The Irish Bride Read Online Free PDF Page A

of hand.”
    “Oh, Nick. Don’t joke about such things. Someone might think you are serious.”
    * * * *
    Desperate for fresh air and movement, Nick went out riding in the afternoon. Stamps, used to constant exercise, greeted him with an impatient whicker the moment he entered the sunlight-strewn stables. Nor did Nick care to stay in, hunched over his father’s crabbed handwriting any longer. The mist that had hung over the hills in the morning had lifted, leaving the air cool and soft. Nick took great, gulping breaths of it as he rode, finding it more heartening that a dram of poteen fresh from a cottager’s still.
    He found moments from yesterday’s meeting playing in his mind as they trotted along the lanes. Blanche Ferris gleamed in his imagination like a gilded goddess in the dark recesses of a temple. She seemed to possess all things desirable in a woman—beauty, charm, a sweet helplessness that left a man feeling the stronger for her weakness.
    If she had faults, they were girlish and would be eradicated by the joys and sorrows of womanhood. And if her father should prove to be as wealthy as promised by that mill owner so simply mentioned, then surely heaven had marked Blanche out for his bride. “Providence set her in my path yesterday,” he told a cow looking over the gate.
    Nick decided then and there that he would call upon the Ferrises tomorrow. Assessing himself, he knew he could offer little beyond a title, yet such things had considerable merit in the eyes of the merchant class. The title was hereditary, so that Mr. Ferris’s grandson would have that all-important “sir” before his name. Hell, I’ll even name the lad... wait. She said her father’s name was Augustus. No, I’m damned if I will.
    A shadow showed against the gray stone wall as he came around the corner. It slipped among the tangle of trees where the wall ended.
    Even in the depths of reverie, his soldier’s senses, honed by ambush and melee, never slept. Instantly on the alert, Nick gripped Stamps hard with his knees, keeping a deceptively loose hand on the reins. He let his right hand fall with apparent casualness to his thigh, but in truth he was feeling for the pistol butt in the holster by his knee. His father had taught him that it was never wise to travel without the means to put one’s horse or one’s enemy out of his misery.
    Nick went forward, refusing to be frightened by a shadow until he knew whether it be that of man, boy, or sheep.
    The other horse broke from cover, crowding Stamps in the narrow lane so that he backed, half-rearing. With knees clamped tight, Nick forced him down, controlling the horse’s instinctive swerve in order to present his pistol over Stamp’s neck.
    The other rider laughed as he, too, brought his mount to a standstill. “I was going to say ‘stand and deliver’ but ‘tis you who keeps the upper hand.”
    Nick held his aim over the other man’s heart. “David? By the Lord, man, there must be easier ways of committin’ suicide.”
    “And easier ways of starvin’ than bein’ a highwayman in Ireland. Pickings are always poor for the fraternity at this season.”
    He pulled away the muffler he’d wrapped around the lower part of his face, revealing a countenance both boyish and brash. His smile seemed to have three corners while his bright green eyes laughed even more than his lips. For the rest, he had hay-colored hair, a bump on the bridge of his nose, and a few scars about his mouth and chin from a youthful bout with smallpox.
    He should have been ugly, but the whole of his face was more than the sum of its parts. Women of mature years were strangely susceptible to the combination of youthful enthusiasm and manly prowess. Or so the rumors had flown, some fostered by David himself.
    Nick eased off the hammer and slid the silver barrel into the holster. He turned Stamps alongside David’s silver-gray mare and reached across to shake his boyhood friend by the hand. “Have you been