Temptress (7 page)

When he finally married Morwenna, his wealth would again grow, his holdings widen. To add to her allure she was young enough to provide him with an heir. A son. At last! Lylla had borne him a daughter, a frail thing like her mother, and they’d both died of a fever within three months’ time. He’d married again, and Margaret, nearly as old as he, had been a cold widow when he’d taken her as his bride and she’d turned out to be barren as a stone. He could have been mounting a statue for all the good it did to try to impregnate her. She’d died within five years, wasting away until she was barely skin and bones, the physician at a loss as to what was happening. All the urine examinations, bloodlettings, leeches, herbal pastes, and potions had been for naught and, he supposed, for the best. Margaret’s only merit had been that she’d been wealthy.

Ryden had shed no tears for her for she’d been a fussy, demanding, self-serving woman who had blamed everyone but herself for her own misery.

But Morwenna was young and spirited. Surely fertile. He smiled at the thought of bedding her and imagined losing himself in her. Getting her with child would be a pleasure. She was sensuous without knowing it, tall and finely muscled, her buttocks round, her breasts large enough without being ponderous, and he imagined she would enjoy the lovemaking as much as he. Oh, to feel her strong legs surround his torso as he plunged into her again and again, pushing hard against her, making her cry out in pleasure and pain. For what was sex without the pure, animal rutting of it? The domination of male over female . . . Ah, yes, he felt himself grow hard with the thought of it.

Dominion—that was what he craved more than anything else on heaven and earth.

He couldn’t wait to claim Morwenna as his bride.

Aye, ’twas a fine, fine union, the best he’d ever planned and one he would have pursued were Morwenna an old, fat, hook-nosed, addled crone. The fact that she was young and supple with firm breasts and a trim waist was but a little sugar on an already tempting pie.

He licked his lips in anticipation.

Ryden of Heath wasn’t about to let any man, least of all Carrick of damned Wybren, change his destiny. He would become husband to Morwenna of Calon no matter what.

CHAPTER FOUR

M
orwenna escaped the chapel and felt anything but holy. Her thoughts throughout the dreary service had been with the stranger, and though she’d made the sign of the cross, listened to Father Daniel’s prayers, fingered her rosary, and whispered her own words to God, she’d done so without any thought or consideration. Her prayers had been merely a matter of habit, and all the while she’d considered the wounded man. Friend or foe?

Her heart leapt at the thought as she walked through the frosty afternoon, and she experienced a warm sense of something close to vengeance run through her blood. Was it possible? Could destiny have served up the blackheart that she’d loved so fiercely, giving her the power over his fate? She felt a pang of guilt at that turn of thought, probably because he was in such a bad way. Had he been healthy, she would have readily thrown him to the wolves of Wybren. To Graydynn. To the hangman, if he was a murdering traitor. But he’d been near death when they’d found him, and her hard heart had cracked a bit as she’d stared into that battered face.

Somehow the wounded man had survived. Though the physician had warned her that the man would probably die within twenty-four hours, he had prevailed.

It had been more than a week since he’d been discovered near death. Surely he would survive, a man whose will to live was this strong.

“Bother and broomsticks,” she muttered, as confused now as she had been when he’d been carried into the keep upon a stretcher. Wrapping a scarf more tightly around her neck, she barely noticed the servants and freemen working in the inner bailey. The farrier was pounding out horseshoes while girls collected eggs or singed the hair and pinfeathers off dead chickens, and the laundress frowned at the dark sky. Morwenna was hardly conscious of the efforts of those around her. Her body, however, responded, her stomach rumbling as she passed by the baker’s hut and the scents of fresh-baked bread, apples, cinnamon, and cloves assailed her.

“Morwenna, wait!” Bryanna cried as she hurried out of the chapel. Morwenna glanced over her shoulder to find her sister picking her way through near-frozen puddles to catch up with her in the garden where last year’s flowers had withered and a bench placed near a fountain was slick with ice.

As if reading her older sister’s thoughts, Bryanna demanded, “What if the man in Tadd’s chamber is Carrick?”

“ ’Tis not possible. Carrick likely died in the fire with the rest of his family.” Morwenna kept walking, holding her cloak tight to her body. They passed by a trellis where a few rose hips still clung to a dark, leafless vine. She didn’t want to speak with her sister about Carrick or whoever the devil that man was. She and Bryanna had exhausted this conversation a dozen times since they’d seen the damned ring of Wybren on the wounded man’s hand. “He’s . . . dead.” She glanced at her sister. “And so is this discussion.”

“You were in love with him once,” her sister charged, and Morwenna nearly stumbled over a rock in the path. “And now you’re promised to Lord Ryden of Heath.”

Morwenna’s jaw ached. She couldn’t think of Ryden. Not now. “I was
never
in love with Carrick,” she said, as much to convince herself as her sister. “Aye, ’tis true that I
thought
I loved him, but it was all just foolish youth.” After all, had not he also bedded Alena before and after his flirtations with Morwenna?

“He broke your heart.”

Inwardly Morwenna cringed, felt the lie of denial leap to her tongue. Instead she stopped short near the carter’s hut and wished to the heavens above that she didn’t have to have this conversation.

“It was a long time ago. Three years have passed.”

“I know, but if this man does prove to be Carrick, what will you do? Either he set the fire at Wybren and is a criminal, or he escaped the fire and whoever set it may be after him . . . and either way Lord Ryden will not be pleased to think that you are harboring an old love who might also be a criminal, a murderer.”

“Or a victim,” she said and spied the challenge in her sister’s eyes.

“I knew him not, but I doubt Carrick of Wybren was a victim,” Bryanna said. “A rogue, aye. A blackheart, yes, but never a victim.” She didn’t wait for an answer but hurried off, leaving Morwenna alone with her cold, troubled thoughts.

The fire could have been accidental,
Morwenna told herself and wouldn’t believe that Carrick had intentionally killed all of his family. To what end? True, if his father, Dafydd, and older brother, Theron, had died in the blaze, he would become lord. But only if he could get away with their deaths. And he would have to come forward and challenge his cousin Graydynn for the barony. Graydynn, Lord Dafydd’s nephew, had inherited the keep after the inferno, and if Carrick did happen to be alive, he had not surfaced to challenge that claim to the inheritance.

“Oh, for the love of Saint Peter,” she mumbled under her breath, and the carter, leaning over a wheel with broken spokes, lifted his head.

“M’lady?” He straightened, his nose red from the cold, straw-colored hair sticking at odd angles from beneath a woolen cap. “Is there something I could do fer ye?” He wiped his nose with the ragged sleeve covering his arm.

“Nay, Barnum, ’tis nothing.” Forcing a smile, Morwenna walked back to the garden and sat on the solitary bench. She looked up at the sky, where dark clouds glowered, promising an early dusk. The day was as gloomy as her spirits. Glancing upward, toward the small window of the room where the wounded man lay, she imagined a castle overcome by fire, the panic that would ensue, the long lines of people with buckets of water being passed from hand to hand from the well and ponds as the flames burned and crackled. Commoners, servants, soldiers, and the lord’s family would try to beat out the fire with wet rags or buckets of sand and prevent the spread of flames. Thatched roofs would be frantically doused, young children and livestock herded away. Pigs would squeal, people scream, dogs bark, horses shriek as the flames leapt ever closer, destroying all in their paths as black smoke roiled to the unforgiving heavens. Pandemonium would ensue, and if the wind were to shift in the wrong direction . . .

She shivered and wrapped her arms around herself. Could someone have intentionally started the fire at Wybren?

Personal gain?

Revenge?

Abject hatred?

She bit her lip and stared up at the small window. Was she harboring a murderer? And if so, was he the one man who had touched her heart, only to break it? Steeling herself, she stood and headed out of the garden again. If the man in Tadd’s room truly was Carrick, then she should deal with him as she would anyone suspected of a crime. She would hand him over to Lord Graydynn. Perhaps there was a price upon his head, a reward.

That thought should have given her a sense of anticipation. Or a little thrill of satisfied revenge. Instead it only dampened her spirits all the more.

“You’re pathetic,” she growled at herself.
And the man in the chamber is
not
Carrick of Wybren.

 

“We’ve found out nothing more than we knew a few days ago,” the sheriff admitted later that day. He was warming his legs before the fire of the great hall and holding his cap in his hand as he shook his head. “My men searched the surrounding villages, listened to the local gossip, and asked questions of innkeepers, farmers, merchants, anyone who might have been a witness to or heard about the beating. Not one person had anything to offer.”

“The only people who know what happened are the man upstairs and whoever did this to him,” Morwenna said.

“But it looks as if there was quite a struggle. I’d hoped we would find someone with bruises and scars he couldn’t explain, but we haven’t. There was a farmer who’d been nearly trampled by his horse, a huntsman who’d fallen from a ridge while chasing a wounded stag, two boys who’d gotten into a fistfight, and that was it. Whoever did this to the man we found either has hidden his injuries well, had received none, or has disappeared. We also looked for someone who had ended up with an extra horse, assuming that our
guest
was riding. But you know that finding a stolen steed is a difficult thing to trace, animals being traded and sold all the time.”

“Mayhap we’re making too much of this,” Morwenna said. She was seated near the fire and staring past the sheriff’s legs to the flames. “A man was found beaten and left for dead. ’Tis a crime, yes, but one we can’t solve without the victim’s word. We’ve acted as if our own keep was threatened, but could this not have been a simple highway robbery?”

“Then why not take the ring? ’Tis valuable gold for melting down.”

“Maybe someone or something scared the attacker off before he could snatch it.”

“Or if this man we’ve got here was the attacker, his victim was somehow able to escape with his horse and leave him behind.” The sheriff clucked his tongue and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “What does the physician say?”

“He now expects him to live.”

“Good.” Payne adjusted his hat upon his head and his eyes glittered with a hardness that Morwenna had never before witnessed. “Then when he awakens, we’ll see what he has to say.”

“If it be the truth.”

Payne’s mouth twisted cruelly. “What are the chances of that?”

 

Twilight had descended upon the keep, and the Redeemer slipped silently through the corridors. Moving stealthily, he hastened down the staircase to what had once been the archive chamber. Thirty years past, after a particularly nasty bout of thievery, the room had been changed into a storage chamber, where seldom used items had been left to collect dust and become vermin-riddled and forgotten. Few even remembered that the room existed.

Listening for footsteps and hearing none, he slid a rusted key into the lock. With a low, resonant creak the door swung open. Stale air greeted him as he held his torch aloft and then quickly closed and locked the door behind him. Quietly he walked unerringly to the small grate on the floor, reached between the rusted bars, and found a latch that he unhinged. Straightening, he walked to the back of the chamber and pushed against a notched stone. Immediately the back wall moved on noiseless hinges, opening to a yawning dark staircase and a web of narrow corridors that had been built into the old keep during its construction.

His shoulders brushed against the walls on both sides as he slid into the corridor, where the air was dry and lifeless. He heard the scratch of tiny claws as rats and other unseen vermin scrambled out of his path. Yet he smiled. No one knew of these ancient, hidden hallways, and those who did believed them to be a myth. Only he knew how to access them and use them to his advantage.

He came to a V in the narrow passage and turned unerringly to the right, climbing ever upward, the soft leather soles of his shoes making no sound over the accelerated rate of his own breathing, the pumping of his heart. For in a few minutes he would be in his viewing chamber near he ceiling of the keep, where hidden he would be able to look down on her.

Morwenna.

Lady of the keep.

Sensually innocent.

His groin tightened at the thought of her, of watching her, and a dryness settled in the back of his throat. Unseen, in weeks and months past, he’d viewed her slipping out of her tunic and chemise. He had spied upon her as she’d settled into a scented tub, the round, rosy nipples of her breasts visible beneath the dark water. He imagined suckling there, tasting her, touching her, the sweet ecstasy of dominating her. As he’d watched, his agony had been exquisite. Gingerly he’d slid his fingers into his breeches and slowly caressed himself, restraining his eagerness, extending the torture of not having her. He’d been careful not to speak, determined not to let out so much as a soft groan to give away his presence. Nor had he relieved himself of the discomfort. Nay, no matter how long he was hard, no matter how much sweat and desire ran down his skin, no matter how much his muscles strained and his cock ached for release, he’d forced himself to wait.