Taming The Beast. Heather Grothaus

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      KISSING THE BEAST

      “I don’t want to fix you,” she said, noticing how her voice had gone breathy.

      His eyebrow rose. “No?”

      She shook her head. “I want to know you—to understand you.”

      “What I am is what you see.” Roderick held his arms away from his sides and they seemed to stretch from one wall of the room to the other as he loomed before her. “A beast. The new Cherbon Devil. Broken, scarred. Rather unpleasant.”

      Michaela shook her head again, but the movement was slight, so mesmerized was she by his very presence, the energy rolling off of him. She stepped closer to him, as if drawn.

      “Are you going to kiss me again?” He gave her a dangerous grin, the scar on his cheek going white by his eye like a warning.

      But she could not heed it. “I think I shall.” She licked her lips. “Do you mind?”

      For one who was so deliberate in his movements, Roderick had taken her into his arms within the span of a blink, and this time, it was he who kissed her….

      Books by Heather Grothaus

      THE WARRIOR

      THE CHAMPION

      THE HIGHLANDER

      TAMING THE BEAST

      Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation

      TAMINGThe BEAST

      Heather Grothaus

      ZEBRA BOOKS

      Kensington Publishing Corp.

       http://www.kensingtonbooks.com

      For Two

      I love you, whoever you are.

      For Jack Belcher

      Who wrote his own success story.

      And for friends who have become my readers,

      and readers who have become my friends.

      I could not do this without you.

      Contents

      Prologue

      Chapter One

      Chapter Two

      Chapter Three

      Chapter Four

      Chapter Five

      Chapter Six

      Chapter Seven

      Chapter Eight

      Chapter Nine

      Chapter Ten

      Chapter Eleven

      Chapter Twelve

      Chapter Thirteen

      Chapter Fourteen

      Chapter Fifteen

      Chapter Sixteen

      Chapter Seventeen

      Chapter Eighteen

      Chapter Nineteen

      Chapter Twenty

      Chapter Twenty-One

      Chapter Twenty-Two

      Chapter Twenty-Three

      Chapter Twenty-Four

      Chapter Twenty-Five

      Chapter Twenty-Six

      Epilogue

      Author’s Note

      Prologue

      October 1101

      Constantinople

      The damned incense hung eternal, like death, cleaved only by the baneful dirge of screams and curses. Each clang and ring of metal—tool on tool, tools falling into bowls and against remnants of armor and ruined weaponry—was piercing. Sonorous Latin droned from the colorless lips of the robed men who mindlessly haloed the long, plastered room as if puppeted by the enormous crucifix hung at the far end. Bodies thrashed on pallets, fighting to free themselves from the hands of the surgeons who sweated and strained and worked like the dogs their patients swore them to be.

      Surely this could be no faithful hospital.

      For Roderick, it was Hell’s antechamber.

      Sobs roiled within the fiery incense as well, as if attempting to dampen the cloying stench of rot and disease merely by the weighty emotion of upward of 150 men. Men like himself, laid like so much half-butchered meat in a smokehouse. The choking smoke was death, in Roderick’s swollen and bruised mind. He could feel its close, burning char against his already-fevered skin, licking away at his sanity, slurping up his very life.

      He waited his turn with the surgeon, who would come soon, Hugh promised. Very soon.

      Roderick would have added his own screams to the miserable din—he certainly had pain enough to warrant them—but after three weeks of worsening agony, he had no strength left to utter the feeblest whimper. From the ill-fated battle at Heraclea, Hugh had brought him, returning them both to that grand city of Constantinople—and ultimately its hospital—against Roderick’s protests.

      “In Constantinople you will be cured,” Hugh had promised repeatedly. “You must only persevere until Constantinople. You must, Rick, you must!”

      And Roderick had, although how, he knew not. He wanted to die. To escape the pain of his injuries. To avoid returning to his father in England a failure.

      Yes, that was the worst of all, the thought that made Roderick’s functioning eye well with thin tears—Magnus Cherbon, awaiting his son’s return with hopes of the same treasure and holy favor that Magnus himself had received on his own pilgrimage. Roderick could hear his father’s condemnation already: Worthless failure! Weak, weak, weak! From your mother’s damned womb you were like her. Weak! No son of mine. A disgrace. Roderick had heard the words so many times, they were verse in his memory.

      A tear at last escaped Roderick’s left eye and rolled dumbly down his cheek to leap from his face onto the rough blanket beneath his head. The tear left behind a wet path as cold as the hatred it represented.

      “He comes, Rick! Look!” Hugh grasped Roderick’s left shoulder and squeezed, his voice sounding as if he was putting on an air of excitement for a very young child. Roderick’s left shoulder and arm were the only places where his friend could touch him without causing further agony, having been saved by the stout English shield strapped to Roderick’s forearm.

      Roderick let his head fall to the left, thankful that the surgeon did not approach from the other side of the room, lest Roderick’s injured face—bloated and stitched up like saddle leather by a young Saracen boy—prevent him from anticipating the man’s approach. Roderick felt the crude courses of thick gut pull in his swollen flesh all the same—from the bridge of his nose, over his cheekbone, across and beyond his right temple. His view of the long hospital chamber was reduced to a horizontal sliver through his left eye, and he could see nothing at all through his right. Perhaps it was no longer even in its socket; Roderick could not bring himself to ask Hugh. His nose was broken badly, his cheekbone likely fractured as well. Since he’d been dragged from his mount during that bloody slaughter, the only sound in his right ear had been a dull roar, like an ocean tempest beyond the cliffs of his old home, Cherbon.

      His head injuries were serious, Roderick knew. But his arm was so much worse—his right arm, his sword arm. And his left leg…

      The surgeon neared Roderick’s pallet, his long leather apron and tunic beneath stained a terrible and ghastly