Defiant (35 page)

He gave a clipped nod. Why was he saying this? Why was it leaking out now?

Because he’d been wrong.

Having thought himself a barren plain, Jamie realized now he was a reservoir. And he ached. Ached with shame for
running, for want of going home. And he never could. Never did. Found every reason under the sun to induce John to send others to Everoot when judicial eyres brought the king’s men up North, when civil unrest required royal forces, when itinerations rounded northward to occupy the empty castle at Everoot. Jamie had stayed away, ever away, ferociously, desperately away.

It was a shameful thing, these two little facts, one that had taken no more than a moment, the other that took the rest of his life: run from your father’s murderers, and never go home again.

But now... now he wanted something. He wanted Eva.

His palm rested lightly on her chest, and he looked her in the eye as he revealed his shameful self.

“He killed my father. That is why I was willing to kill the king.”

“I imagine it was a hot, driving thing,” she said quietly.

He pressed onward. “And when John killed my father, I ran. I watched my father drop to his knees, and then I ran away.”

There it was, the burning whole of him. Out in the open. He had to open his mouth to keep breathing.

Eva nodded slowly, thoughtfully. “Yes. I can see this. It would be the only sensible thing to do.”

He felt unsteady at this validation.

“This is just what a person does when they are faced by men with swords who are much bigger than they. It is what I would do. I would venture to say it is what your father would have wanted you to do.”

He could hear his father’s voice even now, ordering him to run, even as he went down.

She looked over. “This is why you do not do the sensible thing now, Jamie, no? Ry worries that you are trying to get yourself killed. But you will not do that anymore, will you?” She put her hands on the sides of his face and pulled him down
to her face, close. “I would much prefer you stay here. With me. We will go to my river and grow things.”

He felt washed through, but managed a faint smile. “I have a question, Eva. Only you can answer it.”

The braziers had burned down and only one candle burned now, guttering in its holder. The moon had risen, filling the room with silvery light. Eva considered him for a long moment, then propped herself on an elbow, facing him. Her hair spilled down over her arm.

“I am prepared,” she said in a solemn voice.

“Why did John kill my mother?” He forced his voice level. “For years he’d been sending gifts north, as he often did to widows and wards.”

She nodded. “Yes, John has a great deal of patience with those who cannot hurt him. He ought to have been a falconer. For years, he was most kind to the folk at Everoot.”

“Then why?” He pulled his gaze away from hers and focused on the glimpse of a rounded white shoulder visible beneath her dark hair.

“Jamie, I cannot say whether or no John murdered your mother. I know for certes he killed d’Endshire, for I saw that myself. He claimed he was within his rights. I do not know if that is so or not. Was it treasonous for a vowed vassal to do what they did?” He heard her take a breath. “But your mother, the countess. . . . Jamie, I think she might have died of a broken heart. That was the second man she’d loved whom the king had slain.”

He lifted his gaze. “Second?”

She nodded slowly. He let it lie a moment, then nodded too. “What treason did John claim was done at Everoot?”

She swallowed. He watched it move down her throat. “The treasures.”

“Treasures,” he echoed.

“There are treasures rumored to be in Everoot’s cellars, Jamie.
Your
cellars.”

“I know that,” he said quietly. He’d known it since he could walk, since his father had led him down the steep, hidden stairwell behind the lord’s chambers, taken him into a dusty vault filled with bright metals and gems and other things that Jamie had not understood and had never been explained.

When it’s time, son
, his father had said,
you will know. One day, you will be Everoot. Until then, I or another caretaker will hold the keys.

But now his father was dead, and no caretaker had ever shown himself.

Eva was speaking quietly. “Your mother and Roger’s father were trying to spirit these treasures away before John came for them. They feared the state he was in. He needed coin for his wars, he needed support against the papacy, he needed—” She shook her head impatiently. “To be thought well of. He needed inducements to make people love him, no? Your mother feared he would recall the forgotten treasures of Everoot. She was trying to get them away.”

“And I left her to it,” he said, his words devoid of emotion, no change in tone or tenor, just a single pitch, flat and cold.

Eva tipped her head to the side. “You were a child when your father was killed.”

“Not when my mother was.” Anger sawed at him, making him sharp with the one person in the world who did not deserve anything but gentleness. He took hold of her arm and said through a clenched jaw, “When my mother died, I was in France, serving the king. Preparing my vengeance. All those years, letting her live alone, thinking I was dead.”

She tolerated his fierceness in the room, neither rejecting it nor joining in it. She just watched him. Slowly he loosened his hold. His hand fell back to the mattress.

Then she tipped in, so close her nose almost touched his.
“Your mother was not alone, Jamie.
I
was with her. And she loved you very much. She knew you were not dead. She told me this, many times.”

“I have thought of her,” he said thickly. “Every day, for twenty years.”

“Perhaps she felt your regard, for she said it very often, very calmly, a thing she knew completely.
My son is not dead. He is too strong for John to kill, and too smart to come back.
”

He felt a roaring wash up the back of his skull, blowing white noise through his body. Was the bed shaking under him? The muscles in his arm, which had been propping him up, felt weak.

She kissed him, then sat up. “I would like to show you something.”

He gave a ragged laugh and dropped back to the bed. “All right.”

She started pushing the covers aside. “You have perhaps spoken with Angus, and he has perhaps told you what I did to his table?”

Jamie laughed. “I have and he did. I think you made a Christian out of him again, Eva, and that was a bone-hard task, for Angus has been past penance for many years now.”

“He is hurting, that is all.” She slipped her pale undertunic over her head and reached for his hand. It tingled, as if she were lightning touching him. She squeezed, then unfolded her graceful body and got out of the bed. “But he is quite angry with you. I encouraged him in this, of course.”

He felt the smile rise up out of the wash of his head, bold and wide. “Of course.”

“We are not fond of knights, he or I.”

“Nay.”

“But I very much like to paint.” She smiled at him. “And I very much loved your mother.”

“Did you?” he said, but it sounded dim to his own ears. The center of his chest suddenly went heavy and crushed, as if a steel punch had landed. Dense, as if packed with a hot ball of heat.

A heart,
he thought dimly.
This is what it feels like to have a heart.

She was wrecking him. Ruining him for ruin.

She walked to the brazier. “I have never met Angus’s mother, but he thought it was a goodly recollection nonetheless. But, Jamie, I lived with your very good mother for
many
years, and I would like to paint her for you.”

“I would like that,” he rasped, and did not recognize his own voice. He pushed himself up to sit against the bedstead. He felt drunk. He felt sparkling. He felt as if a ghost had punched him in the head and gone right through him, so while there was no pain, he was reeling. Eva walked to the wall.

“Angus will not mind that I brought these little paints with me,” she murmured, “but it is mostly with charcoal from the brazier.”

Then, across the whole of the chamber wall, while she told him about his mother and the small things they’d shared during the years Eva had lived there, and how the countess had pined for Jamie on the ramparts each evening, willing her son to come home, believing when no one else did that he was yet alive, while Eva did all these heartrending things, she painted his mother across the wall of the room with her fingers and hands, until they were black and red and blue. For him.

When she was done, she stepped back and turned to face him, smiling, her arm flung out, gesturing to the wall, as if he had not been watching every motion of her generous, dancing body for the last half hour. He felt as if the freshest breeze were blowing. The moonlight spilled over his bare feet, sliding down his shins, and he sat, stunned.

“Is this her, Jamie?”

He felt as if he’d run up a mountainside. He felt as if he’d tumbled down a crevasse. He felt as if he
were
a mountain, pushed up out of the hard-rock past that was his life.

“That is her,” he rasped, pushing to his feet.

The power washed back into his stunned limbs. The room felt smaller, he felt taller. He was the mountain. He took three steps to reach Eva’s side and pulled her to him. He lowered his mouth over hers and paused just above her lips. She brought her painted hands down and rested them on his shoulders.

“For twenty years, I have been a man of one deed, Eva. But you are my mission now. You are wind and water and air, and you—”

He stopped short. There was no end to that sentence; it might go on for years, all the things Eva was, so he simply stopped talking and kissed her.

They stood in the moonlight, their arms resting on each other’s hips, and softly, slowly, kissed each other for a long time.

“So you will not tie me to a tree and leave me for dead?” she murmured as he began to move his attention down her neck. She put her hands on his shoulders, trying to pull him up.

He resisted, but he did pause and throw her a glance. “I did not tie you to a tree.”

“No, that is so. And yet, is it chivalrous of you to mark the distinction?”

He moved down her neck, every so often scraping the edge of his teeth against her hot skin, until he felt her body begin to press into him. “I will not leave you for dead,” he said, his words muffled by her neck.

“But will you,” Eva gasped as he nipped her earlobe, harder than she’d expected, “tie me up?”

He lifted his head from his ministrations. “Would you like me to?”

And, oh, as Jamie was naught but dangerous by any
measure, the danger of
this
notion, with his darkened blue eyes on her, his callused palms cupping her naked chest, was almost dizzying.

He leaned close to her ear. “Shall I, Eva?” Even as his voice, soft and gentle in its rough-edged rumble, coaxed her to relax, his hand made a wonderful, snapping tension sizzle through her blood. He skimmed his hand up the side of her ribs, up to her arm. Then he grasped it loosely but indefinably trapped it behind her back.

“Shall I do that, Eva?” he said, keeping up his quiet, sensual demands that were making her dizzy. “I am yours. I will do as you wish.”

Fire exploded in her body, already arched up to his. His fingers closed around her other wrist and he pressed them together.

“You see?” she gasped, as his eyes darkened even further. “I knew, in the end, you would be chivalrous with me.”

“This isn’t the end, Eva,” he growled. “And I am not chivalrous. Stand against the wall.”

Her mouth rounded, half between a gasp and a smile. “The wall? Why?”

He looked at her. “So you do not fall over when I make you come.”

Her jaw dropped entirely as he cupped the nape of her neck and, holding her, walked her backward. When she hit the wall, he reached over to the bed and plucked up the ribbons that had been discarded, tangled amid their lovemaking.

“Turn around.”

“Jamie,” she whispered, cautionary.

Hands on her shoulders, he turned her to face the wall, then, in silence, raked his fingers through her hair, from her skull to the ends in his hand. Eva’s head tipped back into the shockingly gentle caress. Slowly, inexpertly, he braided her hair with the
wine-red ribbons. Each tug of his fingers sent shivering cascades of chill down her scalp and back. Her whole body trembled, as if she’d been caught in a rainfall.

“Look at me,” he ordered in a low voice, and when she turned again, he bent to kiss her, first her mouth, then her neck; then he dropped to his knees before her, his mouth sliding down her body, kissing as he went.

The air rushed out of her lungs. “Jamie!” she cried.

Although it was the first evidence of true
exclamation
that he’d heard since he’d known her—he must try this activity more often—Jamie chose to ignore her. Or rather, overwhelm her. He began by affecting nonchalance. And great ignorance.

“What?” he murmured, testing the span of her ribs with his hands.

“What are you doing down there?” she asked worriedly.

He slid his palms up, resting his thumbs beneath the curve of her breasts. “I dropped something.”

She laughed. It was an ineffable sensation, her body vibrating from enjoyment
he
had given her. To the extent it was in his power, he would give her everything her heart desired, except that she desired nothing but peace and leeks and a little cottage by a river. So he would give her those things. And this. He slid his mouth lower. As often as she wished. Should she evidence a desire for horses or castles or cabbage, he would see to those things as well.

He ran his mouth across her belly like he was measuring the space of a room, from one side to the other, marking her with slow, tender kisses. It was painful, holding himself to such gentle measures when she was making unsteady little sounds of desire, when her hips occasionally arched out from the wall, pushing against his collarbone in unbridled little thrusts.