What a Lady Needs by Kasey Michaels

Author:Kasey Michaels [Michaels, Kasey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“AHHHH.” SIMON LAY BACK in the warm tub, resting his head on the rolled towel his valet had provided for him, and then waved the man out of the room, telling him he could take it from here. He didn’t mind someone else lugging water buckets and preparing his bath, laying out fresh clothing, but he’d be damned if someone else was going to wash him.

His aches still ached, his pains still pained him, but the day’s discoveries went a long way toward easing both:

1720 double-aged Madeira should be sipped, not gulped.

He rather liked his brains dripping out from his ears; Davey had never mentioned that part.

More than a year now separating him from his time in the Royal Navy, he was still alert on all suits, still at ease in a position of command...and still loon enough to deliberately agitate an armed man twice his size and believe his sense of presence adequate protection.

And he’d discovered the Society’s ingenious smuggling route. That should be the topper, and it nearly was, although narrowly beaten out by the dripping brains thing. Possibly more than narrowly.

Definitely more than narrowly.

He’d decided against going anywhere near the cottages, to hunt for the opening to the tunnel from that side, and didn’t waste time looking for its exit on the other side of the man-made boulder land-jetty, as he’d begun calling it in his head. Instead, he’d concentrated on the maze itself.

Some of the boulders were too large for anyone but the gods or an army of unfortunate captives to move from where they’d landed; some were haphazardly, it seemed, stacked atop each other, with flatter rocks employed to keep them from tumbling down again.

If he stood at the water’s edge, all he saw were boulders; with no pattern, no reason to believe they were anything more than they were. After all, even if the land-jetty did possess a tunnel, all it did was go from one side of it to the other, so what was the point of it?

Liam had been reluctant to climb down with him. Ghosts, his grandfather had told him. Ghosts of long-ago soldiers who died in a fierce battle “right on this very spot, m’lord. Nobody comes here. Yer can hear the screams in the night, the swords banging. Makes your skin creep, that’s what it does.”

A story like that would help keep the curious away, Simon had decided, and left a grateful Liam up on the hill.

Although he’d felt he’d fairly well memorized the layout of the maze, once he was on the beach he found navigating his way through wouldn’t be that easy, and if it weren’t for Jacko’s wheel tracks, he’d have just wandered aimlessly until he came to a spot where the boulders, most of them reaching a good three or four feet above his head, made further progress impossible.

He could see places where the “walls” had been patched or rebuilt. There were boulders so high they nearly blocked the sun, and a few open

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.