Wildewood Revenge Read Online Free PDF Page A

presence, fascinated by his appearance. Her pupils dilated, a witless rabbit caught in a hypnotic glare of light.
    He appeared weary. A little unkempt, his collar length dark hair was pushed back roughly from his face, the moisture trapped in the damp strand s glistening in the firelight. Here and there, small white lines be trayed the scars of old wounds. They dissected his eyebrow, highlighted the line of his jaw and marred the stubble that cloaked his chin. His eyes, which assessed her with lazy disinterest, were a striking blue, his lashes long and black.
    He was not unattractive she decided as she studied him detachedly, though his appearance suggested he’d been living rough for some time, and an accumulation of sweat and grime had caught in the fine lines either side of his eyes. Laughter lines, her Grandmother would have called them, but there was no humour in his expression. Instead there was an aura of strangeness which initiated stirrings of unease within her.
    He spoke again more insistently, his voice little more than a hoarse whisper but its tone demanding her attention. She shook herself, widened her eyes with difficulty and tried very hard to concentrate. It was French, she was almost sure of it, a kind of French anyway and she thought he was asking her name. How odd, she thought distractedly, a Frenchman in the middle of a Northumberland. Perhaps he was lost, it was easily done. She, herself had a terrible sense of direction. She tried to recall the French learned at school, but apart from the usual rude phrases that circumnavigated the school yard she was at a loss.
    This wasn’t getting them anywhere, she thought. Confusion clouded her usual directness. She could imagine all manner of things about him and who he might be, but that didn’t explain where she was, how she’d got there and what on earth was going on. She swallowed with difficulty, took an unsteady breath and tried out her voice.
    “Speak English, you’re not in France now,” she croaked. She dragged an insolent glare and a generous dollop of false bravado from the depths of her rapidly diminishing store of confidence.
    Pulled out of his lazy reverie, he cocked his head and raised a scarred brow. “Pardon?” he responded. “I merely asked your name, Mademoiselle.”
    “My name?” She cast her eyes around the smoky room, with no idea how she’d ended up there. She had the worst hangover possible, and couldn’t even remember the party. Maybe that was the answer. She’d obviously been to a party, done something stupid, which pretty much summed up her life so far and ended up here, with...him. She felt the flicker of self-doubt, spark into life and chose to ignore it. She’d left all that behind in London, the self- analysis of her own behaviour, the self-deprecation. She doused the flame before it could take hold and glanced back at him. She needed to get her life back on track.
    “My name is Grace,” she offered eventually with a shrug and a shield of indifference “Who the hell are you?” She watched as confusion swiftly flashed across his face. Perhaps he found as much difficulty with her accent as she did with his.
    “Miles, Miles of Wildewood , my lady. The boy is Edmund.”
    “Miles who?” Bloody hell, whatever she’d had the night before; she was making a sworn promise never to touch it again. She felt an unwelcome fluttering in the pit of her stomach and made a supreme effort to retain the contents.
    “Okay , Miles, whoever, from wherever, how did I get here?” One pale hand strayed to her fringe and she wound the longer strands between finger and thumb. She glanced around bewildered, simply could not remember a thing, and felt a tiny ripple of alarm at the absurdity and recklessness of that.
    Miles observed her through narrowed eyes. “Why, on the back of my horse, my lady.”
    In the boot of his car more like , thought Grace, with rapidly increasing unease, wrapped in a carpet and set for a shallow grave. Now