Joining by Johanna Lindsey Read Free Book Online Page A

and what animals were nearby that had not found a warm hole to hibernate in for the winter. She was in a mood to kill something, which was why she would not. She never hunted whenshe was angry. She had brought the bow merely for her own protection, since she knew those attackers had fled into these woods.
    She was fleeing as well, trying to escape a memory that had been brought back so clearly today, thanks to
him.
It had been a day she might not even have remembered, it being so long ago and she so young, if there had not been so much pain involved with the memory.
    She had been proudly showing off her newest accomplishment to her friends, the taming of Rhiska. The falconer had given up on Rhiska, because she was a captured gyrfalcon, not raised from a baby, and had refused to adapt to human handling. He had in fact been ready to turn her over to the cooks, or so he’d said, something Milisant only realized much later had been a jest. So some of her pride had come from thinking she had saved the bird’s life by taming it.
    But then he had appeared, drawing her notice with a sound, and looking at her as if she had done something wrong. And since she had tamed Rhiska without the falconer knowing, entering his domain when she had been expressly forbidden access, she knew she
had
done something wrong, but she could not fathom how this stranger could know.
    But what he said to her, “I am the man you will be wedded to, once you are old enough for wedding,” had been the very worst thing he could have said. He had been handsome enough. Another girl might have been thrilled to hear him say such a thing. But Milisant had just that week decided she was never going to marry.
    Several days earlier, one of the village villeins had beat his wife so severely that she had died from it by the next day. The whispers that followed the incident, however, made a frightful impression on Milisant at that young age.
    “She deserved it,” and “’Twas his right to discipline his own wife,” and “He could have been a bit less heavy-handed. Who’s going to cook for him now, eh?” And “A wife should know better than to make her husband wroth with her.”
    To Milisant’s young mind, the best way to avoid all of that was to simply never wed. Such an easy solution, she wondered why more women did not think of it. And she had yet to be told about Wulfric de Thorpe, had yet to learn that she was already contracted to marry him. So she thought herself safe from heavy-handed husbands—until
he
stood there, claiming with such confidence that she would be wedding him.
    He was a liar, of course, and so she called him, but his words had frightened her too, because he sounded so sure of himself. It had been a bad year for her all the way around, the year she’d found out that most of the things she wanted to do, she’d never be able to do. It was also the year that she had discovered, or at least her friends had, that she had a terrible temper, and she’d yet to figure out how to control it.
    The liar got a taste of it, but when she ordered him to leave, he just stood there, staring. That was the last straw. She was going to have him thrown out of the castle and the gate barred to him.
    She moved to put Rhiska back on her perch so she could leave the mews to summon one of the men-at-arms to deal with the stranger. She was furious that she had been ignored. After all, she was the lord’s daughter, and this man was a stranger. But Rhiska sensed her anger and reacted to it, flying straight at him.
    Milisant was surprised, and even more surprised when the foolish boy put up a gloveless hand to ward off a falcon. The hawk had not been trained to hunt yet, so had not been trained yet to return at a call. But all hawks were hunters by nature; they just did not usually attack people. Rhiska did, though, clamped right on to the boy’s hand. Milisant started forward to talk the bird off of him, but the boy was too swift in his own reaction and shook