Read Online The Forbidden Rose by Joanna Bourne - Free Book Online Page B

she was milk and he was a starving cat.
    The squelch and shuffle stopped. When he looked back, Maggie was bent over, panting, her hands braced on her knees.
    Hell. “We’re far enough from the chateau. We’ll rest down there.” A thin rippling of water gleamed fifty yards ahead. Trees and bushes grew up around a stream. It’d be private, but with a view of the road in both directions. A good spot.
    She shook her head. “I can go farther.”
    Right. “The donkeys can’t. They need water.”
    “Oh.” She straightened, wiping sweat off her upper lip. “Of course. Yes.”
    He wasn’t worried about the donkeys. It takes dedication and ingenuity to kill a donkey, though Hawker was giving it a try. Any fool can founder a high-bred mare. A good horse will run her heart out and die under you.
    That was Maggie. She’d keep on till she fell in her tracks.
    She plodded onward, doing the last fifty yards, scrubbing her hand, open-fingered, on her sleeve. She just absolutely did not like being dirty. “Walking this road is different from traveling by coach. I had known this, of course, in my mind.” She sighed. “Now I know with my feet.”
    “Nothing like experience.”
    “There is no substitute for it, I believe. One can live too deeply in books. They are deceptive.”
    “I’d agree with that.” What he wanted to do was start with her forehead and lick the frown off. Kiss her eyelids. Then he’d just wander down to her mouth. He could take an hour on her face, touring from place to place. She’d be wild for him before he got done with her ears.
    Except he wasn’t going to do anything on that agenda. He was just going to imagine it. In detail.
    Maggie touched from tree trunk to tree trunk on her way down the steep of the road to the water. “I have traveled this countryside all my life,” she said. “I will now carry it in the creases of my skin. This is a different way to know it, and more thorough.”
    The stream looked clean enough. “The boy can water the beasts. You can cool off. Wash some, if you want.”
    “I would like that.”
    Go ahead. Splash water all over you. Get your clothes wet all down you till you got no secrets at all. Let’s drive the man completely out of his head.
    “I will go slightly upstream,” she said, “to avoid the donkeys. I am as fond of donkeys as anyone, but—I will be utterly candid—they attempt to bite me. It is the heat, I believe, that makes them irritable.”
    “They always do that. Remarkably even temperament in those animals.”
    “Doubtless. But I would argue that discomfort brings out in them a special avidity for human flesh. Hercules was sent to steal the mares of Diomedes that ate human flesh. Did you know that?”
    “I’ll keep it in mind if anyone tries to sell me one.”
    She knelt by the water. The steam was shallow and only a few feet wide, running over flat rocks, cooling the air. Gracefully, she reached up and stripped her fichu off her shoulders, unwinding it from her in a circle, uncovering white, white skin. The sun percolated through the trees to land in coin shapes all over her. She was lit up in speckled drops that slid over her neck and across the bones of her shoulders. They played peekaboo up and down the mounds of her tits. A man without his splendid self-control would have noticed she showed right down to the nipple when she leaned over.
    She wet the end of the fichu in the stream and washed her face. Hawker arrived, gave one absolutely casual glance in their direction, and took the animals way off downstream to drink.
    “The road’ll be dry this afternoon. We’ll have easier going.” Doyle chose a flat gray boulder and settled down to see what else Maggie would do. Still lots of clothing on this woman.
    He’d pulled his jacket off an hour ago and slung it over Dulce’s back. He was walking around with his shirt open halfway down his chest. That was a fine poetical look for some men. Not him. He had too much unpoetic muscle. He was