The Highlander Read Online Free PDF Page A

treasure. And instilled a love of all things intellectual and agricultural.
    When the St. Vincents purchased the stately manor of Grandfield bordering Birch Haven, the baron had seen a chance to save his only child from encroaching spinsterhood.
    A disease had been eating at his bones, one he’d kept hidden from Philomena until he succumbed to it mere months after her marriage, leaving her alone in this world but for a cruel husband and his hateful family.
    Now Birch Haven was gone. Her father, years dead. And there was no sunshine or warmth in this world.
    The cold pierced Mena before consciousness fully returned, and she knew for a fact she was not in heaven. Even before she blinked open her eyes and saw the face of the devil calling her name, an eye patch affixed over a grim, scowling, but satirically handsome face.
    â€œDon’t move, Lady Benchley,” the black-haired, black-eyed devil was saying as he tucked something around her shivering body, something with warmth in its heavy folds. His cloak, perhaps? “Don’t look,” he softly ordered.
    There was a man yelling, not far from her. Mr. Burns? The voice made her skin crawl. Her face throbbed with pain. Screams of madness and cries of joy echoed from women among the chaos of authoritative male voices out in the hall.
    A sickening crunch sounded, and despite the devil’s orders—despite her own dismay—Mena looked.
    Mr. Burns dropped from the grip of a familiar auburn-haired mercenary. The orderly’s neck crooked at an impossible angle and his eyes stared sightlessly at the cold, white walls.
    Mr. Burns had been terrified in his last moments, and Mena was glad of it.
    â€œHe shouldn’t have put his hands on you,” the killer stated in that toneless, stony way of his.
    â€œMr. Argent.” A fair-haired man in a perfectly pressed suit leaned into her cell from the doorway, his light brows drawn down his forehead with somewhat paternal disapproval. Though he couldn’t have been much older than either Dorian Blackwell or Christopher Argent. “Did you just murder that man?”
    Argent toed at Burns’s limp shoulder, his chilling features a smooth, blank mask of innocence. “No, Chief Inspector Morley, I—found him like this.”
    The chief inspector glanced from Christopher Argent down at Mena, his blue eyes full of compassion, and then to the devil crouched over her. The director of Scotland Yard was no idiot, and Mena could tell that he ascertained the situation within a matter of seconds.
    â€œBlackwell?”
    â€œBastard must have slipped whilst accosting the lady.” Dorian Blackwell, the Blackheart of Ben More, shrugged as he touched gazes with Argent, and then slid his notice back to Morley.
    A tense and silent conversation passed between the three men, and after a moment where even Mena forgot to breathe, the chief inspector dropped his shoulders and nodded. “I’ll send for a doctor for the viscountess,” he muttered through clenched teeth. “A real doctor, as I intend to see the one running this institution hanged.”
    â€œI’ll dispense with this heap of rubbish.” Taking Burns by the ankle, Argent dragged the limp and dirty orderly away as though he weighed no more than a gunnysack.
    Turning back to Mena, Dorian tilted his head so he was regarding her solely out of his good eye. “Stay still a while longer, Lady Benchley,” he said with a gentleness Mena hadn’t known such a villain capable of. “My wife, Lady Northwalk, is waiting in the carriage. Once the doctor says it’s all right to move you, we’re taking you away from here.”
    Mena fainted again, this time from profound relief.

 
    C HAPTER T WO
    Hallucinations. Delusions. Waking dreams. All symptoms of absolute madness.
    And yet every time Mena pinched herself, the pain didn’t wake her.
    This was really happening.
    She blinked rapidly against misty-eyed