EXCERPT:
People had poured in from the surrounding areas for the annual market festivities and the village was bursting at its seams. Everyone looking for something to buy and everyone with something to sell was there as were the tricksters, the musicians, the acrobats, and the mad.
Jack stalked past them all, his darkly handsome face too menacing for anyone to even dare approach him.
Near the place where a peddler was advertising cures for everything from dandruff to the inability to pee, stood a large tent in front of which a busker called on people to see all manner of curiosities and freaks – a pig with two heads, a woman as hairy as an ape, a mummified mermaid the size of a ten year-old child. The line to enter snaked around the tent though the fee was two crowns.
Jack’s purse was full, thanks to Percy Threlfall, but the tent and its attractions didn’t interest him and he walked on.
“A love ballad, sir,” a young boy cried, shaking the paper in Jack’s face. “Here’s a ballad of a lonely merman who appeared on the Devon coast and sang of his lost love, a fisherman’s daughter whom he’d caressed many a night, but who forsook him to marry a woodsman.”
Jack glared at the boy. “And why should that be of interest to me?” he snarled.
“I’d imagine his expression was as sad as yours,” the cheeky boy replied, undaunted by Jack’s bad temper.
“I have many things to be sad about but a lost love is not among them,” Jack snapped. Of course he wasn’t sad about any lost love, Jack reassured himself, as he pushed through the crowd of people enjoying themselves at the summer fair. He certainly wasn’t in love. Had never been, and never would be.
The fact that he couldn’t get Lucy Threlfall’s sparkling blue eyes and pink-tipped breasts out of his mind had nothing to do with love. It was lust, pure and simple. His cock stirred in his breeches as the image of her pale, naked body shaking on the forest floor flashed to his mind. Jack growled his annoyance. It had been more than a week since he’d stopped the Threlfalls on their way to their new manor home, the manor home that had once belonged to his family before the Lord Regicide or, as he was more commonly known, the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell, had taken it from his father for throwing his support to the royalist cause. Now his father was dead, his mother remarried, and the Threlfalls lived in the house Jack had once called his home.
No comments:
Post a Comment