Castle Spellbound Read Online Free PDF

walk? she thought. Put it off. She left her door and continued down the corridor.
    If Gene came home and found her gone he'd probably get upset, even ticked off. Now that she thought of it, that fetching look she'd given him couldn't have been interpreted any other way except as a come-on. So, he comes knocking, expecting, and ... she's flown the coop. Nothing like leading a guy on and then shutting him off. There were words for the kind of women who made a habit of it. “Coquette” was the polite term.
    She wouldn't blame him if he did get a little pissed off.
    Turning a corner, she came upon the Queen's Dining Hall. Earlier there had been an infestation of flies here. The flies seemed to be gone.
    She went on down the hall and made a few turns, two rights and a left, threading her way through the maze of the castle keep. An old castle veteran, she knew her way. She rarely got lost now no matter where she went.
    She passed a pretty sitting room, doubled back, and went in. The far wall was cut with six French windows, the extreme right one leading out to a bartizan turret high on the keep that gave a sweeping view of the Plains of Baranthe, some thousand feet below.
    The other windows were quite another matter. They looked out onto different worlds altogether: parkland, farmland, forest, plain, and river valley. Nothing spectacular in any; simply pleasant landscapes.
    Linda took a seat on the comfortable couch and put her legs up. The situation called for some thinking.
    She was distracted by how appealing the room looked. The rug was Oriental, with a design that looked more Indian than Persian. There was a lot of furniture: an ornately carved rolltop desk; a tall, white-lacquered chest of drawers; a walnut trestle table; slat-back chairs; an oaken Gothic stool; several wing chairs; several bookcases holding leather-covered volumes; lots of shelves and dressers displaying ceramic pots, cameo glass vases, bronze statuettes, enamel boxes, silver tankards, and other items of interest.
    It was a nice room, cozy. She had run across it before, but it changed every time she encountered it. Which was par for the course in Castle Perilous. Things shifted about helter-skelter on a regular basis, even in the most stable areas of the castle. Sometimes whole rooms relocated themselves, and it was not uncommon for them to disappear entirely, closed off by spontaneously generated blank walls.
    They didn't call it Castle Perilous for nothing.
    But sometimes the old place was quite homey and comfortable. Linda fluffed an embroidered pillow and sat back.
    Getting back to the issue at hand...
    Gene, Gene, Gene. What did she think of him? Well, he was good-looking, in a way. Dark curly hair; sort of Italian-looking (but didn't he say his mother was Irish?) with regular features, hazel eyes. She liked his face. It was a good face; maybe not what you'd call cute, exactly. Handsome. Yes, Gene was a handsome man. Tall, dark, and handsome. No problem there.
    Okay. He was intelligent. Very. Often too . He talked well, was quick on verbal feet. Had a penetrating wit. He could make her laugh. Sometimes he was a scream. Sometimes he was obscure and made strange comments and you didn't know how to take him; but he always had something pertinent to say. He was good in a fight, that was for sure. He was an excellent swordsman, and he seemed never to be afraid, even in a sticky situation. And together they had found themselves in some very sticky situations.
    He was also something of a ladies’ man. Women generally liked him. His adventures in other worlds always seemed to involve a romantic liaison or two. The most notorious of these came to light the time he brought back this absolute Amazon of a female out of some bizarre Edgar Rice Burroughs-like universe, a veritable Deejah Thoris, brass brassiere and all. Right off the gaudy cover of a sci-fi paperback. She'd been stunning. But he'd lost her—she'd run off to Earth with some motorcycle types.
    There