Danger's Kiss (17 page)

While the fool’s jaw slackened in amazement, she nudged one of his pieces off the board with her elbow.

N
icholas, unable to form words, merely wheezed.

Lord, the lass was beautiful.  Seductive.  Breathtaking.  And the little vixen knew exactly what she was doing.  He had to admit, Hubert had been clever indeed to enlist her services.

For a moment, his body seemed absolutely convinced he was about to indulge in an afternoon of sensual pleasure.

Then Desirée straightened with a smirk, hitching her kirtle back up over her shoulders, and he realized it had been nothing more than a well-executed ruse.

Meanwhile, Desirée, completely oblivious to the blood sizzling in his veins and the sweat forming above his lip, casually scanned the board, discovering a move.  “Aha!”  She jumped over his piece and took it out of the game.

Nicholas stared at the black and white pieces, unable to make sense of them.  Real or feigned, Desirée’s flirtation had utterly rattled him.  No woman had looked at him like that since...since he’d become a lawman.

When women had the courage to look at him at all, it was with terror or loathing or tearful supplication.  He’d forgotten what it was like to be the object of a woman’s flirtation.

Apparently, he’d also forgotten how to play draughts.  He moved a piece incautiously forward, directly into her path.

“See?” she said, claiming it at once.  “Distraction.”

He shook his head at his own folly.  It might have been a long while since he’d been seduced by a wench, but at one time his female admirers had been as commonplace as daisies.  All the lasses had adored the butcher’s youngest son.  Indeed, before Nicholas had taken on the mantle of the law, he’d been quite the seducer himself.

“What about you?” she asked.  “Tell me about your childhood.”

He avoided her gaze and studied the board, determined not to make another mistake.  “After I was born, my mother wed a butcher with two sons.  I worked with them in his shop as a lad.”

“What about your real father?”

He rested his fingers tentatively atop one of his pieces, considering his next move.  “He hoped I’d become a mercenary.  He secretly paid to have me trained in warfare.”

“Indeed?  Then why did you become a lawman?”

Startled by her question, he knocked the piece askew, then returned it to its place.  No one had ever asked Nicholas that before.  Most people believed he was born to violence, the way a wolf is born to killing.

He’d told no one the ugly truth, that when he was five-and-ten, his stepfather had been hanged for selling tainted meat to a lord.  After all these years, the gruesome image still haunted him, the horrible kicking and thrashing and gagging as his stepfather slowly strangled to death.  But the worst part was that it should have been Nicholas on the gallows.  He was the one who’d sold the meat.  His stepfather had gone to the gallows for him.

From that day forward, riddled by unbearable guilt, Nicholas had sworn to do everything in his power to make certain no innocent suffered on the gallows like that again.  He’d taken on the unenviable position of reeve of the shire to ensure that merciful justice was upheld.

But he wasn’t about to tell Desirée that.  He had a ruthless reputation to preserve.

“It paid well,” he lied.

He slid a disk forward, then narrowed his eyes suspiciously at the board.  Ballocks, how had he lost so many pieces?

Desirée wasted no time in deliberation, slipping one of her dark pieces closer to his side of the board.  “And your mother?”

“She died years ago.”

He scowled.  Something was definitely not right.  How had Desirée advanced so far across the board in so few moves?  He nudged a piece closer to the middle.

She pushed her piece to counter his move.  “So where did you get the scars on your face?”

He quirked up a corner of his mouth.  “Angry women throwing rocks at me.”

He glanced up, and she guiltily averted her eyes.

“Which scar do you want to know about?” he asked, reluctantly making a sacrifice of one of his pieces.

She picked up his disk and nodded to his forehead.  “The one there, on your brow.”

“York.  Angry crowd.  Thought my victim didn’t suffer enough in the noose.”

“What about that one?”  She gestured with his disk toward his cheek.

“A pack of lads ambushed me on a dare in Salisbury.”  He smiled grimly at the memory.  “I nabbed one of them and took him back to the inn, showed him my instruments of torture.  Never had trouble in Salisbury again.”

“And this?”  She reached out to touch his jaw, and for a moment he was taken aback.  She touched him so fearlessly.  That was another thing to which he was unaccustomed.

“That was from a woman I put in the stocks in Winchester.”

“A woman?”  Desirée pushed a dark piece across the board.

“She fought me like a wildcat,” he said, rubbing a thumb over the scar, “afraid to be left in the stocks, terrified she might be violated in the night.”

“And was she?”

He smirked.  “Nay.”

Desirée arched a dubious brow.

He confessed, “I...watched over her all night.”

Her knowing smile was irritating.  And when he looked down at the board again, he would have sworn his pieces weren’t where he’d left them.  “Whose turn is it?”

“Mine.”  She reached his side with her next move.  “Crown me.”

Grumbling, he crowned her piece, then made a quick count of his own pieces, committing the number to memory.  He pushed one of his disks against the edge.

She studied the board.  “So how many executions have you ordered?”

He gave her a withering glare.  “I think ‘tis my turn to ask
you
a question.”

“But I’ve already told you everything about
—
“

“What’s your favorite color?”  He sat back against the wall, folding his arms over his chest.  He suspected she was cheating, and if she was, two could play at that game.

She picked up one of her pieces, prepared to move it.  “Why would you want to know that?”

“No reason.  Just curiosity.”

She took a moment to decide.  “Blue.  Nay, green.”

“What kind of green?”

“What do you mean?”

She moved her piece to a new square, and he saw her casually nudge one of his pieces off the board and into her lap.  He pretended not to notice.

“Emerald green or pine green?” he asked her.  “Moss green?  Meadow green?”

A tiny crease furrowed her brow.  Obviously, no one had asked her such a thing before.  “I don’t—“

“Or,” he said, leaning forward to take her hand and gazing into her eyes with purposeful, sultry seduction, “maybe you prefer the smoky green of my eyes.”

She looked startled and aroused all at once.  Her hand tensed in his grip, but she didn’t pull away.  “I...  I...”

“Aye, my little cheat?” he purred.

She blinked.  “What?”

“Crown me,” he whispered.

“What?”

“Crown me.”  He nodded to the board.

She followed his gaze and frowned.  While she was floundering under his attentions, he’d used his forearm to slide four of his pieces to her edge.

“How did you...?”

He ran his thumb over the back of her hand and gave her a sly grin.  “Distraction.”

“Bloody hell,” she muttered, slipping her hand from his and reluctantly crowning his pieces.

He laughed.  “’Tis a foolhardy lass who’d try to cheat a lawman.”

“’Tis a foolhardy man who’d invite a cheat to play in the first place.”

“True.”

And yet Nicholas willingly made that mistake again.

And again.

And again, challenging Desirée to new games of draughts until the morn became afternoon.  Rather than stop their play for supper, they nibbled on cold bacon and stale bread and shriveled apples.  When afternoon became evening, and the candles began to gutter out one by one, still they played.  Finally Azrael started on his nightly rounds, prowling the cottage for mice, but only after Desirée’s third yawn in a row did Nicholas reluctantly bid her good night, leaving the gaming box on the table and retiring to his bedchamber.

Never had he spent a more enjoyable Sabbath.  What a delight the wicked lass had turned out to be.  For her, it seemed the challenge of the game was not the game itself, but her ability to cheat at it without being caught.  As for Nicholas, he couldn’t have cared less about the draughts.  He simply enjoyed her company.

Desirée was a bright, charming, desirable woman, one of those rare creatures whose wit was as startling as her beauty.

God help him, he didn’t want her to leave.  Not yet.

As she snuggled closer to the banked fire, Desirée smiled.  She hadn’t had so much fun since the time she’d won three shillings off of a drunken lord in one afternoon of Three Shells and a Pea.  Today she’d wagered nothing and won nothing.  But because of the pleasant company, the hours had flown by at a delirious pace.

Indeed, it wasn’t such a bad existence, staying in one spot, spending cold morns making frumenty in a warm cottage instead of slogging down muddy roads with a tough crust of horsebread, sleeping on a feather-stuffed pallet rather than flea-infested straw.  Having a partner for draughts and a friendly cat to weave through her legs while she did simple chores for a decent wage was far from a miserable life.

It wasn’t as much coin as she would have made at Fast and Loose, of course, but it was honest work.  She never had to look over her shoulder, go hungry two days in a row, or wonder where her next lodgings would be.

Hubert had always said that outlaws could ill afford to let the grass grow beneath their feet.  But even he would have to agree this was a rather lucrative situation for her.  In fact, it was exactly the kind of situation he’d been pushing her toward for weeks.

And indeed, the fact that her benefactor was a shire-reeve might not be the liability it seemed.  What woman wouldn’t want the protection of the most feared brute in town?

The only problem was Nicholas himself.  He’d made it perfectly clear this was to be only a temporary arrangement.  Somehow she’d have to convince him otherwise.

She grinned at the glowing coals.  That shouldn’t be too difficult.  The other thing Hubert always said was that Desirée could charm the braies off a monk.

Lady Philomena was wrenched from sleep with a hoarse cry.  Her pulse pounded in her breast.  The terrifying nightmare had left her shivering in a cold sweat.

Someone had
stolen
the key!

Seized by sheer, unmitigated panic, she threw back the covers, whimpering as she became entangled in the bed curtains.  Tearing the silk aside, she frantically dressed in the dark, throwing on her underdress and surcoat with uncharacteristic carelessness.

For days now she’d scoured the hall for that infernal key.  But neither her own meticulous searching nor charging the flinching steward with its recovery had borne fruit.

At first, she’d been convinced it was only misplaced.  It must have fallen from its hiding place atop the display of crossed swords in the great room and gotten kicked under the cupboard or behind the wall hanging or wedged in a crack of the stone floor.  She’d forbidden the servants to sweep out the old rushes, for fear the key might be lost among them.

But after hours of forcing Godfry to root among the rushes in the hall like the pig he so resembled, to no avail, she’d come to the conclusion that the thing must have been found by someone, probably a naughty kitchen lad who didn’t know what it was, a child who’d thought it a comely prize.

In that instance, she had only to apply pressure through the steward to extract the necessary information and convince the culprit to surrender what he’d pocketed.  So far, that pursuit had yielded no results.

But now her horrifying dream raised a third possibility.

Perhaps someone knew exactly what the key fit.