Timeless Desire by Gwyn Cready Read Free Book Online Page A

everyone.”
    “Certainly. I understand.” Though she was not quite sure she did.
    He found the book she’d left on the floor and picked it up. “I would like you to have this,” he said. “Raise my circulation to two.”
    She felt odd taking it after his unsettling behavior. “I don’t know.”
    “Please.”
    She relaxed. “Thank you,” she said, accepting the book and tucking it under her arm.
    “It has been a long time since anyone has cared for me,” he said. “You made me quite content.”
    He took her hand and kissed it. His hand was soft and strong, and despite everything, she found herself lingering in his clasp.
    A knock sounded at the door.
    They froze. The alcove was half a room away. She began to run, but Bridgewater grabbed her arm, uttered a picturesque oath, and shoved her behind the door he had just forbidden her from entering.

S IX
     

     
    “G OOD EVENING , C APTAIN .”
    “General.” Bridgewater came to formal attention and waited. He had hoped his brief sojourn as a sparring partner for his half-brother’s guards had been all the army time he would have to serve today.
    His visitor released him with a disgusted wave, the flawless queue of iron-gray hair flapping against his coat. “What happened to your face?”
    “The colonel and I had a disagreement.”
    He clucked his tongue. “Idiot.”
    Bridgewater said nothing. He could still feel the softness of the woman’s skin against his lips. How the time with her had quenched the loneliness within him. Talking so openly had perhaps been foolish, but only a lover’s sort of incaution. He had not said a thing she couldn’t have learned from any inhabitant of the borderlands, if in fact she had entered the room not knowing it already.
    Take care, man. Falling in love with a spy is a sure bet on disaster.
    Yet, why had he thrust her into the one place he absolutely didn’t want her to go, unless somewhere deep within him he didn’t believe she was a spy?
    You don’t want to believe it, that’s why. That was her plan.
    “I meant you were the idiot,” the general said.
    “I realize that, sir.” And perhaps I was.
    “Do you know why I’m in the borderlands, Captain? Do you know why Queen Anne sent her best general into this ungodly pen of bloody-minded brutes?”
    Given that the seat of the general’s family had been in the north of England for the last three hundred years, albeit in the more “civilized” area of Carlisle, Bridgewater took the “pen” to which the general referred to mean the parts of England close enough to Scotland to share in their brutishness.
    “Because you’re the most qualified man to lead this effort, sir.” And it was true. Whatever disagreements Bridgewater had with the man before him—and there were many—he was the most canny, experienced, levelheaded leader the queen’s army had ever produced. He had earned every ribbon on that coat as well as the title he carried, even though he’d been born to that. His remarkable rise from a daring captain to a distinguished general had been followed breathlessly by a youthful Bridgewater and had inspired him to take his own commission when he was old enough.
    Which made the fact that Bridgewater intended to betray him all that much harder.
    “Exactly,” said the older man. “And when I say to you that the best way, the most efficient way, and the safest way to bring an end to the violence in the borderlands is to move our army over the Scottish border to Langholm, what is your reaction?”
    “That you are correct, sir.”
    He grabbed Bridgewater by the lapels and jerked him hard. “Damn it, I know that’s not what you think. I know from talking to the boy, Thomas. I know from the note we found on him. You are providing aid to the enemy. Our enemy. England’s enemy.” He flung him loose.
    Bridgewater felt ill. Thomas had been captured? He prayed the boy hadn’t been forced to endure the same two-fisted questioning he had.
    “Damn that bloody