The Falcon's Bride by Dawn Thompson Read Free Book Online Page B

entrance, with its elaborately carved tri-circles? Was there more than one? Had she come out a different way? Where were the kerbstones—all ninety-seven of them—holding up the massive cairn? Gone—all gone! All but the falcon, circling above, had vanished with the light in the passage tomb.
    Panicked now, Thea cupped her hands around her mouth. “James!” she shrilled at the top of her voice. “James! Stop this. What’s happening? Where are you?”
    But it wasn’t her brother who laid hands on her from behind and threw something cold and damp over her head that smelled of horse. Someone had hold of her—more than one set of hands jostled her about and hoisted her into the air. She came down hard across a broad shoulder that she would have beat upon if her hands weren’t tethered beneath the foul-smelling blanket.
    The last thing she heard before something hard struck her head was the sound of a rough voice saying, “Wait till he sees what we’ve bagged—and right under our noses, too.”
    Thea’s first waking sensation was of teeth-chattering cold. Her chinchilla pelerine had been removed, and so had her Moroccan leather ankle boots. Her feet were freezing. So was her body in its thin wool crepe traveling costume, which gapped open in front. Instinctively, she tried to close it, but her hands were tethered above her head, and her feet weren’t touching the floor. All at once, she realized she couldn’t have closed it even if her hands werefree. It opened in back. The frock had been torn apart in front nearly all the way down to the hem.
    A dull ache at the back of her head wrenched a moan from her dry throat. Where was she? Not at Cashel Cosgrove, surely. Why couldn’t she see clearly? She wasn’t alone. Several men and a woman were speaking in hushed whispers in the shadows. Paralyzed with panic, Thea strained her eyes, trying to lift their images from the waves of dizziness that came and went like a pulse beat.
    All at once, rough hands spread her frock and reached inside, stroking her breasts, belly and thighs. She tried to scream but couldn’t. Something stretched across her mouth was pushing her tongue back down her throat, a gag, and all that came out was a muffled whimper. Her feet were untethered, and she used them, kicking wildly at a shadowy moving target, her head swimming with vertigo. But that only spread her frock wider, and the rough hand parted her legs, cruelly exploring the soft, silken hair between her thighs.
    The veins in Thea’s neck bulged with the frantic scream she couldn’t release. Between the cold and sheer terror of what she feared was about to happen, her whole body began to shake with involuntary spasms.
    Suddenly the hand was yanked away so sharply that Thea spun where she hung, dangling from a frayed rope attached to an iron ring in the ceiling of what seemed to be a cave. Albeit blurred, her vision was returning. A chorus of muffled cries, accompanied by the hasty shuffling of feet erupted in a racket of displaced objects and raucous shouts all around her.
    “We didn’t mean no harm,” a husky voice said. A hollow sound followed, and then more shuffling and objects clashing outside of her line of vision. “No . . . have done! I . . .we was just havin’ a bit o’ fun with her while we was waitin’ for you. We wouldn’t have done nothin’— No . . . ! ”
    Thea strained to see her captors, but the position of her arms stretched over her head and the fabric of her gaping frock blocked her vision. She only had a clear view of what was directly in front of her, and these men were off to the side.
    “She’s no good to us spoiled,” said a booming baritone voice. It reverberated in her very bones. Their leader? It must be. Her breath was coming in heaving spasms, and relief thrilled through her. He had spared her from what surely would have been the loss of her innocence. But her euphoria came too soon. From the periphery a figure emerged and stood before her—a