Read Online Danger's Kiss by Glynnis Campbell - Free Book Online Page A

sleep.  At least, that was what she told him.  But even the soothing effects of the wine couldn’t dispel the sickness that gripped his bowels and made him weaker by the day.
    When her laughter subsided, she reached again for the chalice, this time with no intention of drinking it.  She swirled the liquid around the cup, marveling at what a perfect poison arsenic was.  It had no color, no odor, no flavor.  Even better, no one questioned her frequent purchases of the powder to kill rats, for she couldn’t keep a cat to do the task.  Cats were unbearable to Philomena.  They made her itch and sneeze and turned her eyes red.
    Still, Lord William’s demise was taking much longer than she’d anticipated.  He’d almost foiled her plans, suddenly summoning his lawyer to alter his will, giving everything to his nephew.
    But fortune had smiled on her.  The very night the lawyer arrived, a robber broke into Torteval Hall.  While the unknowing thief ransacked the place, Philomena stabbed the lawyer to death and pinned the blame on the intruder.  After the shire-reeve and his constable dragged the culprit and the corpse away, she’d simply tossed the new will into the fire with no one the wiser.
    There remained but one problem.  The key.  Somehow in the chaos of the murder, it had gone missing.
    She dug her fingernails into the waxy rim of the table.  Without that key, she wouldn’t be able to unlock the cell.  If she couldn’t unlock the cell...
    She let out a shuddering sigh.  It would do no good to panic.  She hadn’t gotten this far in her ambitious twenty-four years by letting her nerves get the best of her.
    She patted her sleek auburn hair into place and pinched her cheeks for color, then practiced a frown of compassionate concern as she started toward the door.  Her poor father-in-law was growing steadily worse and worse, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.
    Thank God.

    “Not now, Azrael.”
    With one hand, Nicholas picked the cat up from his lap and plopped him back down on the floor.
    He’d had a miserable day.  Indeed, he’d had several miserable days, starting with the day he’d hanged Hubert Kabayn.  Since when had the shire become so overrun with criminals?
    He’d had to put a boy in the stocks today, a lad as starved and bony as a broomstick.  The wretch was fortunate he hadn’t been ordered to hang, for his crime was thievery, and in Kent, punishments were severe.  The poor lad had managed to wolf down the loaf of bread before the baker caught him, thus destroying the evidence.  The stocks were a warning.
    Nicholas hated the stocks.  It wasn’t that they were particularly distressing or painful, in and of themselves.  But when a victim was thus displayed in the village square, the severity of his punishment was determined by the mercy or brutality of the populace at large.  And in Nicholas’s experience, people were more likely to be cruel than kind.
    He did his best to regulate what transpired by standing guard over the stocks, creating an ominous presence that discouraged more than the usual mischief of yelling insults and hurling garbage.
    But he was still haunted by the memories of the times he’d let his guard slip.  Once, a pack of three lads had stolen past him to cut off a man’s thumb.  Another time, a sweet-faced maid had burned her sister’s bare feet with a candle.  And the hurled stones...
    Nicholas ran his thumb over the scar along his jaw.  Standing watch over the stocks came with its risks.
    No one had thrown anything today, but their taunts had cut the lad in the stocks to the quick, driving him to tears of humiliation.
    Nicholas blew out a weighted breath.  Some days he despised his position as shire-reeve.  He was expected to uphold the law of the land, and he did so as honorably as he could.  But there were days when he saw innocents punished while monsters walked free, and it wrenched at his gut that he could do nothing about it.
    So now