Read Online The Falcon's Bride by Dawn Thompson - Free Book Online Page B

here?” he said.
    Thea didn’t answer. She dosed him with a withering glance and stiffened in his arms.
    His deep baritone laughter responded, reverberating through her body in a most alarming way. There was something so sensual in this experience, riding bound and naked but for the soft chinchilla fur on the back of the majestic stallion in the arms of this gargantuan Gypsy warlord. Was that his manhood leaning heavily against her thigh? He was aroused! That she could feel his sex through the thick fur of her pelerine made her heart leap. His height was evidently not the only thing gargantuan about him. Thea gasped in spite of herself, and tried to inch away, but it was no use. Her other thigh was forced against the studded pommel. She was trapped between it and his throbbing hardness. Drumcondra threw his head back and loosed a mighty guffaw.
    “I say again, sir,” Thea snapped, trying to ignore what could not be ignored. “Where are you taking me?”
    “To Cashel Drumcondra,” he said. “He may call it Cashel Cosgrove, but it will never be. It is mine, and I mean to have it back. We go to show him how that is to be, hmm?”
    “You mean to take me back there?” For a moment she was hopeful, thinking of James, until she realized that James wouldn’t be there. He existed somewhere over a hundred years in the future. It was madness. But it was true.
    “To flaunt my conquest,” he agreed, with a nod.
    “How can the castle belong to you?” she asked, wondering out loud. “If you are a Gypsy, how can you be a lord?”
    “My mother is full-blooded Romany,” he explained. “Cashel Drumcondra has been in my family since time out of mind. The ancestors of Cormac Drumcondra, my father, were clan chieftains of this land in their turn since the Romans came. The Cosgrove may have laid siege to my castle, but I am still the border lord. It is only a matter of time before I have back what rightfully belongs to me.”
    “You favor your mother, then?” It was beyond impossible. How could she be sitting so calmly in this enigmatic warlord’s arms, half naked, on her way to the stars alone knew where, calmly discussing his lineage? One day her curiosity would get the better of her . . . but not tonight. She knew how this all ended. Ros Drumcodra had vanished from existence almost a hundred and twenty years ago, and she meant to know how and why. This was, after all, just a dream—wasn’t it? It couldn’t really be happening. None of this could be real. Still, the bulk of his sex forced against her thigh was a startling contradiction to such imagined fiction.
    “Not entirely,” Drumcondra drawled. “My father’s blood was mixed. He was descended, it is suspected, from the men of the shipwrecked Spanish Armada that landed upon our shores, and from the tribe your kind now calls Tinkers . There was much mixing of blood in the early days, between the Romans and Danes, the Spaniards and Gaels. The dark-haired olive coloring of our clan opposed to the ruddy-looking Irish purebreds could be the result of the mixing of any number of races who came to conquer here.”
    The man was an enigma at best, what with his tanned skin and hair the color of a raven’s feathers, his toweringheight a contradiction of both bloodlines. More jarring was his voice, for it was as cultured as any London aristocrat’s, not slurred and peppered with the common provincial cant, though his speech did have a pleasant Irish lilt about it.
    “How do you mean to bargain, when you haven’t even taken the trouble to learn my name?” she snapped.
    He shrugged. “That is of no consequence. What do I need with a name, when I have the physical proof in my arms?” The last was said seductively in her ear, his hot breath puckering her skin with gooseflesh. “Believe me, before this night is done, he will know the terms of my bargain.”
    Drumcondra said no more as they rode on through the deepening twilight. The moon shone down on the breast of the