Lady of Desire Read Online Free PDF Page A

from behind.
    “Get your filthy hands off me, you swine!”
    “Not a chance, love. You’re comin‘ with us. You’ve seen things tonight you ’ad no business seein‘. I can’t have you goin’ to Bow Street to make a report.”
    “I have no intention of doing any such thing!”
    “So you say. Why should I believe you? I don’t know you. Maybe you’ve got some trick up your sleeve. The thief-takers consider me big game, y’see. Sendin‘ Billy Blade to the hangman could make a man’s career—”
    “Billy Blade?” she gasped, freezing in his arms. Her gaze flew to his face with what he could have sworn was recognition.
    Flaherty raised his eyebrows and grinned at him. “Looks like your fame goes before you, mate.”
    Without warning, the girl tried again to escape, driving her elbow into his stomach and stomping on his foot with her heel. Swinging her satchel over her shoulder, she nearly clocked him in the face, but he turned his head and took the blow on his ear.
    Blade couldn’t stop laughing, rather flattered that she had heard of his misdeeds. She had probably read about him in the papers. In all, her assault had little effect on him, like an attack from some incensed fairy queen, but it forced him to shift his hold on her, and the second his grip loosened, she tore free of his arms and started running.
    Flaherty, still rubbing his cheek where she had punched him, spitefully stuck out his foot in the darkness and tripped her. The blonde fell, sailing earthward, and landed hard on her hands and knees. She looked up through her tangled mop of gold curls, wild fear in her fiery dark eyes.
    Blade sent Flaherty a look of blistering disapproval for tripping her, but a pang of guilt stabbed him as well for having made sport of the little hellcat. In truth, her fight had earned a measure of his admiration.
    He went to the girl, intending only to help her up. It did not occur to him that, as he approached, he must have appeared to loom threateningly over her. When her glance flicked to the dagger sheathed at his side, her big brown eyes filled with an angry rush of tears that rendered him instantly powerless.
    “Go on, do it!” she wrenched out, the icy hauteur cracking to show an innocent girlish misery beneath. “I’d probably be better off!”
    He stared at her for a second, taken aback by the note of genuine despair in her wail, then realized abruptly that the little simpleton actually thought he was going to kill her. Lord, what were they writing about him in the serials these days? He didn’t kill helpless women.
    His men were still laughing.
    “Shut up,” he growled at them. He scowled, insulted, yet vaguely ashamed of their jovial crudity. And his own.
    “I don’t care anymore what happens to me,” she went on. “Make it a clean blow; that’s all I ask.”
    “Oh, leave off the dramatics, you daft chit. Get up.” He grasped her by the scruff of her coat’s fur-lined collar and hoisted her none too gently to her feet.
    She huffed in regal affront at being thus manhandled, but recovered her dignity quickly enough. Once righted, she glared at him over her shoulder as he thrust her ahead of him at arm’s length. Loath to be clubbed in the head again, he relieved her of her satchel and tossed it to Sarge.
    “Give that back!”
    He ignored her frantic efforts to grab it and turned to the scarred ex-army sergeant. “Carry it for her, but if you take tuppence from that purse, you’ll answer to me.”
    Sarge grunted in acquiescence; then he and Flaherty went back to heave Riley’s body up off the cold ground once more.
    Blade wrapped his hand in a possessive grip around the girl’s slender arm above her elbow and gave her a flat look that dared her to protest. “Now
walk
.”
    Oh, yes, she remembered him now. Jacinda trembled a bit as Blade marched her down the alley, his sculpted face grim, his hard-eyed glance forever scanning the shadows. Occasionally, he looked over his shoulder.
    Taken