Read Cates, Kimberly for Free Online Page B

that I cannot control."
    "You've never met Socrates! But even if he were the most docile of beasts, you couldn't manage it You're injured. Your leg. You couldn't possibly!"
    He struggled into his shredded breeches. From the look of them, he supposed he should be grateful her scissors hadn't slipped and nipped off something irreplaceable in her zeal to cut the garment away.
    For the love of God, what kind of a woman was she? he wondered as he battled to get himself clothed. He'd bedded his first woman when he was barely fifteen, an apple-cheeked lightskirt presented to him with a sharp command to get the blasted loss of his virginity over with, so he could keep his mind on more important matters. Since then he'd neatly slotted females into certain boxes—dithering ninnies, elegant witches bought for the price of a diamond bracelet, seductresses as greedy for sensation as any man, and decent women, the most boring of all, forever murmuring their prayers and looking at him as if they feared he'd eat them.
    Only one woman had refused to be slotted into her proper category and dismissed. There had been just a moment when he almost thought she'd touched that cold, dead thing in his chest called a heart. But she'd married another man—a man of fire and passions seething close to the surface—with an open heart and the courage to lay it before her, no matter what the cost. A man worlds different from the ice-blooded English captain the whole west of Ireland feared. She'd left Redmayne bemused, if not lovelorn, aware that there was a chink someplace in his carefully constructed armor that it was possible for a woman to hammer her way through.
    Mary Fallon Delaney had been as different from Rhiannon Fitzgerald as possible, and yet, there was something about Rhiannon's eyes, an eagerness, a whimsy, as if she could see magic beyond the mist— fairy raiders and heroic tales, the same fey elixir in her blood he'd sensed in Fallon. The slightest link between the two females was enough to tighten the bands of unease about his chest. The sooner he got quit of this place and his untidy savior the better.
    He staggered upright, the tiny room swimming wildly before his eyes. "My boots, Miss Fitzgerald."
    She presented him with the whole boot first, then the second, a lump of mangled leather. Redmayne couldn't suppress a groan.
    "This really is a bad idea, Captain Redmayne," she said as he worked to bind the spoiled boot together with strips torn from his ruined shirt. "I wish you would reconsider."
    But he was already stumbling outside, bracing himself on the caravan. The most disreputable excuse he'd ever seen for a horse stood a little distant from the cart. The nag paused in cropping grass long enough to give him a sleepy look out of half-closed eyes.
    This was the demon horse no one could ride? Redmayne grimaced. The ridiculous beast was so fat he doubted it had ever gone faster than a trot in its whole benighted life.
    He worked the bridle into the horse's mouth, then turned to the woman. "I don't suppose the cat has a saddle I might borrow—with the understanding that I'll return it in excellent order, of course."
    "There's no point in having a saddle for a horse you cannot ride," Rhiannon insisted so reasonably he wanted to throttle her. "Surely you see this is impossible."
    "I'll merely ride bareback. Not the best of situations, but I could hardly look more ridiculous." Doubtless if his assailants saw him on the road, they wouldn't bother shooting again. Why waste lead when they could merely laugh him to death?
    He limped over to the horse's side, grasping a hank of mane the texture of broomstraw, then leaned with his left arm against the beast's withers. Redmayne paused, mustering all his strength to fling his leg over its back. But the instant he turned his back on the animal's front quarter, Socrates swung his great head around. To look at the new intruder, Redmayne assumed. A fatal error. Pain shot through Redmayne's hindquarters