Hard Day's Knight Read Online Free PDF

everything seemed to be in working order.
    “Really, Walker, there are gentler ways of removing a woman from your lap,” Farrell said, a self-righteous, solicitous smile touching his lips. “But I forget, you have so little experience in dehorsing people that I suppose one must make allowances. Please, my dear, I will help you—”
    “No!” I screamed as the white horse’s hooves danced toward me. I stopped checking my limbs and scrambled to my feet, absently brushing off my butt as I backed away from the white monster, now snorting and rolling its eyes at me. “You’ve done enough to help me, thank you.”
    “What the hell?” Walker, who had been busy controlling a fussy Marley, realized the cause of the problem. He turned in the saddle and scooped Moth up from where he was clinging to the horse’s broad rump. Moth meowed a protest as Walker faced me with flared nostrils and a disgusted look that almost exactly matched the one on Marley’s black face. “I take it this cat is yours?”
    “No, he’s not mine,” I said feeling trapped between the huge black horse and the high-strung white one. I edged my way out from between them. “But I’m cat-sitting him for the next two weeks. Moth, you are a very bad cat! No kitty num-nums for you tonight!”
    “Moth?” Farrell asked.
    “It’s short for Behemoth,” I told him. He rewarded me with a flashy smile, but I refused to be swayed by the smile of a man who’d drop me just when I needed him.
    “How amusing.”
    “You wouldn’t be laughing if you were stuck with him.” I turned back to Walker, who was trying to pull Moth off from where the cat was now riding his shoulders. “Moth! Come down here this instant.”
    “Farrell, are you all right? I heard yelling and thought Lancelot might have run away with—” A shortish, chunky young man with carroty red hair and big round Harry Potter glasses dashed around the side of one of the tents, skidding to a stop at the sight of a cat riding on top of Walker. His eyes widened before he shot a look out of the corners of them to where Farrell was once again trying to gain control of his fretting horse. “Eh . . . everything okay?”
    “Get out of the way, you idiot,” Farrell yelled as the white horse (Lancelot? How trite could you get?) tried to take a bite out of the red-haired man’s shoulder. “Can’t you see he’s nervous?”
    “Untrained is more like it,” Walker said in his lovely smooth English accent. My knees, which wanted to go all swoony at his voice, were reminded by my abused hip that he, too, had dropped me, and after promising me I wouldn’t fall. “You’re a fool to be racing him through here like that.”
    “When I want the opinion of a has-been farrier, I’ll ask for it.” Farrell’s mouth was tense, which was probably the reason his words came out like icy little bullets. He swung the demon horse’s head toward the cringing red-haired man. “Claude, you waste of oxygen, get the hell out of my way! Can’t you see you’re making Lancelot nervous?”
    “S-sorry. I thought you might need help. Oh, there’s a TV crew at the arena, and Simon thought you’d like to know—”
    “Television!” Farrell’s head snapped around as he looked toward the big buildings of the fairground. “Why didn’t you tell me that before? Here I sit wasting my time with this third-rate shield tagger—if I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a million times, the press always comes first!”
    “S-sorry,” Claude stammered again, hurrying out of the way as Farrell dug his heels into Lancelot’s side. The horse screamed, tossed his head, and lunged forward, barely missing Claude. I helped him up from where he had stumbled.
    “I was just trying to help,” Claude mumbled as I brushed the dirt and dried grass from his navy-blue tunic. “I thought he might need help because of the new horse.”
    “That was very thoughtful of you,” I said, picking from his shoulder a discarded candy wrapper.