Linda Needham (6 page)

Protective. As though they believed they were on her side, and that she was on theirs.

As though their lord demanded something different from them, and they gave it readily.

If she could only believe such a thing was possible. That Alexander de Monteneau was different than all the others.

That he could actually protect her family and defend Carrisford and its people from the war, stave off starvation and the cold. And all of his
soldiers were as loyal and as invincible as they appeared to be.

Peace and protection, the children running and laughing freely through the village and the castle gates.

A husband to love and respect, for her to cherish and honor in return.

Then she wouldn’t have to…

But all those fanciful feelings of hope and security fled a moment later. She hadn’t seen the familiar shape in the gatehouse passage until she was out of the glare of the sun and almost upon him.

De Monteneau.

The most astounding thing was that he’d somehow slipped ahead of her and now leaned easily against the portcullis channel, looking as patient as a wolf about to pounce.

“Ah, my lady, I see that I’m just in time for my tour of the village.”

She sniffed at the grandness of the man’s arrogance, at her plans gone awry, and strode right past him, knowing that he would follow.

“As you proved last night so well, my lord, you do have impeccable timing.”

He followed after her like a swirling summer storm, his cloak wrapping around the backs of her legs, his astonishing warmth clinging to her ankles.

“Timing, my dear, is all in the eyes of the beholder.”

A
lex had rarely seen such a breathtaking contradiction of expressions so quickly brought under control. From enchanting, openmouthed surprise at seeing him, to horror to suspicion to absolute determination, and now to this lovely flushing that grew from out of the neckline of her chemise—all in one splendidly smooth sweep across her lovely features.

So very telling.

“I haven’t time for touring just now, my lord. I have food to deliver, and the miller’s wife is near to her time.” She jutted her stubborn chin toward some distant horizon.

“Then I’ll carry your basket and speak with the miller while you’re busy with his wife.” He reached for the basket, but she shifted it to the op
posite hand. He damned well wasn’t going to lose track of his elusive ward again. Not after losing the staunchest of his soldiers to her tending.

He’d looked up from the table full of his advisors to where the woman had been standing only moments before and felt a sudden unease.

He didn’t like the idea of her wandering about unsupervised, hatching her little plots against him. He’d planned to keep her well within his sights through the day—despite the distracting glint of the morning sunlight on her hair—but she’d vanished from the hall.

He’d checked the kitchen, her quarters, even his own chamber, then had remembered her concern over the village. And Gordon’s comment that it had been deserted last night.

“You may follow me, if you please, my lord. But know that I have work to do that should have been done last night.”

She went tromping across the drawbridge, heading down the steep incline in a stride far longer than her slightness might suggest, her heaping basket swinging freely among the weighty folds of her cloak.

He caught up with her easily and suffered her snort of derision with a cool-headedness he hadn’t known he possessed. The more he learned about his ward, the more valuable she would become to his future.

The small village spread out at the base of the
castle, neat and trim, though there was a leanness about it that made him think of a wounded animal balanced carefully on the edge of existence.

“There. Do you see, my lord?” She stopped short at the top of the lane before it descended into the village and made a great show of taking in the sights, blaming him for every leaf out of place. “The result of more than two years of guardians who had no regard for anything but their own greed. Six years of a petty war between two royal marauders, each claiming to know what’s best for their subjects.”

Let her damn him for something not of his making, let her bait him. He’d not rise to it. Or to the heady call of her hair, caught back in a thick plait, the boldest strands making a halo of soft curls around her face.

He inhaled a head-clearing breath but managed only to draw in more of her, mint and yew and gentian. The stunning intimacy of her bride’s bed.

“Tell me what was destroyed in last night’s attack, madam, and I’ll have it restored before sunset.”

She raised a frown at him, shielding her eyes from the sun with her hand. “I don’t expect you to understand, my lord. You bring your wars here where they’re not wanted.”

“The war goes where it’s needed.”

“What purpose did it have in coming here?” She knelt and scooped up a piece of charred
wood. “To the threshold of a family of weavers, my lord?”

He could see the remains of the cottage, the outline of its foundation, the brown, overgrown garden beyond. “When did this happen?”

Her voice lost its bravado, a pain too recent. “They were burned out when Lord Murdock decided he wanted Carrisford for himself.”

He’d seen many burned-out villages, but only from the perimeter, and only to pass them by. He knelt beside her and sifted a heat-twisted nail out of the rubble. “Where’s the family?”

“Brenna is the only one left—the older girl you met last eve.” She stood sharply, her brow fretting deeply, her eyes red-rimmed.

“I thought she was your sister.”

“Orphaned. I took her in because she hadn’t anyplace to go. You see, we’ve been sacked, looted, razed, starved, murdered, and frozen to the bone so often that I would have lost count long ago if I hadn’t recorded every outrage.”

“And what of
this
time, madam?” He stood and wrapped his arms through the handle of her basket, their arms touching, drawing her closer to him, making his point as clearly as he knew how. “What offenses of mine against your village have you recorded? You looked quite busy earlier today.”

“I…well—” She clutched the basket tighter.
“As you might have noticed, I’ve had no time to inspect the village for myself.”

He pulled her even closer, her nose an inch from his own, her minty breath mixing with his across his jaw, threatening to unbank the lawless fire glowing in his belly. A simple thing to cross the distance between them, to taste her, to satisfy this distracting craving for her. “And you have not a single loss to record against me, have you?”

She furrowed an angry brow at him, “I haven’t seen all of the village yet. Now let go.”

It was only when she started off again that he realized the street was still deserted, and so was the wide, open square with its spokes of narrow lanes. Just as Gordon had reported last night. No hearth smoke, no children or dogs or grazing livestock.

“Madam, your village lacks people. Where is everyone? Are they in the fields, bringing in the harvest?”

She gave an ungainly snort of pure derision. “What harvest do you mean, my lord? The fields were never sown, remember? And it’s October, long past harvesttime.”

“No harvest at all?” He was no kind of farmer, but, Christ, that didn’t sound right. “But Carrisford does have a village full of people. Where the devil have you stashed them all?”

But she’d already strode away from him again, through the oddly deserted square and into a
two-storied barn. Before he could discover exactly where she’d disappeared to in the dusty, shadowed darkness, a bell began to ring somewhere high in the rafters above. A deep, throaty tolling that filled his chest and the building, thrumming against the walls, rolling up the length of the valley.

He followed the tolling through the nearly empty barn and finally found his ward up a flight of stairs, her fingers wrapped around the thick bell rope, her face tilted upward, catching the sunlight in bright, moted stripes across her rosy cheeks.

What the devil?

“Is this the village church?” he shouted.

She shook her head. “The granary, though as you probably noted, it does lack grain.”

He hated her secrets, the large ones and the little dodgy ones that she placed in front of him to slow him, as though they could. Half-truths that told him much about her.

“Why the bell then?”

She waited while the tolling faded to nearly nothing, doubtless measuring him for the story she would tell. “’Tis a make-do pele tower. The villagers left last eve at the first sign of your assault.”

Ah, so that was the bell he’d heard last night as he’d ridden through the courtyard. An alarm. “Do you mean that the entire village has been in hiding all this time? In the woods, all night?”

She shrugged lightly. “They’re used to it, my lord. And where else would they go to be safe?”

“Into the castle, madam. Behind stone walls and thick doors.”

She laughed and wrapped the thick rope around her hand and then her wrist. “Into the arms of another overlord like Rufus? Oh, no, my lord, we learned the folly of that strategy after the second assault. Everyone scattering to the winds is far safer than seeking shelter in the lord’s castle—whoever that lord might be.”

She still didn’t understand or was purposely ignoring the fact that
he
now made the rules here. “
I’m
the lord now.”

“Aye, but the villagers will still take to the hills the next time Carrisford is overtaken.”

“Damnation, woman, there won’t be a next time.”

That seemed to amuse her, drew a smile to the corners of her mouth. “Perhaps you’re right, my lord guardian.”

Bloody hell, he hated that word and the indicting way she said it. He wrapped his fingers around hers on the bell rope, took a handful of her sleeve to keep her close. “Madam, if there is ever trouble on my watch, you will instruct the villagers to come to the castle for their safety, not flee to the woods. Do you understand me?”

She fixed him with an unflinching gaze, one steeped in doubt and sorrow and a dangerous
kind of determination. “Quite perfectly, my lord.”

She leaned toward him and hung her weight into three quick pulls that drew his hand and hers through the steady rhythm, the rise and the fall and the fading ring, that reminded him of simpler days.

Of summer and the sea.

When she tried to pull away, he held fast to her hand, this clever, fearless woman and her conspiring bells. “What did that mean?”

“Which?” Her blue eyes widened in an almost believable show of innocence. He’d have to remember that.

“This second alarm you just rang.”

She huffed at him and blew a stray strand of hair off her temple. “The same as before, my lord. I want to make sure everyone heard that it was safe to return.”

Not the same signal at all. Quicker, sharper, struck with deliberation and defiance.

“Don’t ever take me for a fool, madam,” he said, chancing the softness of her hair as he tucked the loose strand behind the ridge of her ear. Chancing the downy graze of his knuckles across her cheek.

Never expecting her little gasp. The erotic pleasure of it. Or her own obvious surprise.

“Believe me, my lord, you seem like anything but a fool to me.” She yanked her hand out of his, then brushed off her skirts and picked up her bas
ket. “Thank you for escorting me to my village, my lord, but I have a great deal of work to do.” She started down the stairs.

“Then you’ll do it with me.” He followed her through the granary, wishing he knew more about the workings of a village. About harvest yields and lambing.

“Surely your soldiers need you.”

“The trick to running a disciplined garrison is to engage the most skilled officers and to trust them.” He caught her arm and turned her, braving all that illuminating indignation.

“And do you trust them, my lord? Are they as skilled as they seemed to be last night?”

“I’ve the best trained, most loyal men in the kingdom, Lady Talia. We’ve never lost a contest, no matter how great the odds.”

“You’ve never had to defend a castle, my lord. Never one like Carrisford. I pray that you’re not too disappointed when you lose her.”

With that odd pronouncement still ringing in his ears, she started away into a narrow lane that had been deserted only moments ago, and now she hurried to greet the bedraggled people who were beginning to slip back in from the countryside.

Moments later, she was helping an elderly woman over the threshold of a sagging cottage, leaving her with a loaf of bread and a kiss on the cheek.

She gave three more loaves and a cut of salted pork to a large, threadbare, thin-limbed family; dressed a boy’s scraped elbow, chased and caught a piglet for a woman whose arms were filled with two children; dashed from one crisis to another, however minor, tending to every illness and sorrow with her good works.

Unwilling just to stand idly by and watch the woman trying to patch up her tattered village, Alex helped two men prop up the rear wall of a cottage and secure the flagging roof, repaired the rope on the well bucket, and, a half hour later, found Talia hurrying toward the market square, her basket nearly empty and her hair springing from its plait.

A small knot of women were gathered there, careworn, but chattering like geese. Their chatter stopped abruptly as soon as they saw Talia, and then erupted again as they swarmed around her, hugging and kissing her.

“Oh, my lady! We’re so glad to see you!”

“Auch! We feared you were surely going to have to marry that Rufus! But they came in time!”

Alex caught Talia’s eye as she looked up at him from the short distance across the square, and damn if he didn’t find her more dazzling than ever. If the blue of her cornflower gaze didn’t rouse him like a callow lad.

“Rumor was they came
just
in time!”

“I prayed and prayed it wouldn’t happen to you this time ’round, my lady! And it didn’t, praise the Almighty.”

“Ooo, and didn’t I hear that your new guardian is a…a…well, then!” The woman had followed Talia’s gaze and stopped abruptly and gaped at Alex, which made the rest of the women turn in his direction, bunching themselves around Lady Talia as though they feared that he would abduct her.

“Is that him, my lady?” one of the women asked, as though he couldn’t hear or see.

“Is it, Lady Talia? Is he the new lord?”

Alex had never felt so much like a bullock on the auction block. He felt Talia’s openly appraising gaze tracking over him, from his eyes to the soles of his boots and every place in between, heated and perilously familiar. So like the night before.

“Will you be marrying this one, my lady?”

This
one? Had she been pledged to another man before de Graffe?

“
I
certainly would, Lady Talia!”

His enchanting ward turned her head then and said something to the women under her breath which made them all turn and stare at him and then giggle and coo.

An excluding sound that sent them off in a dozen directions.

He caught the back of Talia’s cloak before she
could slip away from him. “What’s all this marriage business, madam? I thought that was done.”

“Something that you, my lord, needn’t trouble yourself about.”

Blasted woman and her little secrets. “I damn well plan to trouble myself about—”

“Talia! Talia! Taaaaaalia!” The little voice came streaming toward them from behind, another squeakier voice screaming high atop it.

Talia shot Alex a frown and bent down just in time to scoop up the little girl who threw herself into her embrace.

“Oh, my, my, what is it, Lissa, my sweet?”

“It’s Radish! Gemma’s bunny! He’s…he’s…got all tied up!” The choking sob was far larger than the little girl and shook her like the winter wind.