A Rebel Without a Rogue by Bliss Bennet Read Free Book Online Page A

since she’d felt such an urge to smile at a man in shared amusement?
    A heavy tread behind her checked the unwise impulse before it had a chance to take root. “O’Hamill, sirs. The name for which you seek is O’Hamill.”
    Fianna stilled, all her senses snapping to painful attention. A common enough name in Ireland, O’Hamill. But a man from Cork, in the south of Ireland, would never set the syllables dancing with a musicality found only in the north. Why would he lie?
    She turned, half a beat after all the others, to find her gaze caught by a pair of eyes as green as her own.

    Kit had been born with the gift of intuition, at least when it came to sensing the emotions of others. A quick glance at a person’s face, or the way they held their body, and the edge of irritation, or disappointment, or fear that lay beneath the polite exterior seemed as clear to him as if they’d spoken their true feelings out loud. How often he’d winced as others foundered, misreading others’ feelings, until he’d realized that most people could not see beyond social façades as he could.
    But his usual skill had failed him when he’d met Fianna Cameron. Even given her impassive, cold demeanor and the stillness in which she held her petite frame, it had taken him aback, his inability to read beyond her glittering surface.  
    How odd, then, to sense her sudden disquiet now, even as she stood behind him, out of his line of sight. He could feel it quivering in the air, like the trembling tension of a rabbit immobilized by the sight of a predator yet unable to still the wild beatings of its heart. What had shaken her so?
    Her countenance, when he turned to face her, proved just as unrevealing now as it had been two nights earlier. But when he followed the direction of her gaze, he found a possible answer.
    One of the two men making their way across the coffeehouse was as familiar to him as were his own brothers. More so, perhaps, given how little time he’d spent with either Benedict or Theo of late. But surely his friend Sam Wooler wouldn’t make any woman uneasy. Kindly and even tempered despite his radical politics, Sam rarely allowed strong emotion to overset him.
    It must be the man beside Sam, then, a man Kit did not recognize. Did Miss Cameron know the burly, stern-faced fellow? Impossible to tell, for by the time the two men reached them, she had turned her eyes modestly to the floor.
    “Kit!” Sam grasped his hand with eager welcome. “Why did you not send me word you were up and about again?”
    “Because attempting to amicably settle your argument with Abbie was what led to the trouble in the first place,” Kit said, quirking up one corner of his mouth. “I’d no wish to listen to the two of you continue to squabble over my sickbed.”  
    The night he’d been attacked, he’d been searching the news room at the Crown and Anchor for a copy of the second volume of The Rights of Man , in an attempt to settle a ridiculous quarrel between Sam and their friend George Abbington-Pitts over the precise wording of one of Mr. Paine’s pithier pronouncements. Witnessing a fellow being shot would have sent such petty quibbles straight out of the heads of most men, but once Sam and Abbie sniffed out a bone of contention, neither was likely to let it drop.
    “Ah, you already know our friend Mr. Wooler, do you, sir?” Callendar exclaimed. “But not Mr. O’Hamill, I’ll warrant. How fortuitous!”
    Callendar nodded to the Irishman, then gestured him toward their group. “Mr. Pennington, may I introduce Mr. O’Hamill? Pennington here is in search of a Gaelic scribe.”
    “Is he, now? And cannot the lovely cailín do the honors?” the stranger asked, nodding toward Miss Cameron, who stood a bit apart from their group. “I’d wager my last groat that she’s the blood of the Irish flowing through her veins.”
    All the antiquarians had responded to Fianna Cameron’s disquieting beauty in one way or another—darting