Kit Black Read Online Free PDF

them.”
    â€œI don’t want anything of yours.”
    â€œAh, but you already have it.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œYou have my heart and my undying desire, my lady pirate.”
    I tossed the coins at him and followed with the sword. He ducked, but I think the blade nicked his face. I didn’t look at him. I backed out of the door and slammed it in his handsome face. Horrified, I wanted to go back to him and see how much damage I had done with the sword blade. I didn’t.
    I walked barefoot home and cried for the most of the way. My feet hurt on the rough stones and my legs ached between them. I was ashamed, disgusted, and terribly sad. Oh, God, what if I’d taken out his eye? I couldn’t remember crying since I was a child.
    When I slipped through Roger’s window, he was waiting for me with a grim face. I just knew that my mother had died. I didn’t think I could cry over Madeline, my mother. I had believed that her death would come as a relief. She had suffered too long. But I did cry. I cried until my ribs ached, and all I could manage were dry gasps that hurt my throat. There seemed to be no more tears. She was so still and so thin, so unlike the laughing dark eyed woman of her youth.
    There was something in her hand. I had to pry her fingers apart to get it. It was a medallion on a leather string. I looked at it carefully. It depicted a moon with a man’s face. A grinning face. I don’t know where it had come from. I showed it to Roger, and he told me it had been my father’s. I covered my mother’s face with the blanket and walked back to Roger’s rooms with him. I was thinking about Armand, wondering if that blade had cut his eye. If I was honest with myself, part of my sadness was over the prospect of never seeing him again. I wondered if I would carry that picture I had of him forever in my mind’s eye. Of his handsome face lowering to kiss me.
    â€œWe haven’t got the funds for a burial. I’ll take a rowboat out and put her into the sea,” Roger spoke as in a dream. “She said it would be alright, though she never liked the sea much herself. She doesn’t deserve to be in the pauper’s field.”
    â€œAye. That’ll do, Roger.”
    â€œWhat happened, lass? Where are your shoes?”
    â€œI left them behind.” I sat down and looked at my feet. There were cuts on them, the bottoms black with soil.
    â€œYou got your gold pieces, didn’t you?” Roger squinted at me, lighting his pipe.
    I bit my lip. I had never been able to lie to Roger. Not in my entire life. The few times I did, he made me go out back to the bush and choose my own switch so he could whip me with it. I told him the truth always now. With a voice raspy from crying, I told him of what was offered and what I did in retaliation for it.
    â€œThere’s many a fine lady who’d take a gent up on an offer like that,” he said. “You could be wearing those wide straw hats and silk dresses. You’d have enough shoes for an army.”
    â€œI have no intention of taking him up on it.”
    â€œAye. Well, he won’t be so pretty to look at with one eye gone.”
    I cringed at that.
    â€œHe might send the authorities after you.”
    â€œI don’t think he knows where I live. I didn’t tell him. There are lots of whore houses in Ajaccio.”
    â€œNot many that house six foot blond boys named Kit, I’d imagine.”
    I sighed. “I don’t care. I hope I missed his damn eye, but he’ll have a scar to remember me by. Did I hear that The Black Moon docked yesterday?”
    â€œAye. It did. What are you getting at, girl?”
    â€œI’m planning to join her.”
    â€œWith Harris Gareth as captain? The man’s a bastard if there ever was one. You’ll not be safe, girl. That is a daft idea. I thought you’d done with that long ago.”
    â€œI’ll be fine, Roger.