Blood Kiss - Ward J. R. (книги онлайн полностью txt) 📗

“I was pretty shaggy.”

She jumped up and hugged him. “Thankyousomuchforcomingimsohappyyourehere—”

Craeg laughed in that great baritone he had started to use and he held her in that great way he did, up close to his body so she could feel his strength. “I would have been here sooner, but my ride was getting busy.”

“You made it. That’s all that matters—and oh, my God, you are hot.”

“And you are…” He put some space between them and seemed to look at her properly for the first time. “Wow. That is some dress, and … are those real? Those are real … that one in the middle is the size of my thumbnail.”

“It was my mahmen’s.”

“It’s almost as beautiful as you are.”

As they talked, she was very aware that they were being sized up and spoken about, and there would be scandal, yes, there would be.

Fuck ’em, she thought as she hooked her arm in his. “Come with me?”

“Anywhere you take me, tonight and always.”

Leading her male over to the head of the stairway, she nodded at Fedricah, who immediately bowed in deference to Craeg.

“Sire. My honor to see you this eve.”

And then the doggen turned to the crowd and in his best, most formal voice announced in the Old Language, “Mistress Paradise, blooded daughter of Abalone, First Adviser to Wrath, son of Wrath, sire of Wrath, and the honorable Craeg, son of Brahl the Younger, bestowed of the King’s Award of Valor last eve for services rendered unto the royal court.”

A hush silenced the crowd, and then a ripple of conversation overtook even the orchestra.

Meanwhile, Craeg recoiled. “What was all that? I got what? They did who?”

Paradise patted his hand. “My father told Wrath you saved my life, and the King gave you a title. But I loved you just as much before. You were supposed to find out tomorrow evening—I think our butler got a little overexcited.”

“What?”

“Technically, you’re an aristocrat now.”

“WHAT.”

“Pay no attention.” She met him right in the eye. “It doesn’t change anything—well, except tacitly tell the haters to f-themselves.”

Craeg blinked and then chuckled as he looked out over the assembly. “Let’s do this, my Paradise. And then maybe we can find a private spot?”

She leaned in. “I already have one in mind.”

“That’s my female, oh, yeah.”

Stepping forward with him, she didn’t look at the crowd. They weren’t even in the room for all she knew.

No, she was looking at her fine male.

“You know something,” she said with love as they descended to the black-and-white marble dance floor.

“What?”

“I am the luckiest female on the planet. Right here, right now.”

Yup, she thought as his chest puffed with pride. She knew exactly who she was … and who she was with—and they were a helluva pair.

“I love you,” he whispered as he swept her into his arms. “Dance with me.”

Read on for a sneak peek at the first book in a new contemporary romance series by New York Times bestselling author

J. R. Ward,

THE BOURBON KINGS

Available now from Piatkus.

Chapter One

Charlemont, Kentucky

Mist hung over the Ohio’s sluggish waters like the breath of God, and the trees on the Charlemont shore side of River Road were so many shades of spring green, the color required a sixth sense to absorb them all. Overhead, the sky was a dim, milky blue, the kind of thing that you saw up north only in July, and at seven-thirty a.m., the temperature was already seventy-four degrees.

It was the first week of May. The most important seven days on the calendar, beating the birth of Christ, the American Independence, and New Year’s Rockin’ Eve.

The One Hundred Thirty-ninth running of The Charlemont Derby was on Saturday.

Which meant the entire state of Kentucky was in a thoroughbred racing frenzy.

As Lizzie King approached the turn-off for her work, she was riding an adrenaline high that had been pumping for a good three weeks, and she knew from past experience that this rush-rush mood of hers wasn’t going to deflate until after Saturday’s clean-up. At least she was, as always, going against the traffic heading into downtown and making good time: Her commute was forty minutes each way, but not in the NYC, Boston, or LA, densely packed, parking-lot version of rush hour—which in her current frame of mind would have caused her head to mushroom cloud. No, her trip into her job was twenty-eight minutes of Indiana farm country followed by six minutes of bridge and spaghetti junction delays, capped off with this six-to ten-minute, against-the-tide shot parallel to the river.

Sometimes she was convinced the only cars going in her direction were the rest of the staff that worked at Easterly with her.

Ah, yes, Easterly.

The Bradford Family Estate, or BFE, as its deliveries were marked, sat high up on the biggest hill in the Charlemont metro area and was comprised of a twenty-thousand-square-foot main house with three formal gardens, two pools, and a three-hundred-sixty degree view of Washington County. There were also twelve retainer’s cottages on the property, as well as ten outbuildings, a fully functioning farm of over a hundred acres, a twenty-horse stable that had been converted into a business center, and a nine-hole golf course.

That was lighted.

In case you needed to work on your chip shot at one a.m.

As far as she had heard, the enormous parcel had been granted to the family back in 1778, after the first of the Bradfords had come south from Pennsylvania with the then Colonel George Rogers Clark—and brought both his ambitions and his bourbon-making traditions into the nascent commonwealth. Fast forward almost two hundred fifty years, and you had a Federal mansion the size of a small town up on that hill, and some seventy-two people working on the property full-and part-time.

All of whom followed a feudal rules and rigid caste system that was right out of Downton Abbey.

Or maybe the Dowager Countess of Grantham’s routine was a little too progressive.

William the Conqueror’s times were probably more apt.

So, for example—and this was solely a Lifetime movie conjecture here—if a gardener fell in love with one of the family’s precious sons? Even if she were one of two head horticulturists, and had a national reputation and a master’s in landscape architecture from Cornell?

That was just not done.

Sabrina without the happy ending, darlin’.

With a curse, Lizzie turned the radio on in hopes of getting her brain to shut up. She didn’t get far. Her Toyota Yaris had the speaker system of a Barbie house: there were little circles in the doors that were supposed to pump music, but they were mostly for pretend—and today, NPR coming out of those cocktail coasters just wasn’t enough—

The sound of an ambulance speeding up behind her easily overrode the haute pitter-patter of the BBC News, and she hit her brakes and eased over onto the shoulder. After the noise and flashing lights passed, she got back on track and rounded a fat curve in both the river and the road … and there it was, the Bradfords’ great white mansion, high up in the sky, the dawning sun being forced to work around its regal, symmetrical layout.

She had grown up in Plattsburgh, New York, on an apple orchard.

What the hell had she been thinking almost two years ago when she’d let Lane Baldwine, the youngest son, into her life?

And why was she still, after all this time, wondering about the particulars?

Come on, it wasn’t like she was the first woman who’d gotten good and seduced by him—

Lizzie frowned and leaned forward over the wheel.

The ambulance that had passed her was heading up the flank of the BFE hill, its red and white lights strobing along the alley of maple trees.