Felicity

By Celeste Hall

In a savage land, ruled by a barbaric king, it is the innocent who suffer the most.
Jerrard is a ranger, part of an elite group of medieval heroes who still fight to protect the people from the often cruel whims of the nobles.
Against his better judgement, he finds himself drawn into a tangled web of lies and murder all revolving around a powerful lord and his two beautiful daughters.
Falling in love with a noble woman was the last complication he needed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Celeste Hall
• Release date: Dec 30, 2014
• ISBN: 9780463341964

Celeste Hall

Celeste Hall is a passionate writer of paranormal and erotic romance with over twenty-five titles to her credit, including Beware of Wolves, the Kitty Coven series, and her ultra-sexy Seduction series. If you're looking for a sizzling escape from the pressures of a long day, her alpha hero incubi will make you purr.Celeste believes that a great book can do more than offer an afternoon's pleasure, it can change your life. She is absolutely addicted to happy endings. Her favorite stories will often include elements of the paranormal or fantastical, but they will always have a romantic heart.When not writing, Celeste enjoys traveling and spending time outdoors. She also enjoys photography, graphic design, a variety of artistic mediums, gardening, horseback riding and geeking out online - especially on Facebook.You can find a full list of her books by visiting: CelesteHall.com.

Book preview

Felicity

An erotic, historical romance.

A Prequel to the Savage Throne Series

By Celeste Hall

Jerrard is a Ranger, one of an elite group of warriors which still fight to protect the people from Horde invasion. They are wraiths in the forest. Silent assassins who may strike and vanish again before the enemy ever realize they are under attack.

His kind are a dying breed. The king’s corruption has cost too many lives. They are now all at risk. Jerrard is already challenging his loyalties when the king sends him to rescue the daughter of a noble man.

Felicity is beautiful and passionate. He quickly realizes that she is the bait in a carefully laid trap to destroy him. To fall in love with her is a death sentence. Yet he finds himself irresistibly drawn into her arms.

Felicity

A Prequel to the Savage Throne Series

Copyright © 2019 by Celeste Hall

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Please purchase only authorized editions.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

This book is for sale to ADULT AUDIENCES ONLY. It may contain sexually explicit scenes and graphic language which may be considered offensive by some readers. Please store your files where they cannot be accessed by minors.

All sexually active characters in this book are 18 years of age or older.

Prologue

Jerrard led four of his most trusted rangers into the night on foot. Silently, invisibly. After the past year, they now knew each other better than birth brothers. These were men that would die to protect him, even as he would die to protect them.

The earth beneath them was soggy and cold. Marshland. It had made tracking their quarry an easy task, as the enemies’ horses had sunk fetlock deep into the mud, leaving a trail that even a blind man could have followed.

But it also slowed down Jerrard’s men, forcing them to tread carefully to avoid stumbling and falling into the muck. They’d left their own horses tethered in the trees, far enough away to prevent the animals from alerting to their presence.

The group’s progress was now painstakingly slow.

Yet despite the foul terrain, Jerrard’s men were silent shadows slipping through night. Making no more sound than a panther stalking prey. This was the purpose they’d been trained for.

They were alert to every sound. To the whisper of the cold night wind through the swamp grass. To the chirp and hum of the insects crawling through the brush nearby. To the distant howl of a wolf seeking his absent pack.

From nearby came the nearly silent rustle of wings, as an owl swooped down from the dark sky, followed instantly by the agonizing scream of a dying mouse snatched up in razor-sharp talons.

Jerrard loosened the sword in his scabbard. The blade was blackened by smoke to prevent it from reflecting the starlight.

His men carried equally dark blades.

There were some in Cederic’s army which dipped their blades in poison before darkening the steel. A technique which made even a small scratch potentially fatal. But that was something which Jerrard would not condone among his ranks.

He’s seen far too many men needlessly crippled or killed in such a manner. Men who really had no taste for war but were forced into combat by their king. Men who would have gladly thrown down their blades and surrendered, if given half a chance.

His years of combat service had not hardened him to killing, as it had so many others. Instead, it had made him resent the royals and their ambitions. It was greed and envy which so often left widows and orphans begging upon the streets.

During the Horde wars, Cederic’s ranks had been filled with hundreds of farmers and peasants who had never lifted a sword before their conscription. Most of which never returned home.

But there were always exceptions. The men he now hunted, were hardened criminals. They’d most likely whet their appetite for blood during the war, and later found that murder and theft were much easier than pushing a plow.

He paused, and the men behind him fell still in response.

Tilting his head slightly, he heard the sound once more. The muffled flutter of a horse’s nostrils, covered by a feed bag to keep it silent.

The enemy knew these woods were protected by rangers. Men who lived, breathed and bled the wilderness.

No common soldier could ever equal the lethal skill of Jerrard and his team. Nor could any man hide from them, despite covering their horse’s hooves in heavy swathes of cloth, and keeping their muzzles covered to prevent the beasts from smelling approaching riders and giving warning.

Although the night was wintery cold, there were no fires to give away the enemies’ location, but Jerrard knew the camp was dead ahead. He made a hand signal and sensed as his men silently spread out, positioning themselves to prevent any escape.

After hundreds of missions together, each and every one of them knew exactly what was required. Their objective would be in the most heavily protected tent near the center of the camp.

Jerrard crept through the shadows to the nearest cloth shelter. With a boot dagger, he silently sliced a man-sized gash through the back wall, then cut the throat of the sleeping man inside with equal ease.

He was preparing to slip back out into the night, when his gaze snapped back to what he’d first thought was a bundle of supplies secured in a blanket with ropes for ease of transport.

The enemy had outsmarted themselves. They’d set up guards around the center tent, no doubt hoping to lure the rangers into a trap. Then they’d hidden their stolen prize here, with only one sleepy thief to protect her.

Jerrard scowled down at the sleeping girl, wrapped in dirty rags and thick ropes. With her wrists tied to her ankles, she was forced into an awkward fetal position. Her hair was a tangled mess of knots and filth. Her face was stained nearly black with grime and dried blood.

Rage filled him, hot and deadly, as he realized that they’d beaten the poor girl. Possibly worse.

Drawing his dagger once more, he moved to her side.

The moment he touched her, she flinched, and he realized she’d only been feigning sleep. She was now staring up at him in wide-eyed terror, fixated upon the blade within his hand.

Jerrard silently put a finger to his lips and shifted his hand into the pale moonlight trickling through the gash he’d made in the back of the tent. Turning the dagger slightly to illuminate the symbol engraved upon the hilt.

An oak leaf, wearing a tiny crown over its stem. A symbol of the king’s Rangers.

The mark was also on his sword, and on the blades of all his men. It separated them from the common soldier. A symbol that was renown throughout the kingdom. Feared by criminals and revered by the humble people.

Rangers were celebrated for being God-fearing men who had vowed to protect those who were incapable of protecting themselves. They were the priests of forest. The hidden swords of God. Peacekeepers acclaimed for being beyond mortal temptation. Beyond corruption.

Or so the people believed.

Jerrard had known a few exceptions to the rule, but the deceivers were quickly and quietly weeded out of their ranks by an anonymous dagger in the back. A lethal warning to all other rangers. If you betrayed your vows, the green brotherhood would find out.

Upon seeing the oak leaf and crown, the girl’s eyes appeared to grow even wider, yet she held silent and still as Jerrard stepped forward once more to carefully cut the ropes from her body.

The poor child was trussed like up like a wild boar, with more rope than Jerrard knew was necessary.

The soft flesh of her wrists and ankles was raw and torn beneath the bindings. She must have put up a valiant fight to have earned such abuse, but he only felt a seething anger for those that had done this to her.

Once she was freed, he could see that she wore only a thin and tattered nightgown beneath the soiled blanket she’d been bound inside. Unfastening his dark green ranger’s cloak, he wrapped it gently about her shoulders.

She silently accepted the offering, standing tall and proud. Every inch of her now the daughter of a noble man. Her eyes sharp with intelligence, rather than dampened by the fear and pain he knew she must be feeling.

As he held out his palm, her chin lifted in a slightly shaky gesture of defiance, revealing a glimpse of the spirit she must have shown her captors. But after a moment, she placed her delicate hand within his and allowed him to guide her back out through the gash in the tent.

The camp was silent as a tomb.

If all had gone well, it was. The dozen or so men who had held the girl would already be dead. The watchmen slain without a sound. The rest killed in their sleep.

But a ranger always remained on guard. His life depended upon his ability to detect potential threats.

Jerrard led the girl out over the same path that his men had used to approach the camp.

The horses were tied where they’d been left, including the additional horse they’d brought for the girl.

Delicate creatures, nothing like the massive war beasts which were prized by knights and nobles. A ranger’s horse must be fast and nimble. Built with the grace and agility of a deer, making them ideal for navigating the narrow wildlife paths which crisscrossed the heart of the forest.

Jerrard helped the girl onto her horse, feeling another wash of rage as she winced, despite the extra blankets he’d had his men drape over her saddle, to pad her from the hard leather.

Her captivity must have been hell.

Then his men were stepping out of the shadows all around them, silent as wraiths. They mounted without speaking, but a silent inventory assured Jerrard that not a single one of his team were injured or missing.

As silently as they had arrived, the rangers vanished back into the trees, leaving the corpses of the guilty behind to feed the ravens and the wolves.

Chapter 1

Felicity closed the bedroom door softly behind her, silently grieving when the wooden barrier could not block out the sound of her sister’s tears.

Adelaide was home, but she was not the same girl which had been stolen. There was a darkness that haunted her eyes now. A trembling stiffness in the way she avoided dark doorways and isolated halls.

How could their parents not see it? How could they demand that the wedding continue after all that their daughter had been through?

It was clear that they wished to keep the abduction a secret, but Adelaide had been deeply traumatized by the event. How could their parents now force her to surrender to yet another man? A stranger they knew nothing about, other than his noble standing and wealthy connections.

Felicity was furious. But there was nothing she could do to stop it. Her hands were bound by invisible ropes as relentless as the ones which had left those scars upon her sister’s wrists and ankles.

In hopeless frustration, she retreated from the sound of her sister’s misery.

For days she had remained at Adelaide’s side, attempting to offer what comfort and support she could. But there were times when her own thoughts grew so dark with rage and pain, she knew it would not serve for her to remain near someone who was already suffering.

So, she would retreat to the gardens, a direction she now walked out of habit.

The beauty of the flowers and trees were a gentle balm to her tortured soul, and she was unlikely to be disturbed here. Her parents seldom trespassed outside of the castle, unless summoned by some nobleman’s fancy or king’s writ.

And the gardeners would always fade away the moment they caught sight of her, no doubt obeying some irrational command from her parents. The lord and lady were unusually strict in keeping their daughters isolated from the outside world.

Felicity craved the peace and solitude the garden offered.

Her heart was caught within a painful tangle of frustration and concern for her sister as she circled the outer edge of the elaborate maze of hedges and shrubs.

She had even found herself thinking that it might have been better if Adelaide were killed, rather than forced back into a position of domestic captivity. And what else would you call this hastily arranged marriage?

Adelaide’s future husband might be a nobleman, but that did not guarantee a good temperament. Her father was proof of that.

Circling back towards