The Firebrand by May McGoldrick Read Free Book Online

brush of callused fingers against bare skin just above her right breast. Glancing quickly down, she stared at a long tear on her blouse—where his fingers were tracing a seductive path on the exposed curve of her breast.
    “I...Stop!” She struggled against him, and he moved, allowing her to bring a hand between their bodies and pull the torn material together. “I...I must have torn that climbing aboard.”
    He was no longer touching her, but Adrianne could still feel the scorching heat of his hand on her skin, the strange tightness in her belly that his closeness seemed to be making worse with each passing moment.
    “I warn you...my passion runs far cooler than my aunt’s. But if you continue to provoke me...” At his pause, she looked up and met his eyes again. “If you push me too far, I can devise far more creative...treatment... than anything you’ve encountered so far.”
    The fight drained out of her in an instant as his hands moved up and cradled her face, holding her head motionless against the wall. She watched his eyes linger on her lips.
    His mouth descended until his words were just a breath upon her skin.
    “This is only a sample of the consequences that await you, if you should choose to provoke my passions.”

CHAPTER 5
     
    He might as well have hidden in a grave.
    The incessant chattering of Gillie’s teeth echoed dully inside the damp wooden staves of the barrel. For hours, it seemed, his legs had been alternating between feelings of pins-and-needles and total numbness. Pressing his thin chest tighter against his kilted legs, the boy blew on his hands, trying to breathe some warmth into the chilled bones.
    The bay’s water had been much colder than he’d thought it would be. The swim to the ship, much farther in the whipped-up water than he’d ever tried swimming in winter. Halfway to the ship, he had felt his mind starting to wander, but he’d forced himself onward. Onward in pursuit of his protector—his friend—the one person in the entire world who had cared enough to treat him with any kindness. Onward in pursuit of Mistress Adrianne.
    The salty brine was still in his nose, and Gillie snatched the wet tam off his head to smother the sneeze that he felt coming on. The burning itch in the skin of his face was driving him mad. It was a hundred times worse from the seawater, and he scratched at it carefully with the tam. It didn’t help, but Gillie knew how agonizing it would be if he really scratched it as he wanted to. The crusty patches would just open up again, fiercely painful and oozing pus.
    The boy forced himself to think of other things. Of Mistress Adrianne.
    Hiding amid the rocks on Barra’s shore, he’d kept watch over Mistress Adrianne from the time they’d hoisted the cage up the wall of Kisimul Castle. When the shipmaster had dropped anchor in the bay, and the steward had sent one of the other lads calling for Gillie to help with the stores going to the ship, he’d kept his silence and watched that cage swinging in the winter gloom.
    But it wasn’t for her protection that he’d kept his vigil. Gillie knew better than anyone that his mistress was braver and more capable of taking care of herself than most men. He’d been waiting for her to escape. And he’d known where she was going.
    For the past five months, for as long as he’d known Mistress Adrianne, she’d been waiting for a ship. Waiting for a way to escape the Isle of Barra and get back to her family. Seeing the tall masts and dark sails swing around the eastern point, Gillie had known that—cage or no—Mistress Adrianne was going to find a way to get on that vessel before it sailed from Barra.
    If she ever left the island, the boy had decided months ago, he was going, as well. Gillie had decided that the first moment she had taken the time to notice him.
    Aye, he’d known he had to go with her. Except for the fat steward when there was work to be done, no one would miss him if he were to disappear