Read Online Never Kiss A Stranger by Heather Grothaus - Free Book Online

looked over his shoulder at the girl, just now crawling from beneath the natural lean-to. She looked all of eight years old then, her cheeks creamy around the soft pink blooms of sleep. Her eyes were brown like a young calf’s, her hair now adorned with twigs and bits of dry leaves in place of the fine headpiece and veil she’d worn that morning. She could have been a child of the manor emerging triumphant in a game of hide and seek.
    Piers guessed that was likely an apt description for the game she played with her sister now, and the idea of it made him resentful and cross.
    “No,” he sneered. “Are you?”
    She laughed as she gained her feet, her absurd pet taking up post on her shoulder while Alys shook out her outrageously costly blue skirts. Simply looking at the monkey seemed to make Piers’s fingers throb all the worse. And now that she was standing, and Piers could see the swell of her small bust, he no longer thought of her as eight years old. His mood went from sour to black, and what little patience he had vanished.
    “We would be in dire straits indeed were the food gathering left up to me. I’m fast, and I can be quite stealthy, but alas, I have no weapon save Layla.” She reached up to scratch the beast’s hairy head and the monkey leaned toward her adoringly. “Perhaps you could be my hound, eh, girl? Could you scare up a deer for us? You’ve already cornered a boar.” She looked at Piers with a mischievous grin.
    He turned his back to her to add some slender sticks to the fire. To Piers’s dismay, she came to stand beside him.
    “If you’re not going hunting, what shall we eat? I’m famished.”
    “I’m certain there is no want for food at Fallstowe,” Piers said. “It shall motivate you to walk faster.”
    “Back to that again, are we?”
    Did nothing faze this silly child?
    “We are. If you leave now, you will have some daylight for the whole of your journey.”
    “You want me to leave now?” she asked, as if doubting she had understood him properly.
    “Yes.”
    “Right now?
Immediately?”
    “Start walking.”
    Alys Foxe sat down near the fire. “Piers, I’ve been thinking …”
    Piers closed his eyes and sighed. “No, don’t think.
And don’t sit!
Sitting moves you no closer to Fallstowe and no farther from me!”
    “Do you truly find me so annoying?”
    “Yes!”
    “Well, I’m quite sorry to hear that. But, as I was saying, I’ve been thinking, and—”
    He gained his feet and strode into the trees.
    “Wait!” He heard her scramble to her feet. “Where are you going? Why did you walk away from me?”
    “In part to look for more wood for the fire,” he said, his eyes scanning the forest floor. He leaned down and snatched limbs from the ground as he walked. “And also to keep from strangling you.”
    “That’s rude,” she said, from not very far behind him.
    “I’m certainly not forcing you to put up with me.”
    “True,” she conceded. “Any matter, I know you wish for me to leave you alone with your miserable and quite secretive plans, but there is a problem.”
    Piers came to an abrupt halt, so quickly that Alys ran into his back. The monkey chattered and bounded to the leaves underfoot.
    He did not turn. “What problem?”
    “I … I don’t know the way back to Fallstowe.”
    Piers whipped around to face her, darkly pleased when she took a step back. “What do you mean, you don’t know the way back? You’ve lived there the whole of your life, have you not?”
    “Indeed, I have.” She nodded agreeably.
    “And yet you cannot find your way home little more than an hour from your own keep?”
    She flushed, pursed her lips to the side and her eyes flicked nervously to the trees surrounding them. “No, I don’t think so. I’m afraid not. Sorry.”
    Piers’s own eyes narrowed. “Bullshit.”
    “I beg your pardon?”
    “Bullshit!” he said more loudly and began walking back toward their primitive camp. “I may be mostly of common blood,