Read Online Venture Unleashed (The Venture Books) by R.H. Russell - Free Book Online

didn’t catch her words. Jade’s reply, though, was clear.
    “I doubt it. He’s not very bright at all.”
    Jade’s words came crashing at him hard, heavy, and sharp. Not very bright? Simple? A servant boy, yes. And dismissing her cousin’s remarks for the sake of propriety, that he could understand. But simple , that was unnecessary. Wasthat what she really thought of him now?
    He ought to have waited for a moment, just long enough for the ladies not to suspect he’d been there listening, and gone in and given them their cloaks, as though nothing had happened; it was what a good servant would do. But the fighter in him roared with wounded pride and he wheeled around, ran back into the house, put the cloaks away, and ran back out, not to the stable, but to the chopping block, where he viciously hacked firewood in the rain, leaving the girls to wait and to wonder where he’d gone.

    Venture slid out the sturdy iron pins, releasing the end gate of the wagon with a clatter.
    “Come on, Bounty, can’t you lift it up a little?” he said as the younger servant boy struggled with the heavy sack of flour, fresh from the miller. “Stop! Stop! You’ll bust it all over the place!”
    A pale cloud billowed up from the wagon floor.  
    “Who do you think I am, Mightyman?”
    Venture laughed at the image of Bounty as the legendary hero of Atran. “Sorry.” He scrambled up into the wagon.
    Venture went down on one knee and put his shoulder into it, hoisting the bag up lengthwise over that shoulder. He rose, carried it to the end gate, and then, with the imagined screams of Earnest in his head— Great gods, you’ll blow out your knees! —he jumped. He stumbled back and had to lower his knee down, but soon he was standing steady again.
    He grunted to Bounty, “Get the door for me, will you please?”
    He was settling the bag into the pantry, where Connie was busy arranging smaller goods on the shelves, when Jade entered the kitchen. Venture hadn’t wanted to admit to himself how disappointed he was that Jade hadn’t come to find him, come to find out what had happened to him—or even known somehow that he was listening at the stable door and come to apologize, to explain herself, the day before. But now he felt it, undeniably, and he wanted to disappear before she read it on his face.
    “Can I get something for you, Miss?” Connie said from the pantry door.
    “No, thank you. I’m just going to fix myself a cup of coffee.”
    Yes, please do. Then maybe I can slip out of here.
    “Let me get it for you, Miss,” she insisted.
    Jade opened her mouth to protest, but closed it when she noticed Venture.
    Connie went to put the pot on, and Jade stepped into the pantry.
    Blast it!
    “Hello, Vent.”  
    His would-be reply caught in his throat.
    “What happened to you yesterday?”
    Venture forced himself to answer, “I’m sorry, Miss.”
    She eyed him strangely at this incomplete answer, at the silence that followed in place of an explanation. But she let it go, not like a lady who deserved an answer from her servant, and one who’d failed to perform a task at that, but like a friend who knew that was the extent of what he chose to say. After what she’d said to Tempest, as much as he didn’t want to answer, he found Jade’s acceptance of his silence perplexing, even infuriating.
    “It seems like you’ve been gone forever. We were all worried about you when we heard you were hurt.”
    She traced a scar on his eyebrow with her fingertip, and he let his eyes shut, let his mind wander. He knew he should be angry that she thought she could just touch him like that, but he still craved the feel of her hand. Still wanted more. Her finger drifted to a new bruise on his jaw line, the result of a miscalculation in practice, a punch Dasher had thought he would dodge, that had found its mark with a little too much force.
    In the kitchen, Connie slid a cupboard door shut noisily. Venture came back to his senses and jerked