Charming the Devil Read Online Free PDF Page B

scarlet waistcoat and blue greatcoat. A Redbreast, he was called, a member of London’s newest attempt to curb crime. But this city would forever revel in chaos. Perhaps the same could be said for the world at large.
    Cupping his right shoulder with his left hand, Rogan rolled the joint backward, trying to alleviatethe pain, but it was there to stay. One of a dozen aches to be expected after a score of years on the battlefield. The Anglo-Mysore Wars, the Battle of Boxtel, the Storming of Badajoz. He winced at the bloody rush of memories. What had those battles gained him? Gnarled scars, burning nightmares, aching limbs, and an eerie ability to sense the advent of trouble. Yet, despite his oddities, good men had died. Good soldiers and others. Innocents. And for what? So some foreign hunk of soil could be exchanged among the English hierarchy? Aye, his father had been English, but his mother’s kin had been Scots to the very roots of their brawny beings. His mother’s brothers, who had initiated him to battle, and who, in later years, had followed him into more than a few. His mother’s brothers, who had given their lives a thousand miles from their beloved Highlands.
    They should never have ventured onto Spanish soil. Should have understood the curse that stalked Rogan McBain. But they had refused to turn back. When a Celt set his mind, there was little one could do to change it.
    On the street below, a scruffy lad trundled a barrow of parsnips down the darkened lane. London was forever filled with ragged children. Cheap labor, they were, and little more. Chimney sweeps, millworkers, parish apprentices. McBain winced as memories marched in.
    “Bain!” Connelly’s voice boomed through the house as he banged the front door shut and strodethrough the foray, boots rapping on hardwood as he passed through the great room, with its sparse furnishings. “Bain!” He came nearer, glanced into the narrow sitting room, then turned into the doorway of the kitchen. “What the hell happened to you?” he rasped.
    “Nothing to concern yourself with,” Bain said, and in that second the carefully guarded concern fled Connelly’s eyes, replaced immediately with a spark of mischief as if he already guessed at the embarrassing cause of the other’s pain.
    McBain scowled, scrunching the skin around his damaged eye. Despite the fact that it had blossomed into a dozen vibrant colors even before he’d found his bed, he had almost forgotten its existence. Just another benefit of too many battles. Or too much introspection.
    He poured tea carefully into a ridiculously small cup and lifted it to his lips. It was hotter than Hades, so he set it gently onto its matching saucer to eye his so-called friend. “She must have been something special,” Bain rumbled.
    Connelly gave him an arch look as he retrieved a walnut from the basket on the table and tossed it in his hand. “Who?”
    “Someone else’s wife,” Bain guessed. Although Connelly was happy enough to share the town house’s rent, he rarely spent a full night in his own bed. But neither did he generally linger elsewhere, even when there wasn’t an angry husband involved. Which was, most probably, a rare occasion.
    “Ahh, yes, well, Marguerite is a unique…and very umm energetic…woman. But…” He smiled at Bain’s battered eye. “Don’t distract me. Tell me the tale.”
    Nonplussed, Bain poured water from a pitcher into a basin, then squeezed the excess from a saturated rag. He had no desire to discuss the previous night, but before he could apply the cloth to his eye, Connelly had snatched it from his fingers.
    “Dare I hope you were involved with an angry husband?” he asked.
    Bain increased the intensity of his glower. “Hand over the rag, Connelly, or be gone from my sight,” he growled. Introspection—who needed it?
    “Sight!” Connelly laughed and waved a well-manicured hand in front of Bain’s face. “Are you saying you can still see, old