How to Tame a Wild Rogue by Julie Anne Long EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: Julie Anne Long
- Language: English
- Genre: Victorian Historical Romance
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
He’d been born on a night like this: the sky choked with black clouds, the
wind banshee-screeching through cracks and rattling windows in their frames
like a costermonger who’d caught hold of a thieving urchin.
Or at least that’s the sort of thing Lorcan St. Leger liked to tell whatever
audience he held in thrall at a given moment.
“It’s how I got so strong and so ugly, you see,” he’d say. “I was born
screaming into a headwind. And I’ve fought against headwinds me whole
life.”
He didn’t actually know precisely when or where he was born. But he’d
come to understand that a personal myth could be as useful as armor.
Experience told him the impending storm would be long and violent and
his skin prickled with not unpleasant portent. His ship had reached harbor just
ahead of it; and while his crew had dispersed at once to inns or brothels,
captain’s business had kept Lorcan out later than he’d anticipated, and by the
time he’d reached the nearest inn the last room had been taken. He needed to
find shelter soon, but the only other possibility for lodging nearby was a
storied brothel he knew of mainly through misty, prurient reminiscences
shared by sailors over the years. He’d seen the building once, years ago;
gargoyles lined the roof edge.
So that’s where he was headed. In a pinch, he supposed, he could take
shelter in the livery stable he’d passed. God knew a man could keep worse
company than horses.
Now and again the fitful wind whipped clouds away from a full moon, and
fragments of his surroundings were illuminated: the eyes of a slinking cat, the
sheen of greasy water atop an open barrel, a lantern hook outside a shop door.
Nearly every shop and dwelling had taken their lamps in. He hadn’t seen
another human on the street for nearly a quarter of an hour.
Only cats, rats, and Lorcan St. Leger would walk the streets near the
London docks unafraid at this time of night.
In St. Giles, as a child, he’d learned that a moment’s distraction could
mean death. Terror had been the whetstone against which he’d honed his
reflexes and wits. How to find hiding places and escape routes, how to fight,
when to ingratiate, when to intimidate, how to barter and steal—he leveraged
his lessons into strength, and then into power. By the time he was scarcely
more than twenty years old he’d built a shadowy empire from one end of
England to the other of men and women who would have killed for him.
He’d made sure they’d never needed to. Brutality was the fastest way to
the gallows, after all. The quickest way to get caught. And it was no
substitute for strategy and cunning or for razor-sharp judgment of character.
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