The Wayward One (The De Montforte Brothers Book 5) Read Online Free PDF

lass. I’m just messin’ about with ye. I’d never hurt ye, not in a million years. I’m perfectly harmless.”
    “You—you don’t look harmless.”
    “No?” He arched a brow, his gaze dropping pointedly to her bosom, the nip of her waist and the flare of her hips with undisguised interest. “How do I look?”
    Dangerous. Virile. Predatory. Fascinating. “I can’t answer that.”
    “Not scared of me now, are ye?”
    “After what you just said to me? No, I am not scared . What I am, sir, is offended. Outraged.”
    “I paid ye a complement and ye’re offended? Outraged? Saint’s alive, what would your reaction be if I paid ye an insult?”
    “I can’t believe I’m standing here having this absurd conversation with you. You are rude and obnoxious and drunk, and I have already given you far more time and attention than you deserve. Good evening, sir.”
    He went back to looking down at the garden below, his gaze far more keen and watchful than his drunken state should allow. “’Twould be a better one if ye came over here and let me give ye that kiss.”
    “Ohhh!” Incensed, she turned on her heel and hurried for the stairs, hearing his laughter ringing out behind her. Her slippered foot had just reached the first of the steps leading down to the ground floor when an earth-shattering explosion all but shook the house off its foundations. Startled, she missed her footing…grabbed wildly for the balustrade…and suddenly the stairs were coming up to meet her, ceiling, balustrade, walls and stairs all whirling past her eyes as she tumbled and fell.
    Her scream was lost to the wild applause outside.
    * * *
    Ruaidri had only pretended to exit the townhouse earlier, just as he’d pretended to be drunk so that nobody took him seriously—but he’d never had any intention of leaving, and had slipped quietly back into the house after everyone else had filed outside. He had not expected to be disturbed, and certainly not by the ivory-haired beauty who had swept so forcefully into his room. He had no love for the English—not after what they had done to him as a young lad, not after the years he’d spent pressed into the Royal Navy, not after the innate scorn with which most of them treated him and anyone else who happened to be Irish. In fact, truth be told, he hated the English. It amused him to have outsmarted them all into thinking he was nothing but Deirdre’s foolish brother, a tenant farmer who drank too much and was only a few steps above an idiot, obligingly leaving the house when told. It also amused him to rattle the imperious ice princess when she’d come flying into the room. Poor little canary. He could have stayed all night talking to her, as he’d sensed she was not just a spoiled aristocrat but a young woman of depth, passion and feeling, but there were times for the pursuit of a skirt and there were times for the pursuit of duty.
    Tonight belonged to duty.
    And so, he’d deliberately frightened her to get her to leave. He hadn’t moved from his place at the window as she’d stormed off, and he had fully intended to go back to watching the much-anticipated demonstration of this “new explosive” unobserved and unnoticed up here in the upstairs window of his darkened room, when a horrendous boom at close range had nearly blown the glass out of that very window; he heard her shriek and then the terrible, thudding sounds of a body falling down a flight of stairs.
    The explosive forgotten, he charged from the room and to the head of the stairs. There at the bottom she lay, a beautiful broken doll with one outflung arm, her hair down from its elaborate coiffure and now in helpless disarray over her face and her skirts, the blue-green color of Galway shallows under a bright sun, twisted around her legs.
    He took the stairs in three bounds.
    “Yer ladyship!” He knelt and took her gloved hand, alarmingly limp within his own. “Answer me!”
    She stirred, moaned, and fell motionless once