To Seduce an Angel Read Free Page A

He’d actually said the name rather easily.
    Under her cloak she wore a dove gray muslin gown, too loose for her light figure. An overdress of pale sky blue closed under her bosom and gave some shape to the gown. Her eyes were vivid against that blue. Something about the dignity of her bearing had made him expect elegance, and not a woman in a secondhand gown applying for a humble household post. The upward tilt of her chin with its slight dent seemed regal, a dent made for a man’s thumb.
    Inside the pyramid the boys squirmed and positioned themselves to spy on her. At any moment he expected them to erupt from their hiding place with wild whoops. He prepared himself to step in and put a comforting arm around her shoulder. If she sensed the boys meant mischief, she didn’t show it. She circled the pyramid, collecting slates and pencils and stacking them on a chair facing the dark entrance.
    When the room grew quiet, she stopped and touched the pocket of her gown, as if she had something tucked there. He smiled to himself. If she had something there, a good luck talisman perhaps, and still possessed it, the lads had lost their touch. Lark and Rook could lift the feathers from a strutting cock, and he’d not miss them.
    Her gown fell back in its near-shapeless line, and she folded one hand over the other, a gesture of perfect self-containment. It irked him. He felt his fists tighten on the sword and his jaw clench that she should be an expert at retreating into herself. It spoke of a past about which he wanted to know nothing.
    Her voice, low and sweet and surprising in its authority, interrupted the thought. “Once upon a time,” she began.
    He did not know the story. It was like the old stories he had heard as a child, but unfamiliar too. He doubted it was English at all. A part of him believed she was making it up on the spot, or at least altering it to suit her audience, for there were seven sons of a poor woodcutter and his wife who had no more money. The wife took a threadbare cloth and wrapped it around the last of the bread, and they sent their two oldest sons out into the world.
    Dav thought he could listen to her voice if she talked about laundry, and he certainly did not mind looking at her. The story continued with the journey of the woodcutter’s sons.
    â€œOff they went down the road, and passed men working in the fields, and building a great church, and selling goods, but no one offered them work. As they sat at noon to eat their bread, a flock of little brown birds landed in the branches above and hopped about their feet. The birds chirped and chirped.”
    Here the storyteller paused and wrote upon a slate, her pencil making a birdlike cheep. She put the slate aside and resumed the tale of the hungry boys, who ate and went their way, leaving the empty cloth but not a crumb for the birds. As the sun was setting, they met an ogre, and the storyteller lowered her voice to a gruff growl. “ ‘What do you have to say for yourselves?’
    â€œWhen the woodcutter’s sons replied, ‘Nothing,’ the ogre said, ‘Then you’d best come work for me.’ He led them to his house at the edge of a wood and opened an oaken door crossed with iron bars. ‘In here,’ he invited. The boys stepped forward, and he shoved them down stone steps and locked them in darkness black as pitch.”
    In the way of such stories the second pair of sons met the same fate as the first. They, too, waved away the birds and left behind their mother’s scrap of cloth but shared no crumbs. Again the girl wrote on the slates. Again the woodcutter’s sons had nothing to say for themselves when questioned by the ogre, and down into the cellar they went.
    She paused, and the room held its breath. Her gaze didn’t waver, but Dav felt her awareness of him. He had tightened his grip on his sword. She told the story as if she knew just what it was to be locked in that