and quiet. All three were at his instant disposal. A woman would have been nice, too, but his situation was already complicated enough. As soon as it was uncomplicated, as soon as he had the Fianna in hand and his son back, there would be room in his life for a woman, and that woman would be Ann Phillips.
    He drank his beer standing in the kitchen. Just as he was popping the cap on his second, the doorbell rang.
    If it was Nancy again, he decided that he was going to have her. Likely standing up in the hall, with how he felt at the moment. A very bad idea. He wished the beer had blunted his desire, but it hadn’t.
    He opened the front door to a very different woman. And who else but the one he had been thinking about with increasing frequency for several months now.
    Ann Phillips was a head shorter than Finn, but she wasn’t built small. Her hips were wide, her shoulders broad but delicately molded, her breasts full and round. She had a body that was athletic and distinctly, pleasingly feminine at the same time.
    She had intrigued him from the minute she had first turned up on his now shattered doorstep, with her long red hair and pale brown freckles dusted over luminous skin. The little dots frosted her collarbone and shoulders and made Finn want to trace them with his hands.
    “Ann Phillips,” he said. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
    “School business,” she said, wearing a prim expression that he recognized from their last encounter. That expression wouldn’t last long. Ann Phillips wasn’t naturally prim, no matter how hard she tried to seem that way. She was vibrantly alive, and her arrival felt like a refreshing breeze after all of his troubles with Miach and the Fianna and, now, this nameless Druid. Her nose scrunched beguilingly when she was angry, and he almost hoped he could make her so, wanted to see her eyes light up the way they did when she was riled.
    “If this is about my nephew’s truancy, Miss Phillips,” he said, recalling the purpose of her last visit, “you’ve come to the wrong place. He’s living with his mother in South Boston.” Little Garrett was actually Finn’s grandson, but he didn’t expect Ann Phillips to understand that a man who barely looked thirty could be thousands of years old. She wasn’t a local, and she hadn’t been admitted to the secret that Charlestown’s Irish kept from the world: the presence of the Fae in their midst.
    “It’s not about Garrett,” she said. He remembered now how much he liked her voice. It was husky and mellow, like honey wine. “But it is school business.”
    “You teach second grade,” he said. He’d taken the time to find out all about her, in the hope that in better days, he might renew their acquaintance. “Don’t you think it’s a little late for school business?”
    It was full dark, in fact. The lights around the monument had come on, and they burnished her red hair gold. She was wearing it piled high on her head, and it looked like a fiery halo. He imagined she was aiming for a chaste, schoolmarm’s appearance, but he found everything about her, from her silk blouse to her pencil skirt to her tall leather boots, sexy as hell.
    “I didn’t have an easy time finding you,” she said. “It was still daylight when I arrived at your former address.” She cocked her head to indicate the scaffolding behind her. “But your contractors weren’t exactly forthcoming about your whereabouts.”
    They wouldn’t be. He used locals. Workmen who knew what he was, what the Fae were owed for protecting the Irish in Charlestown these last two hundred years. “How did you find me, then?”
    “I went to your place of business,” she said.
    The bar. He didn’t like to think of her at the bar. It was where he conducted his business, but his