Burn Me Deadly: An Eddie LaCrosse Novel Read Online Free PDF

flies. It meant being awakened by the occasional loud confrontation in the middle of the night and stepping over fresh bloodstains on the stairs in the morning, but the rent was cheap and the rooms were cool in the summer and warm in the winter.
    Liz yawned and raised up on one elbow. She traced a finger down the old sword scar on my chest and said, “You’re not going to let it go, are you?”
    “You know I’m not,” I said.
    “Another man in your position might count himself lucky and just put it behind him. It really had nothing to do with you; you just stumbled over it and got caught in it.”
    “That makes it my problem.”
    She firmly grabbed my beard and turned my chin so I had to look her in the eye. “ Why , Eddie?”
    What could I tell her? The truth was that too many women in my life had died when I should’ve protected them. When I was sixteen it had been Janet, sister of my best friend, raped and killed while I was forced to watch. Years later it had been Liz’s twin sister, Cathy, a story I still kept from her. There had been dark Jenny, on the island of Grand Bruan. And now it was Laura Lesperitt.
    But what I did tell Liz was also the truth. “A sword jockey who lets someone riding with him get killed, and then doesn’t do anything about it, won’t get much work after a while.”
    “Is that the real reason?”
    I grinned. “It’s a real reason.”
    She shook my chin with playful annoyance. “Okay, so what’s our first move?”
    “Hm. Well, I want to see where that farmer found me. Maybe there’s a clue left lying around. That house where they took us to torture the girl can’t be too far away.”
    “It’s been over a week. By now they must know you’re not dead.”
    “I know. But I have to start somewhere.”
    “What can I do to help?”
    “Other than what you just did?”
    She grinned. “That helped us both.”
    “If you feel like it, you could try to find out who else Argoset talks to, and what he’s really doing here. He’s looking into something, all right, but it’s not me. And if he wanted to frame me for the girl’s death, he would’ve done it already. He just wanted to scare me out of the way.”
    She nodded. “I’ll ask around.”
    “But watch yourself. This isn’t a simple thing.”
    “I know. That’s why you need help with it.”
    I turned and looked at her. The soft candlelight smoothed out her lines and made her look much younger: as young, in fact, as my memories of her twin sister, Cathy, over fifteen years ago. Soon I’d have to tell Liz that story, because it hung over us like a sword only one of us could see.
    But not at that moment. At the moment I only had to kiss her again.

chapter

THREE

    I
    t grew easier to move around the more I did it, so it made sense to keep doing it. The next day I went down to the livery stable to arrange for another horse. Liz had her office there, just as mine was above the tavern. Her delivery business was a one-wagon, one-woman operation, but she’d been so successful lately she’d considered hiring an additional person. I did not have that problem.
    Before she left that morning, she kissed me while she thought I was still sleeping. Through my eyelashes I watched her stand in the doorway, her figure silhouetted against the gray dawn sky beyond. How had I landed a woman so beautiful? She was slender, with hips just wide enough she’d never be mistaken for a man and breasts that rose deliciously against the front of whatever she wore. She had a lithe way of moving, a natural grace that turned heads wherever she went. I felt a little tug somewhere inside, the way I used to when we first met. Back then it was because I was afraid something might take her away; now I feared something might do the same to me. Mortality is grand.
    She descended the rickety steps attached to the outside of the building. I heard one of the town’s cats meow as Liz no doubt stopped to pet it. Then she was gone. I rested a little longer, then