Suzanne Robinson (30 page)

“No, don’t move!” she screamed.

Gray’s arm stretched out across the door panel, and the shard cracked against the wood next to it, splintering and sending a flake stabbing into the back of his wrist. Horrified, Juliana stood in the chest, unable to move as he cursed and jerked his hand from the door. He pulled out the flake. Its point was crimson with his blood. Gray
ignored the wound as Imad darted into the room, glanced at them both, muttered something in Arabic, and then said, “The mistress left this in the village.” He set down her healing box and lifted Gray’s hand.

“A small cut, master.”

While Imad searched for a bandage from her healing box, neither of them spoke. After glancing at Imad, Gray raised his jewellike gaze to her.

“Wait there, my joyance. That chest will make a good seat when I turn you over my knee. Oh, don’t look so shocked. I’ll send Imad away before I lift your skirt.”

Her blood heated and shot in boiling waves to her face. Juliana vaulted out of the chest, slammed the lid, and rounded on him, her voice shaking.

“By all the demons in hell, I’ll not endure this. You seek to make me your slave.”

“What?” His tone was at once startled and bewildered.

She rushed on, impelled by the need to rid herself of this pain with words. “I’ll not have it, do you hear? I’d sooner marry a leper than spend my life groveling at your feet or enslaved and—and performing for your pleasure.”

His lips moved, slightly apart, and his gaze shifted, lowering to his wrist. Imad had been pressing a bandage over the cut but had frozen at their exchange. The length of cloth dropped to the floor. In the stillness Juliana felt the sudden change in him without understanding its cause. Then he looked up at her.

His gaze was filled with astonished hurt. He shook his head and spoke in a broken voice.
“Enslave
, you think I’m capable of such a thing when I—I thought there was more between us than … than desire. I thought you understood what I am. But I was a fool to think you looked beyond the outward guise—and simply liked me.”

In but a moment Juliana’s righteous anger disappeared. The unfortunate choice of a word had wounded
him as no sword or dagger could, and she had been the one to hurt him. Pain stabbed through her as she realized what that one word must mean to him, the degradation and suffering, the shame.

“No,” she whispered as tears blurred her sight. “I didn’t really mean …” She lost her courage in a wave of remorse.

“Um, if you put yarrow on the wound …” She tried to begin again, but he was gone, quietly slipping out the door and closing it with elaborate care. Juliana was left to plead with the polished oak. “I didn’t mean it.”

That look, it haunted her. All composure, all mastery, even his chill reserve had been ripped from him, laying base tortured and suffering radiance. She’d wanted to win against him, not shred his soul. It had never occurred to her that she held the power to do it.

She was still standing beside the chest, oblivious to anything but her misery. How could she have been so reckless? She should have understood what that word would do to him. A clatter distracted her, or she would have burst into tears of regret. Imad had closed the healing box and was setting it on a table. Straightening his flowing robe, he came to her, held out his hand, and guided her away from the chest. Juliana covered her face with her hands while he set about clearing the chamber of broken pottery and upset furnishings, his expression impassive. She was crying silently when he spoke.

“He saved my life.”

Juliana stopped crying and peered at the youth through her fingers.

Imad knelt on the floor and plucked shards from beneath the bed. He kept his eyes lowered, his tone flat. “I was surviving by thievery on the streets of Alexandria, a scrawny, filth-ridden little asp. I tried to cut his purse, and he caught me. His guards would have beheaded me,
but he forbade it and begged Saladin to allow him to keep me. I wasn’t grateful until later, when he persuaded the master not to sell me to a brothel. He still won’t tell me how he did it.”

“I can cure scores of ailments,” Juliana said. “But I can’t cure myself of my evil temper. In truth, no one has ever made me so angry.”

Imad straightened and sat back on his heels to regard her with solemn black eyes. “I have remained silent by his command, O divine mistress of beauty. But you and he are like two lions, each with majestic temperament and deadly claws. He had begun to sheathe his, or he wouldn’t have concocted this tale of the bandit’s being the murderer.”

Juliana felt a muscle in her jaw quiver. “I didn’t kill him.”

“He knows that, O light of the world, in spite of your pretense otherwise. But you don’t know what a battle he fought to put aside his rage at having been stripped and paraded before strangers at your hands. Did you never think that such a thing would repeat the humiliations he suffered as a slave?”

Juliana’s knees turned to water. She sank down on the chest at the foot of the bed. “Oh, no.”

Imad began putting shards on a tray while she contemplated the evil she’d done to Gray’s pride. He carried about him such an air of stately composure; it concealed wounds of shame barely healed, and she’d ripped them open.

“Tell me what happened to him,” she said.

Imad rose smoothly and put the tray on the bed. “I cannot, mistress. If I did, he wouldn’t hurt me, but he would send me away, and suffer great sorrow at my betrayal. I would never do that to him.”

“Is it so terrible?” she asked.

A long silence followed. Imad touched the shards on the tray, then came to kneel before her. His movements fluid, he sank to the floor and lowered his forehead to touch the tip of her boot. Then he sat up.

“A slave has no dignity, no privacy, no will of his own. For him there is no justice, no appeal, no relief. There is only abject debasement, invasion of body and spirit, subjugation, and shame. I do not have to describe for you what this would mean for a young man of such fire and so wild a spirit as my master.”

“No.”

“And as a healer, I think you have great sense. Sense enough to offer solace without the pity that would destroy him.”

Juliana’s shoulders slumped. “I should have talked to him instead of losing my temper.”

“Yes, mistress, but he wouldn’t have told you what you really needed to know.”

“Prideful.”

“Yes, mistress.”

Then she remembered being hauled to her room and seduced. Her eyes became slits. “But he’s at fault too. At fault, ha! He tries to drive me like a sheep. I shouldn’t have used such a mean word to him, but he has been as careless of my feelings and desires.”

Imad lifted a hand, causing her to shut her mouth and give him an irritated stare.

“And do you know what causes him to behave like this Viking to whom you compare him?”

“Oh, you heard about that?”

“Yes, O flower of divinity. And I will tell you one thing, though the master would never wish me to. His tyranny arises out of fear.”

Juliana heard her quivering voice. “Fear. Fear? Gray de Valence is afraid? Of what?”

Imad slipped his hands in the sleeves of his robe and lifted jet-dark brows. “Why, fear for you and fear of you, mistress. He fears your temper will ruin you, and he fears his own feelings for you.”

“Are you certain?” She dared only whisper the question.

“As certain as Allah is the light.”

“Curse it, then why hasn’t he said this to me?”

“Have you spoken of your fears to him?”

“Oh.”

She subsided into thought while Imad waited, undisturbed by her long silence. She remembered Gray’s wild fury at her refusal to declare her innocence. She remembered the way he touched her—as if he couldn’t resist the compulsion—even when his purpose was to drop her in a washtub. Now memories came quickly to her. The desperation in his eyes as she plummeted toward him down that hillside above Clement’s cave. The angelic gentleness of his touch in the blackness of that same cave. And finally, after they’d made love, the tremor in his voice as he admitted that he was enslaved.

She had been too caught up in her own fears to perceive the gravity of those words or what it must have cost him to utter them. What had she done? Cold, unremitting fear invaded her; this cursed temper of hers might have cost her this incomparable man.

“God give me grace,” she whispered to herself. Then she looked up at Imad. “Do you think he’d forgive me?”

“The master follows the word of God. The Prophet has written that He won’t take you to task for vain words, but for what your heart has amassed.”

“That doesn’t sound good for me.”

Imad laughed. “But it is, O kind and generous lady.”

“I’m not kind. I’ve a tongue like a dagger and the
temper of a wounded stoat, and look what letting them run rampant has done to Gray.”

“There is a shadow on the sea, but a good breeze will send it flying.”

“Are all Muslims so circuitous in their language?”

“I know not what you mean, mistress.”

Juliana hopped from the chest and began touching her hair and clothing. “Thunder of God, I must look like a devil’s crone. Er, um, Imad.”

“Yes, O divine lady of light.”

“He really did mean to marry me?”

Imad cocked his head to one side. “Of course, mistress. He cast aside this preoccupation with vengeance, this crusade for belated justice, all in
pursuit
of you.”

“Then perhaps it’s time that he found out what it’s like to be pursued.”

“Many women have pursued him, mistress.”

“Not like me, Imad. I assure you, not like me.”

Gray sat on a bench in one of the sparsely furnished manor chambers. His squire and Lucien had found him there. He paid no attention when, upon seeing the tiny dots of blood on his sleeve, Simon had begun to mutter and removed his tunic. When he didn’t resist and continued his blank perusal of the chamber walls, Lucien pointed to the bandage on his wrist and asked the origin of the cut. Gray’s glance barely touched the wound as he explained without revealing details.

“Mon Dieu, messire
. She could have put out your eye.”

The wound was nothing, a little puncture unworthy of a child’s notice. But the words, her words … Those had ripped through him as though a jagged shard of steel had pierced his chest. That she could think him capable of acts such as those of Saladin, of that terrible lack of compassion for the helpless …

His mind reeled anew under an assault of memories that made him feel dirty. Again he felt the hands of strangers on his bare skin, felt the gaze of a master upon his unclothed body. And yet Juliana thought he, the former slave, was like the slavemaster. In her eyes he was an animal, a brutish thing with yellow fangs and ungovernable lusts. The possibility that she might revile him the way he did Saladin made him want to howl.

Gray closed his eyes. More than to anyone else in the world he’d given himself to Juliana. He had been on the point of baring himself to her, uncovering his soul. And what frightened him near to tears was that even now, in spite of how she’d turned on him, he still loved her.

He’d known slavery of the body, but not this all-encompassing slavery of the heart. Against it he was more helpless than ever he’d been against Saladin. He was lost to her, and that evoked terror, terror that there was nothing he could do to save himself, and that, in spite of their fleshly desire, she might not return his love.

A small, secret part of him wanted to moan. He could feel it, deep in the narrowest, blackest cavern of his soul. Small, lost, cowering, that part of him he kept hidden, protected. That small, pale ghost of his lost innocence was in pain. And the pain was growing, no matter how he tried to master it. Soon he wouldn’t be able to conceal it. Perhaps he’d failed already, for Lucien was staring at him.

The knight dismissed Simon and drew near. “You’re as pale as the white walls of Wellesbrooke,
messire
. What has happened?”

Gray shook his head, but Lucien repeated his question. With each query, that trembling gray wraith within him grew stronger, more substantial, and threatened to overwhelm him. He muttered something, part of the truth. Lucien must have guessed at the rest, for he touched Gray’s arm and spoke in a whisper.

“Sacré Dieu
, what has she done to you?”

Each word stabbed into him, carving slices into his already bleeding heart. Abruptly Gray shoved Lucien aside and thrust himself off the bench.

“Enough, Lucien.” He raised his voice. “Simon! Simon come back here.”

He waited impatiently while Simon returned and helped him don a clean tunic of soft forest-green wool. He fastened his own sword belt only to be distracted by the sight of the white bandage on his wrist. His fingers touched the cloth gently. Then he heard Lucien swear again.

“Go away, Simon,” the knight said.

Gray looked up from his wrist to find himself alone with Lucien. His friend stood before him, fists planted on his hips.

“Never have I seen you beaten to your knees, sire. You mustn’t let her do this to you. Cast this demon-tempered creature aside before she destroys you. Choose a lady more noble, more worthy of your hand.”

Gray rammed his sword into its sheath so violently that he grimaced at the jar to his cut. “By Satan’s staff, be silent!” He stood there breathing hard and scoring Lucien with his stare, his voice throaty and rough. “I have no choice. Don’t you understand? I. Have. No. Choice.”

Whirling from the knight, Gray rushed from the chamber. His pace quickened until he was running. Down the stairs, across the hall, into the courtyard, and around to the stables. His mind burned, his lungs heaved. He didn’t remember saddling his hunter, but soon he was astride the bay and clattering across flagstones, beneath the portcullis, and out of the manor. He heard shouts behind him, but only kicked his horse into a
gallop. The shouts faded, but the pain remained with him.

Harder and faster he rode. Clods of dirt flew in his face. The mass of muscle and sinew beneath him pounded across fields, leaped across logs, hedges, streams, plunged into woods. Bending over the horse’s neck, he urged the animal on, gripping with his knees, straining forward. The hunter sensed his desperation and lengthened his stride, clawed the ground, and surged over the landscape. Soon they were both sweating, but still they charged on, careening down winding trails.