Winter's Reach (The Revanche Cycle Book 1) Read Online Free PDF

foot and hooked her leg around his waist.
    “Two weeks is a long time without you,” she said and guided him inside her.
    Then there was no time for words, no room for them, just two lovers clinging to one another and leaning against a crumbling stone wall as they rutted like beasts. Renata bit down hard on his shoulder, her muscles tightening like steel coils as she crescendoed, and he let out a hoarse cry as he followed her over the precipice. They held each other close, sweating, panting, feeling each other’s pounding hearts.
    “I love you,” he whispered.
    They sank to the damp cobblestones together, their legs too wobbly to stand.
    “Two weeks,” he said, “and I save the Banco Rossini. Money, pride, a place at the bargaining table. My brother and my father can run it from there.”
    “Without you,” Renata said.
    “Without me,” Felix said, “and I can walk away knowing they’ll be all right, with my honor intact.”
    Her fingers curled around his, twining, holding tight.
    “Do you think they’ll come looking for us?” she asked.
    “When they find out I eloped with a ‘commoner’? Father will be furious, but Calum will calm him down. He always does, and the money will soothe any open wounds. Besides, let them look. We’ll be all the way to Kettle Sands before anyone notices we are gone.”
    “I heard back from the owner of the Rusted Plow,” Renata said. “You wouldn’t believe the hoops I’m jumping through to keep my parents in the dark. He agreed to our offer. I’m starting to think we can pull this off.”
    Felix smiled. “An inn by the shore, someplace peaceful and warm, just for us. You can tend the bar and I can cook. It won’t be easy, but we’ll make it work.”
    She looked in his eyes, and her smile faded just a bit.
    “Felix?”
    “What is it, love?”
    “You once told me that there are no sure things when it comes to business,” she said.
    “You know that as well as I do. You practically run the Hen and Caber yourself, not that your drunkard of a father has ever given you a lick of credit for it.”
    “What if you fail?” she said.
    He looked down at their twined fingers and shrugged.
    “If I fail, the only way I can save the family business—and keep my father from dying in a debtor’s prison—is by marrying Aita Grimaldi. So that means there is only one possible outcome here.”
    “What’s that?”
    He gave her a lopsided smile. “I don’t fail.”
    *   *   *
    A light rain fell from the midnight sky as Felix returned home. He ducked under the columned porch and let himself into the dark villa, shutting the door behind him as softly as he could. Metallic plinking sounds echoed up the empty halls as raindrops leaked through rotting boards and down the edges of warped window frames, landing in the battered pots and pans that littered the mildewed rugs.
    I will never set foot in this house again
, he thought. A bitter pain gripped his heart and nearly drove him to his knees.
    The door to his father’s study hung open, the candles doused, the hearth cold. It brought him back to the day he’d told Albinus about Renata, almost three years ago. Before the pox had shriveled his father’s body, when Albinus could still swing a fist strong enough to break his son’s lip and loosen a tooth.
    Felix remembered standing there in shock, blood running down his chin as Albinus ranted at him.
    “Your mother
died
giving
birth
to you, you ungrateful shit! This is how you want to repay her memory? By dragging our family name into the gutter? By making us the laughingstock of the city?”
    “I thought you would be happy—” Felix had said.
    “Happy? Why? Because my son is fucking a piece of dockside trash? You are a
Rossini
. A nobleman! I’d rather see you
dead
than dirtying yourself with a commoner.”
    The room was silent now, but he could still hear the fury in the old man’s voice, echoing from the worm-eaten wood.
    “Well, Father,” Felix said to the empty