Inhaltsangabe
Tasked with caring for a handsome, injured captive to ready him for execution, Irish beauty Shivahn Armagh determines to find out whether he is a legendary warrior for Irish independence or an enemy Englishman. Original.
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s his salvation.<br><br>She stroked his fevered body with her healing hands, and willed the tortured rebel back to life. He was a total stranger, yet Shivahn Armagh felt she had known him forever. Then the Irish beauty discovered that he was an Englishman, the enemy she was suppose to hate. But Shivahn could not forget the gentle caress of the prisoner she'd been sent to revive--for the executioner's ax. So she risked her life to set him free.<br><br>His touch was her destiny.<br><br>They called him the Griffin, legendary warrior for the Irish cause, an enemy who had eluded the English for years. <i>He</i> said his name was Kristian Montague, an Englishman, and all he wanted was one last kiss. Shivahn's kiss. But then Shivahn refused to let him die, refused to let him hide behind the demons that raged in his soul. She scorched her way into his heart, even as he tried to resist. She followed
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"Bloody Jesus, Johnnie . . . who's she?"
The words themselves, Shivahn Armagh had heard, yet learned not to hear, a thousand times before. It was the stares she would never get used to. Those stares that matched the filthy English soldier's tone shade for shade. Bold. Bald. Morbidly interested but cruelly indifferent, as if gawking at some artifact pilfered from one of the local chapels, not a woman who'd been ordered from her bed after a night of delivering one baby, stitching two heads, and sleeping three hours.
Nay, she would never get used to the stares.
Nevertheless, she surrendered not a fraction of her pride as the soldier called Johnnie pulled her through the ankle-deep mud and oatmeal-thick fog surrounding the gates of Dublin's Prevot Prison. She forced her shoulders to support her tattered shawl as if she wore Queen Medb's own robe; her patched sack of herbs and ointments might have been a velvet pouch of emeralds and perfumes bouncing against her left hip.
But most of all, she did not lower her gaze. Shivahn returned the soldiers' stares with determined serenity, silently telling the swine this Irish bauble was not as crushable as their conquests on the Wexford battlefield last year. This foreign oddity had edges sharpened on the whetstones of injustice long before the screams of that night were buried beneath the winter of 1798.
As she half expected and fully hoped, her mettle worked--for half a minute. First, both men nervously darted their stares from her regard. But the venture only funneled all Johnnie's fervor to his arms. Like a human grappling hook, he clamped his hand tighter around her upper arm.
"She's the healer the captain ordered us to find last night," he told his comrade in an equally agitated tone. "So let me through, Thor."
But Thor--whose mum clearly had the Sight when christening him--shifted only his hairy brows, causing a deep scowl across his leathered forehead. "The healer? You mean the one with them strange powers? The harpy who fixed that rebel's leg back to him like it were no more than a doll's joint?"
"How the bloody hell should I know?" Shivahn felt Johnnie's discomfited squirm before he jerked her forward by another two steps. "Look, I'm tired and I'm--"
"She don't look like a harpy to me."
"Thor!"
The soldier cracked a grin, his teeth looking a jumble of dirty pebbles crammed against fleshy gums. "C'mon, Johnnie. No foul meant." The smirk slid higher. "I was just wonderin' if harpies has the same parts as other birds."
At that, Johnnie's attitude transformed, as well. As slick as the sweat he reeked of, he sidled closer to Shivahn. She stiffened, but his other arm caught her waist, locking her against him. She barely held back the rush of bile surging from her belly...or the dreading pound of her blood in parts lower than that.
"Ahhh." The soldier growled into her nape. "Now I ken your meanin'. I must admit that very question ails my own head."
Thor chuckled at his comrade's stress on the last word. "Well, when my head aches, I rub it."
"Me, too." The swine's mouth moved to her neck. His hand slithered around her bottom. "C'mon, healer harpy, what d'you have in your magic bag for my poor throbbin' head?"
She yearned to scream with every ounce of air in her lungs. But she emitted not a sound. Doing so would only make her the breakfast "treat" for the entire regiment. Instead, Shivahn answered him with the hardest, wildest struggle her depleted muscles would yield. But when Thor added his brute's strength to Johnnie's wiry tenacity, she found herself dragged, dumped, and flattened to her back in the mud behind the guard house, watching the younger soldier kneel and flip open his breeches with practiced speed.
"Not yet!" Thor growled urgently at his mate. "We gotta blindfold her first!"
"Blindfold her?"
"They say she can make your staff fall off just by lookin' at it."
"Bloody blinkin' Mary," Johnnie muttered, grabbing at his groin. "Use your neckerchief, then. Tie it on her good."
Shivahn fought Thor's hands, tossing her head back and forth, but with a gritted oath, he grabbed her hair, holding her in place while he secured the kerchief around her eyes. She grimaced at the feel of the grimy cloth against her face, but some other part of her actually thanked Providence that she would not have to witness the taking of her innocence, only listen to the deed. Another part of her mind told her she also should be grateful for having seen her eighteenth summer without being defiled yet by these bastards. That thought was not so easy to honor.
She tried to turn the sting of her tears into spring raindrops, in a world she envisioned beyond her squeezed eyes. A world where folk smiled at each other again on the streets of Dublin, where children played in this mud...where English rapist bastards had been sent to Hell, where they all belonged.
But the picture was not strong enough to obscure Johnnie's pleasureful grunt as he leaned forward, thrusting aside the last of her underskirts.
Which doubled her surprise at his shocked oath, as he leapt away from her.
Nay, Shivahn discovered as she pulled off the blindfold a moment later, not leapt --the soldier had been yanked clear of her with seemingly no effort on the part of the medal-encrusted officer now towering over her. As she and Thor looked on, Johnnie dangled in the man's grip like a mutt caught with his muzzle in the stew pot.
"Mr. Treakle," the officer intoned with little movement of his thin, grim lips, "and Mr. Rankin. Good morning, gentlemen."
"M-Major Sandys," Johnnie squeaked. "W-we didn't hear you comin', sir."
"Then it's your fortune I wasn't a brigade of United Irish Insurgents." Again with naught but a tremor of strain, he flung Johnnie back to the ground, before delivering a hard kick to the V where the soldier's breeches still gaped open.
"Bloody Jesus!" Johnnie doubled over, tears in his eyes.
Thor stared at his comrade in silent sympathy but dared not a gesture otherwise. The big soldier's features reflected legitimate panic about the severity of his fate at Sandys's hands. He fumbled into a trembling salute as the senior officer turned back to him. Mud sucked at the soles of Sandys's costly patent boots, the only sound in the morn's dense air.
Sandys stopped before the soldier before flicking a brief glance at Shivahn. His nostrils flared in disdain, as if regarding no more than a mound of donkey droppings.
"Mr. Rankin," he said with equally efficient frigidity, "did Mr. Treakle inform you of the urgent need for this woman in Cell Block Three?"
"A-a-aye, sir."
"Ahhh. And the last time we discussed the meaning of 'urgent,' Mr. Rankin, I believe we also discussed the meaning of delays."
"A-a-aye, sir."
"And their unacceptability to the proficiency of this facility."
"A-a-aye, sir."
During Thor's tremor-ridden grovelings, Sandys pivoted slowly back toward her....
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The Promise of Your Touch
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