He’d been walking through this valley for a long, long time. Yea, though I walk though the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil… With a reassuring shush for the beast’s benefit, Rhys marched on, turning up the collar of his coat to keep out the mist. The wind’s low moan played his spine like a fiddle string. No matter what misfortune befell him, this or any night, Rhys St. He’d just end up with a lamed or dead horse, another broken rib perhaps, and the same curse that had haunted him since boyhood: unwanted, undeserved, and wholly wasted good luck. In fact, if he thought this godforsaken moor had any chance of claiming his own life, he’d cheerfully saddle his gelding and charge off into the gloom.īut it wouldn’t work. Rhys wasn’t in the least concerned for himself. Between the poor visibility and the surrounding terrain littered with chunks of stone and boot-sucking bogs, the risk of fatal injury was too great.įor the horse, that was. He couldn’t see but a few feet in front of him, which was why he’d decided to dismount and lead his horse on foot. The moisture in the air kept dithering between fog and rain, and the night was thick with its indecision. That left knee was on fire tonight, sizzling with pain as Rhys trudged through the granite heart of Devonshire, leading his horse down the darkened road. And in damp weather like this, his left knee throbbed with memories of marching through the Pyrenees and surviving the Battle of Nivelle unscathed, only to catch a Basque farmer’s hoe to the knee the next morning, when he left camp for a predawn piss.

Since sometime around his thirtieth birthday, the little finger on his right hand just plain refused to bend. Fists driving through barroom haze to connect with his face had snapped the cartilage in his nose a few times, leaving him with a craggy profile-one that was not improved by his myriad scars.

Maur, newly Lord Ashworth, was a broken man.īy the age of twenty, he’d fractured his left arm twice-once in a schoolboy brawl at Eton, and then again during an army training drill.

Tessa dare twice tempted by a rogue