Danger's Kiss Read Online Free PDF Page A

picking the lock.
    With a metallic click, the shackle sprang open.  If he hadn’t dived forward, snapping it shut again, she would have freed herself.  As it was, he earned himself a stab of the cloak pin in his shoulder.
    With a yowl of pain worthy of Azrael, he knocked the pin from her grasp and dodged back out of range in case she had any more weapons on her person.
    The woman screamed in thwarted fury, rattling the shackles as if she might break them open by pure force of will.
    Who was this she-devil?
    Hubert Kabayn had claimed to know no one in Canterbury, so Nicholas had assumed the woman shrieking in the square was simply one of those females who couldn’t abide bloodshed of any kind.
    His bleeding shoulder proved otherwise.
    But if she didn’t know the victim, and she wasn’t averse to blood...
    “Who are you?”
    She whipped her head around, spitting a strand of hair from her mouth.  “I’m not your whore!  That’s for certain!”
    Sex was the last thing on Nicholas’s mind.  His ballocks still ached from the kick she’d given him.  The woman might be as beautiful as an angel, but she clearly had the devil’s temperament.  He preferred his lovers gentle.  And willing.
    “Nor do I intend to be your prisoner for long!” she added, straining at the shackle until her fingers blanched white.  “You may have held Hubert, but you’ll not hold me!”
    He frowned.  “Hubert?  How do you know Hubert?”
    She didn’t reply, only struggled all the harder with the shackles.
    A sudden and unpleasant possibility occurred to him then, a possibility that sent a frisson of terror up his spine as he slid slowly down the wall onto his hindquarters.
    “You aren’t...his granddaughter, are you?”
    The woman froze midstruggle, confirming his suspicions.
    His breath escaped him in a thin, long-suffering sigh.  “Shite.”  He wasn’t going to get any more sleep this day, he could see.  He rested an elbow on his upraised knee and rubbed hard at the spot between his brows that was beginning to ache.  “I thought you’d be...  The way the old man talked...  I expected a child.”  He perused her from head to toe from beneath his hand.
    She was no child.  Hubert Kabayn had omitted the fact that his granddaughter, whom he’d portrayed as a helpless, homeless waif who’d be without a friend in the world after he was dead, was indeed a full-grown wench with a definite will of her own.
    Nicholas shook his head.  He should have known better than to trust the word of a felon.  “Ballocks!”
    He’d made Hubert a promise.  He was honor-bound to keep it, no matter how it grated on him to do a good deed, not for an innocent child, but for a foul-tongued lass who was obviously poured from the same mold as her outlaw grandfather.
    “Let me go, you pox-riddled son of a whoremonger!”
    He stared at her, wondering what to do.
    “Teat-sucking spawn of the devil!” she spat.
    Now that he knew who she was, he couldn’t very well toss her out in the snow.
    “You hound-swiving,” she said, banging the shackle on the bedpost, “nun-beating, shite-eating scourge of the earth!”
    He raised his brows.  He thought he’d heard every curse known to man.  Because of his despised profession, which included collecting taxes, he was constantly barraged by vile oaths.  Apparently, there was no sport more gratifying than swearing at a lawman.
    For the most part, such words rolled off his back like water off a swan.  But this maid showered him with oaths he’d never even thought of, much less heard from the sweet mouth of a woman.  Her foolish grandfather must have spared the rod with the child, for she swore like a fishwife.
    At last, catching her breath, she snapped, “What are you staring at, murderer?  What’s churning in that diseased brain of yours?”
    “I’m wondering when you’re going to run out of curses.”
    She jerked hard on the shackle, and he saw a bloody scrape where the iron met her