Jane Feather - [V Series] by Violet Read Free Book Online Page A

their only child. She had been taught to regard such bodily hungers without prudery. They were perfectly normal among adults and should be satisfied without guilt. But she didn’t think El Baron or Cecile would have regarded that wild encounter with approval. One didn’t fraternize with the enemy.
    And soldiers
were
the enemy … a personal enemy.The images flooded in again, the screams, the steaming reek of blood. Her father standing in the midst of a yelling circle of men in the tattered uniforms of many nations, their faces twisted with the rapacious vicious-ness of greed, their senses drunk with blood. His great sword slashed from side to side but they kept on coming; shot after shot pierced his body, and it seemed to the two powerless watchers on the heights that he couldn’t still stand there alive with the blood spurting from the holes in his body—and yet still he stayed on his feet and bodies fell beneath his sword.
    Cecile lay in the shadows, dead by her husband’s hand, a small black smudge on her forehead, where his merciful bullet had entered. El Baron’s wife wouldn’t fall victim to the rapine hungers of a vile mob of deserting soldiers. And his daughter too would have joined her mother in death if she’d been in the Puebla de St. Pedro that dreadful day, instead of hunting with Gabriel in the hills.
    Slowly, she blinked away the images, put the anger and grief behind her. She’d led her own small band since that day. Those who’d escaped the massacre and others who’d joined them, all were prepared to follow El Baron’s daughter as they aided the partisans, tormented the French, avoided direct contact with the English, and took what payment came their way.
    Until that double-dyed bastard, Cornichet, had set his ambush. Tamsyn had no idea how many of La Violette’s band had escaped the French in the pass, but she had been their target. The baron had long ago entrusted his daughter’s safety in his own absence to his most trusted comrade, and Gabriel had fought beside her and for her. But one man, even a giant, was no match forfifty. They’d both been swept up like spiders before the broom.
    But what was done was done, and bewailing the past was pointless. It was now a question of making the most of their present situation. There must be some advantage to be gained from it. There was always an advantage if one looked for it.
    She tucked her shirt into the waist of her britches and walked toward the two men, carrying her shoes and stockings, enjoying the feel of the cool, mossy turf beneath her feet.
    The colonel’s bright-blue eyes rested on her as she approached, and Tamsyn’s scalp lifted, her heart quickening. What was done was done, she told herself firmly. That moment of madness was in the past. It had nothing to do with the present situation.

Chapter Three
    J ULIAN FASTENED HIS SWORD BELT AT HIS WAIST . A RMED, HE felt immeasurably more secure, although the giant’s sword was unsheathed, and the colonel was certain the man would be as fast and deadly with his weapon as any soldier he’d encountered.
    The girl was walking toward them along the bank, carrying her shoes and stockings for all the world as if she were on a picnic by the river. He still couldn’t get his mind around what had happened between them. His anger and injured pride at the ease with which she’d outsmarted him had turned into something else. Something darker and more powerful than simple lust, so that he’d lost all sense of reality, of duty, of purpose in a scrambling tangle of limbs and the heated furrow of her lithe body.
    And it had lost him his prisoner and almost his skin. His fury at himself was boundless.
    He had quickly dismissed the possibility of calling to his men. They’d not hear him from the woods, and they certainly couldn’t get to him quickly enough to support him in a fight with Gabriel and his broadsword. La Violette, however, was unarmed—Cornichet had seento that—so he had only one