The Barefoot Princess Read Online Free PDF Page B

He growled with fury.
    “No.”
    “Perhaps you didn’t understand me, girl.” He looked at her from under lowered brows. “I’m the marquess of Northcliff, and I said to get…it…off.”
    “And I don’t care who you are, you’re here and here you’re going to stay.”
    A flame of pure blue rage seared all thought out of his mind. With the instinct of a caged beast, he let out a roar and leaped at her.
    She jumped back, her face alive with shock.
    His hands reached for her throat—and the chain jerked him off his feet. The stone floor met his outflung body with a thump that knocked the air out of his lungs. For a long, agonized moment he couldn’t breathe. Then he could, and it was worse. Painful reprisal for his rage.
    His leg, his stupid leg, felt as if he’d landed on hot pokers.
    And all the time he lay there and gasped like a dying fish, that female stood and watched without offering sympathy or assistance. To him. To the marquess of Northcliff, the man whom dowagers and gentle ladies adored.
    When at last he could lift his head, he asked, “What have you done?”
    “What have I done?” She lifted a mocking brow. “Why, I’ve kidnapped the marquess of Northcliff.”
    “You dare admit to it?” Inch by painful inch, he dragged himself back onto the cot.
    “Admitting to it is the least of my sins. I did it.”
    She was enjoying herself. He could see it in the saucy tilt of her lips, the jaunty lift of her brows. He couldn’t comprehend that any woman would have the gall, the sheer unadulterated nerve to take him off his own property…He straightened. His eyes narrowed. “Wait a minute. There was a man.”
    “I hired him to lift you. He’s gone now,” she said swiftly. “You won’t see him again.”
    “I don’t believe you.” Stretching out his leg, he rubbed the thigh, feeling the bone through material and muscle. It didn’t feel broken, but he’d wrenched it again, and his pain was her fault. Hers . This insolent baggage. Speaking in the condescending tone she so richly deserved, he said, “No woman would come up with a plan like this, much less be able to execute it.”
    “I’m depending on that kind of thinking. Everyone will imagine you mad when you say a woman took you—if you even dare admit it.” She inclined her head to him in mocking homage.
    “Women don’t have the ability to sustain a thought long enough to put such a plan in motion.”
    “Actually, you’re right.” She grinned, not at all offended. “It took two women.”
    “Miss Victorine,” he remembered. “You said I was in Miss Victorine’s cellar.”
    “That’s right.”
    “Are you trying to tell me that Miss Victorine Sprott helped you kidnap me?” He well recalled Miss Victorine. When he was a lad, he used to come over with one of the fishermen, run up the walk to her stately old cottage, and she would serve him cakes and tea, then walk with him in the garden and tell him about the plants. Everything he knew about tending flowers he’d learned from Miss Victorine—and now she had kidnapped him? “Nonsense!”
    “Not nonsense. If you think about it, there’s a certain justice in her actions that you can appreciate.”
    He straightened. “What are you babbling about?”
    “Please, I beg of you. Don’t try to pretend ignorance. It does you little justice and will avail you nothing.” The girl’s contempt whipped at him.
    In that moment, as he listened to her elocution, he realized what he should have realized before. She might dress like a servant, but she spoke like a lady. That was what had bothered him last night—at least, he hoped it was last night—at the gazebo.
    She glanced up the stairs where the soft hush of a lady’s skirt and the gentle patter of a lady’s slippers could be heard. “I think that’s Miss Victorine now with your breakfast. Are you hungry?”
    “Do you expect me to sit here like a bloody fool and eat a meal?”
    “You’ll always be a bloody fool, there’s