WindSeeker by Charlotte Boyett-Compo Read Free Book Online

she sidestepped him and sat on their bed.
    She held up her arms to him. "Come to me, Milord Conar!"
    There were tears in her voice, and he wasted no time in going to her. She turned into his embrace and
    buried her face against his bare shoulder, wincing at the chilled feel of his flesh, trembling as the thought of
    his hard flesh turned cold with death flitted unbidden through her mind.
    "Hold me, Conar!" she begged. "Hold me as though there may never be a tomorrow!"
    "Hush, now. Our tomorrows will be many and long. I would rather die than not spend my life with you."
    Sleep was a long time in coming for Liza that night.
    She knew her nightmares had just begun.

    * * *
Galen McGregor’s dreams were filled with Liza. His waking thoughts were on her lovely face and sweet
    voice. His fantasies took him to exotic lands and to the heights of shared passion with her imagined form.
    But his realities brought him crashing to earth.
    When he had known his twin was miserable, sick that he was being forced into a loveless marriage with
    a woman thought to be hideously deformed, Galen had been overjoyed. Never had the golden Prince of
    Serenia been prevented from having something he wanted; never had something Conar McGregor held
    dear been taken from him as his beloved Liza had been. To have Conar in misery, suffering, even from so
    minor a thing as having to marry someone he didn’t want to, had Galen laughing until the very moment the
    veil had been drawn from Liza’s pretty face.
    From that moment, Galen’s dreams had become nightmares, his thoughts vile and vengeful. His fantasies,
    ones of misfortune for his twin. His realities, the knowledge that Conar had won still again, and in the
    winning, had claimed the lovely Liza for his lawful prize.
    Galen now dwelt in a perpetual state of drunken stupor, his days filled with snarling rage, his nights with
    whimpering dejection.
    Curse him! Galen thought as he sat brooding in his study within the dank and dismal walls of Norus
    Keep. Curse them both, father and son! Once more Conar had escaped the fate he so richly deserved
    while he, Galen, had been left to suck hind teat still again. Was there no end to his hated brother’s good
    fortune?
    If there had been any semblance of love left within him for his brother, Galen thought, it was long gone. If
    there had ever been one ounce of compassion buried deep in his bitter soul, it was hidden so deeply even
    the gods couldn’t find it. His rancor toward his twin had become a suppurating wound oozing venom
    from his heart to flood his system with poisonous thought. He wanted Conar out of his life forever and he
    knew only one person who could see that it would be done…
    Kaileel Tohre.
    Slamming his fist into the paneling of his study, Galen felt a great satisfaction at the physical pain. Pain
    was something he understood. It was something he relished on occasion. Not the pain in his heart—that
    was unbearable—but the physical pain that momentarily took his mind from the agony rotting away his
    soul. He could bear the pain he felt on the outside; it was the pain within him, throughout his entire being,
    that haunted him with burning barbs and taloned fists that gripped him with the red-hot sting of jealousy.
    That was a pain that could not be eased.
    Raking blunt fingers through his dark gold hair, Prince Galen McGregor narrowed his pale blue eyes and
    cursed the fates that had made him the second-born of the two. Although he bore a striking resemblance
    to Conar, his own hair was much more coarse than Conar’s silky sheen; his face was cast in the same
    roundness, but Conar’s was more handsome, more bold; the blue eyes were direct where Galen’s
    tended to shift away.
    "You got it all, didn’t you, Conar?" Galen hissed, picturing his twin. "You got the personality and the
    loyalty; you got the crown." His lips curled. "You got the woman." His anger seethed within him. "Damn
    you to the Abyss, but I hate you!"
    Shouting for his