Mesmerized Read Online Free PDF

figure and huge brown eyes that seared right into a man.
    It was a long wait in the dark, tossing and turning, eyes opening and shutting, before at last he drifted down into the blackness….
     
    There was the smell of smoke and blood in the air, and the castle rang with the clash of iron against iron, underlaid by the moans of the wounded and dying.
    He blinked his eyes against the acrid smoke; sweat trickled down into his eyes and dampened the shirt on his back. He had had no time to do more than don his hauberk of chain mail and grab up his sword.
    He was on the stairs, close to the bottom, making his slow retreat up the curving stone steps to the tower room above. It was, he knew, the only slim hope for her safety. The lady of the castle. His love.
    She was behind him now, her body shielded by his, inching up the steps as he did. No coward she, she had not run up the stairs to the safety of the tower room with its heavy barred door; instead, she stuck with him, turned to face out to the side of the stairs, the dagger pulled from its sheath at her belt and held to the ready.
    His heart hurt with love of her—and fear.
    “Go!” he barked at her. “Get up to the room and lock yourself in.”
    “I won’t leave you.” Her voice was calm, a silvery pool underlaid by iron.
    He continued to swing his sword, holding off the rush of men who pushed up the staircase. There were two in front, for the staircase was no wider, and at the edge of the steps there was no rail, only empty space to the great hall below. Here, only a few steps above, some tried to climb up onto the steps or to grab at his legs to pull him down. One had managed to land a hit with his sword, but fortunately only the flat side had slammed into his calf, hurting even through the thick leather of his boots but not cutting him. He had taken care of each of them with a hearty kick that broke one man’s jaw or a swift downward slice of his sword that left another without a hand. Lady Alys, behind him, had dispatched another by hurling at him the poker she had carried. The man had fallen like an ox, but unfortunately, the poker was now lost to them.
    His arm was weary, yet still he swung. He wouldfight, he knew, till he was bleeding and on his knees, and even then he would fight. Even though he knew they were doomed, he would fight. It was all he had of hope.
     
    Stephen’s eyes flew open, and he sat up, a gasp torn out of him. He was drenched in sweat, his hair lying wetly against his skull, and he still felt the heavy ache in his arm, the sting in his eyes from sweat and smoke.
    “Bloody hell!” he said. “What the devil was that?”

2
    O livia Moreland sat back against the comfortably cushioned seat of the carriage. Her spine was ramrod-straight with irritation. The nerve of that man!
    “Mad Morelands, indeed,” she muttered.
    It was an epithet she had heard all her life, and it rankled. Her family was not mad in the least; it was simply that all the rest of England’s upper crust were narrow-minded, set-in-their-ways snobs.
    Well, perhaps her grandparents had been a little strange, Olivia acknowledged in the interest of fairness. Her grandfather had been somewhat obsessive about some rather bizarre medical cures, and Grand-mama had insisted that she had “the second sight.” But her father was simply a scholar of antiquities, and her great-uncle Bellard was a shy, sweet man who loved history a great deal and stayed away from strangers with equal zeal. There was nothing odd in either of those things, she thought. Nor was there anything wrong with Aunt Penelope going off to Franceto sing opera, though everyone in society had reacted with as much horror as if she’d been transported to a penal colony.
    The problem, she knew, was that her family thought differently and acted differently from the rest of society. Her mother’s greatest sin in society’s eyes, Olivia knew, had been to be born to minor country gentry instead of the nobility.