Never Kiss A Stranger Read Online Free PDF Page A

her hood shielding all but a sliver of her creamy face and a single, thick lock of yellow hair trapped beneath her cheekbone.
    He closed his eyes tightly, took a deep breath, and then looked again.
    He blew out his breath in a weak huff. She was still there.
    Piers’s eyes narrowed and he quickly looked around the standing stones and over both shoulders, even spinning around to take on any would-be attackers. He had gained enough experience in brawling for coin that his instincts for ambush were sharper than most men’s. Piers knew there was almost no level too low for an opponent to sink to when a heavy purse was the wager.
    But no, he was alone, standing just outside the ring, looking at the enchanting golden girl asleep on the stone slab.
    Perhaps the final blow from Bevan had rattled Piers’s brains irreversibly—by all that was holy, his head still hurt like the very devil, the healing wounds itching on his butchered scalp. There could be little other explanation for the girl’s presence save madness. Certainly she wasn’t a fairy—there couldn’t be fucking fairies on Fallstowe lands. That was absurd. And he couldn’t see any wings, any matter.
    Piers recognized that he was debating the existence of a mythical woman-creature in an unlikely area of England, as if there were other regions more hospitable for the fey. This disturbed him enough so that he squared his shoulders and stepped into the ring fully, determined to either discover the woman’s origin, or jump entirely over the farthest edge of insanity.
    The atmosphere within the standing stones seemed oddly thick, and Piers didn’t think it was his imagination. Warmer here, too, although the fallen and standing stones—most two yards wide and twice that tall—were no shelter from the now burst open, sparkling sky. Piers hadn’t noticed the clouds disappearing, but now the moonlight seemed to rival the very sun in its brightness. He reached up to the cowled neck of his borrowed monk’s robe and pulled it away from his skin. He was starting to sweat.
    “Ho there,” he called out, dismayed at the timid whisper that barely stirred the air in front of his face.
    Her arms, crossed in front of her bosom and covered by her cloak, shifted.
    Piers moved slowly to the stone slab, until he stood over the woman. She seemed very small to Piers. Curled on her side, the toes of her dainty slippers peeked out from beneath the hem of her fur-lined cloak, and he fancied he could scoop her up from the slab with one swipeof his arm. The tips of her profile—browbone, nose, lips, chin—seemed like polished ivory in the moonlight, and her dark lashes rested on her cheeks like the smallest black under feathers of a tiny bird. He shrugged out of his pack and let it slide soundlessly to the ground.
    “Hello?” he called again, and this time, he reached out one hand. He intended to pull back her hood and experience her full beauty—imagined or nay—at once.
    A blur of movement stopped his heart, and before he could jerk his arm away, the first two fingers of Piers’s left hand were laid open by very small, very sharp teeth.
    As he roared and began to fight off the thing that was attacking him, Piers no longer thought he was insane.
    But he did think it somewhat ironic that he was wearing monk’s clothing while in a battle with the devil.
    Alys came fully awake at the shout that seemed like thunder in the heretofore stillness of the Foxe Ring. Layla had clawed from her embrace and Alys could no longer feel her small warmth, although she could most certainly hear the monkey’s wild shrieks. She sprung upright on the slab.
    Someone was trying to abduct the monkey she had rightfully stolen!
    “Layla!” she cried, and then immediately scrambled down from the stone to launch herself at the dark, hooded mass of a creature that was presently trying to flog Layla with a forearm. “Let her go, you beast!”
    “Get it off me!” the hooded figure boomed. “It’s biting my