Temptress by Lisa Jackson Read Free Book Online

sheriff asked thoughtfully.
    Alexander said, “If he was attacked.”
    “There are many questions here and few answers.” Payne clucked his tongue as the wind swept through the forest with a keening sigh. “Far too few answers.”

CHAPTER THREE
    E very bone in his body ached as if the pain would never stop. Muscles he hadn’t known existed throbbed and his face felt afire, as if someone had taken a dull knife and peeled away his skin. He heard sounds . . . disembodied voices talking over and around him, as if he were truly dead, the words whispering across his burning skin like the wings of moths. Still he was unable to move. Couldn’t so much as flinch.
    He tried to speak, but no sound escaped his lips.
    Where was he?
    His mind was blurry and dark, as if he were lying in a fog-shrouded forest.
    How long had he been here?
    He tried to open an eye, but pain sliced through his brain, and he could do little but let out a moan and try to fight the blackness that pulled at the corners of his consciousness and threatened to drag him down in that blissful abyss where there was no pain, no memories. His mouth tasted foul, his tongue thick. He attempted to move a hand.
    Agony ripped through his body.
    He made another stab at speech, but his lips would not move and his voice failed him except to murmur a groan. As if from a distance, bits of conversation pierced through his pain from voices who had no faces.
    “He stirs,” one old woman said.
    “Nay, ’tis only the moan of a dying man. I heard he whispered Alena of Heath’s name when he was brought in.”
    Alena . . . Deep inside he felt something stir. Alena .
    “But he weren’t awake then, nor is ’e now.”
    “But—”
    “I’m tellin’ ye, he’s not awake. Watch.” He felt a hard hand upon his shoulder and all the fires of hell swept through him in a painful blast. Yet he could not move. “See . . . he’s as close to death as any man should be, and ’twould be a blessing if he passed.” The heavy hand was lifted.
    “Do ye think he’s a highwayman?” one worried female voice asked nervously. “An outlaw, then?”
    “Mayhap” was the response from a surer, steadier voice. That of the older woman. “I believe ’e were a ’andsome one. I wouldna be afeard of ’im searchin’ me skirts.”
    “Oh, ye’re awful, ye are,” the voice said. “How can ye tell, what with all his bruises and swelling? ’E looks more like a hog’s carcass after Cook has hacked off the meat fer sausage.”
    Both women cackled before he blissfully drifted off again.
    Later . . . how much time had passed he knew not, but his pain had lessened considerably and in his half-oblivious state, he heard prayers, intoned without inflection, from a man he presumed to be a priest, a man it seemed who thought his soul was about to leave his body, and it sounded, from the tenor of the priest’s words, that that very soul was about to plunge straight to the depths of hell. So days had to have passed . . . several days, he thought.
    He tried to lift an arm to let the priest know that he could hear, but his bones were too heavy and he was able to only listen as the priest, without much conviction, asked that his sins be forgiven.
    His sins .
    Had there been many? Or few?
    And what had they been? Against man? Woman? God?
    As he lay aching in the darkness, he didn’t know, couldn’t recall, didn’t care. He only wanted the remaining pain to go away, and as the priest left, he wondered if it would be better to embrace death rather than endure.
    His periods of consciousness were thankfully brief and this one was no exception. As he began to slip away again, he heard a door creak open and then quiet footsteps.
    “How is he?” This voice was that of a woman. Whispered, so as not to disturb him, he presumed, but clear and filled with an underlying authority. A voice that touched a far corner of his memory, a voice he knew instinctively he should recognize.
    “About the same, m’lady” was