Sarah Gabriel by Keeping Kate Read Free Book Online

made her feel better about despising him.
    She stretched a little to ease her aching shoulders, but discomfort nagged at her everywhere—in overtaxed muscles, in chilled hands and swollen feet, in her full bladder. Ignoring all that, determined to endure, she stared ahead in silence.
    After a while she heard more footsteps in the corridor, the scrape of a chair, low murmurs. On the wall, she saw shadows moving and heard the creak of the door as more footsteps padded over the straw behind her.
    “Katie Hell.” Francis Grant’s voice, quiet and nasal, the very air around him seemed to hold loathing in it. She tensed for what might come.
    Black boots and cream breeches entered her view, and she saw the thin, angular shape of his legs and the long tail of a red coat, crossed by the sash of an officer.
    Glancing up, she looked into long-lidded brown eyes set in a pale and narrow face made paler by the silver wig he favored. She said nothing, though she glared at him.
    She remembered Grant in the encampment weeks earlier, when he lay sprawled and snoring in shirtsleeves and loosened trousers, a silver flask in his hand. He had been quite fond of the contents of that flask, she recalled, and she had needed neither herbal potion nor a thump on the head to subdue him—only more whiskey. Grant had sucked it up eagerly, when he was not pawing at her bodice and sucking at her mouth like a kelpie sprung from a river. Strong and wiry, his advances had left bruises on her arms that had lingered for two weeks.
    Her kinsmen had nearly gone out to kill him, but she had stopped them, not wanting revenge on her conscience. After all, she had told them, no real damage had been done to her, and for the sake of the Jacobite cause, her kinsmen could not chance deliberately harming a regimental officer.
    Staring at the wall, Kate wished she could tell Grantthat she had saved his life—and that he owed her in return for it.
    “Kate,” Grant said. “I’m sure you’re thirsty and tired by now. Tell me what I want to know, and you’ll be permitted to rest and given a hot meal.”
    Even the thought of rest and food made her tremble. But she stared at the wall, willing the strength of that immovable rock into her legs to keep her from collapsing.
    “Tell me your name, and who sent you.” She heard an edge in his voice like a knife in velvet. “Tell me why you returned again to that encampment. Your mistake, my dear, and our good fortune.”
    A greater mistake than anyone knew, Kate thought, thinking of Fraser. Her eyes stung. She closed them, silent.
    He touched her arm, and she jerked in surprise, and when his fingers tightened, she gasped out in pain.
    “Four days since they brought you here to Fort William,” he murmured. “Four days without a word, and now over eighteen hours on your feet. How much can you take?”
    She stared at his boots and swallowed, her mouth dry.
    “Stubborn little strumpet,” Grant hissed. “You will not last out this game with me. You’ll talk, or die on your feet.”
    Panicking inwardly, Kate wondered if he was right. She struggled for breath and against the pain of his grasp.
    “I do not wish to see you suffer. I remember when you came to me before…so tantalizing,” he whispered, as he stroked her shoulder now. “You did not stay longenough, my dear. We would have enjoyed such delights together.” He leaned closer. “I could have been the only man to know all Katie Hell’s secrets, the only man to sample all of her intoxicating magic.” His fingers stretched, grazed over her bodice, over the fullness of her breast above the stays. “I still could be that man.”
    She shuddered and leaned back, chains clanking, but that only extended her arms uncomfortably. Grant stood close.
    “Either you tell me what I want to know, or I will tell everyone that Katie Hell was mine,” he said, his breath hot and meaty on her cheek. “If you do not cooperate, you will be mine for certain, every night,” he