Nobody's Angel Read Online Free PDF

would not treat a dog so, so please remove them."
    Johnson, cut off in mid-protest, shrugged and signaled to one of the guards to do as the lady wished. An anvil was dragged over, and Ian squatted to place his wrists on the iron. A mallet slammed home with the clang of metal against metal. One pin and then the other shot from its casing. The mallet grazed his wrist with the final blow. Ian ignored the small hurt, as he had learned to ignore most unpleasantness. He was alive, and that was what mattered. And he meant to stay that way.
    Perversely, now that his arms were free, Ian found himself questioning the lady's good sense. He rose slowly, so as not to make the pounding in his head worse, rubbing his numbed wrists and then spreading his arms wide. The muscles of his shoulders and back protested the unaccustomed movement, but it was a good kind of pain, and he welcomed it. He had not known such freedom of movement for almost half a year. The guard jumped hastily back at his sudden movement; Johnson's hand strayed to the pistol at his waist. But the lady watched him unmoved, her head cocked a little to one side, her hand still clasping the end of the rope that encircled his neck. Had he been more himself, Ian would have found the situation utterly ridiculous. She could not have been more than an inch over five feet tall, if that, while he stood six feet two in his bare feet. Though she was sturdy for her size and he was emaciated, he could have picked her up and held her immobile with one hand and wrung her neck with the other. Yet she had ordered his irons removed. What would she do if he turned ugly, pray?
    "Susannah, be careful, please!"
    This plea and the sound of shocked giggles from just beyond the woman drew his eyes. Glancing over the top of that hideous bonnet with no trouble at all, Ian beheld a trio of girls clustered at the lady's back. One was lovely, the other two merely passable. All three were looking at him as if he had sprouted horns through the top of his head. The quiet-looking one in the pink bonnet held her hand pressed to her mouth as she stared at him in open fear. Ian had to repress an urge to bare his teeth at her, just to give her a taste of what she so obviously expected.
    "See here, Miss Susannah, I'll take the miscreant off your hands for you, give you back the money you paid for him to the pound. 'Tis no shame to admit you've made a mistake." The speaker stepped up to stand beside the woman, looking down at her. He was a choleric-looking fellow who might have passed for her father but for his manner of addressing her.
    "I do not want the miscreant taken off my hands, thank you very much, Mr. Greer. I am convinced that he will suit my purpose admirably." For all her frumpishness, the lady could summon the cool hauteur of a duchess. She even managed to give the impression of looking down her nose at a man who was half a head taller than she.
    "When the animal tries to murder you all in your beds you'll sing a different tune, my dear, but 'twill be too late then. If you will not think of yourself, at least think of your poor innocent sisters." Greer wore a bottle-green frock coat that would have been the better for being thoroughly brushed and a pair of black breeches that seemed to have been made for a much trimmer man. He looked every inch the bumbling provincial and would have been laughed out of London or Dublin had he blustered about so there. Here, it seemed, he was an important man, and one who was used to being obeyed. The lady's intransigence caused his face to turn even redder than nature and the hellish New World sun had rendered it.
    "He is not an animal but a human being, and he will certainly not try to murder us in our beds. How absurd you are to even suggest such a thing!"
    That decided speech, delivered with a lift of her too- square chin, made Greer look apoplectic. His lips clenched, and his eyes promised trouble as they darted from her to Ian and back.
    "Absurd, am I? When even