Defiant (36 page)

When what he wished to do was spin her around, bend her
over, plant her palms on the wall, and thrust inside her so hard she’d throw back her head and howl.

But she might misunderstand the generosity of the gesture. So instead, on his knees, he kissed her slowly and wetly, with only the lightest, sweetest nips. She possibly didn’t even notice his hand slipping up her inner thigh. The curls at the ends of her long hair and the silken shreds at the ends of the ribbons tickled his ears and nose. He pushed them out of the way.

His reward came a moment later, when her fingers fluttered down to rest lightly on the top of his head.

He slid more boldly up her thigh and pushed against her knee with his forearm, nudging it to the side. “Now, Eva,” he murmured, “do not make this difficult.”

Her fingers tensed in his hair. “Make what difficult?”

He bent to the dark curls and touched his tongue to the heated juncture below. Her hips whipped out from the wall on a shocked gasp, which only served to bring them closer together, so that his hands cupped her buttocks, his mouth pressed tightly to her hot, scented wetness.

“This,” he answered thickly, and flicked his tongue up, hard on the slicked crest of her.

Her fingers clenched in his hair and her head dropped back against the wall on a long, low moan. No, she would not make this difficult.

With one hand, he exerted a small pressure on her leg, urging her to lift it. She did, bending her knee, and he draped it over his shoulder. This made her womanhood his entire world, the focus of his devotion, and he let her know it. He spread her apart with his thumb and licked her senseless. Her hips moved with reckless little pushes that forced his tongue and teeth against her harder. His head spun, his cock pounded, and his breath came as ragged and shallow as hers as he delved into her with his tongue, then slid back up to the swirling nub and
sucked it into his mouth swiftly. She gave a strangled cry. He sucked again, teasing her, sliding his fingers around her slippery entrance, but not pushing in.

“Please, Jamie,” she whispered.

He savagely pushed one up inside her. She gave a low, sobbing cry.

“Please what, Eva?”

Her knees were weakening, he felt it. She tilted her face down, making her hair fall in a dark curtain around him. “Please, find what you were looking for.”

He gave a low laugh and knew, in that moment, the world meant nothing. All that mattered was right here, assuring Eva she’d done the right thing by giving herself over to him. Eva, his love. “I’ve found it.”

Tongue, thumb, fingers, lips, he focused everything on her, glorying in her response as she exploded into a passionate, unbridled orgasm stretched between him and the wall, until her legs gave out entirely and she slowly, gracefully, collapsed to the floor.

“You fell even though the wall was there,” he murmured, catching her.

“I am a weak woman. Floors are not for . . . this,” she whispered, just barely, in his ear. Her arms were weakly draped around his shoulders.

“Floors are for anything I need them for.” But notwithstanding such talk, he lifted her in his arms and dropped her onto the bed.

They did not sleep for a long time. They talked, languidly, in the rhythm of sated lovers: words, then silence, then more words, as they watched the moon unfurl its full light. They spoke of animals they might keep and the best angles for roofs and where Roger might wish to stay when he found a woman of his own. Neither of them pointed out that, of
course, Roger would be staying in England now. He was the d’Endshire heir.

Neither spoke of Jamie’s being Everoot’s heir.

Nor did they speak of Father Peter or King John or anything farther off than the walls of this room and their hopes.

For the first time in her life, Eva felt safe. She was embracing this night of brightness, of Jamie and all his dark goodness. There was only one blemish on it all, and no matter how she turned her back or looked the other way, still it lay there, a shadow on her sun.

Jamie thought her an orphan. But she was not. One must have dead parents to be an orphan. Hers were not dead.

It was much worse than that.

“S
OMETHING
is wrong,” the king muttered.

Brian de Lisle, his chief commander and right arm to Jamie’s left, looked up from the papers he’d been delivering. He’d been headed to Windsor when an outrider had found him and detoured him here to this small, wooded encampment, a day’s ride from Everoot. He had been quite surprised to learn the king was in the North, heading for Everoot in secret and in haste.

But then, John was known for his energetic and abrupt itinerations. And his paranoia. And his inability to tolerate even the smallest dissension amid his noble ranks.

Which is, of course, why he had so much dissension amid his noble ranks.

“My lord?” Brian said, laying down the papers. The king did not so much as glance at them. The wardrobe official did, but he quickly sat back again when John rose from his seat.

“Something has happened. Something is amiss.” The king swung about, the hem of his robes rising, then settled back as he fixed his gaze on Brian.

He raised his eyebrows. “My lord?”

“Everoot and d’Endshire have been empty too long. They have plagued me too long.”

There was nothing new here.

“I am going to ensure, once and for all, that they cease to be an albatross.”

“How, my lord?”

John pulled the papers to him, glanced at them idly, then looked up. “I shall grant them. To the highest bidder.”

Sell them, Brian thought, impressed. The king was going to sell the estates of the missing heirs.

“Everoot has been a thorn in my side for far too long. It is a curse, which is why I have ne’er tried to fill it,” the king snapped. But Brian knew a better reason to explain John’s reluctance to fill the Everoot earldom, even after the decades-long absence of the heir: fear.

If the powerful Everoot heir was out there somewhere, lurking... well, in short, the king was afraid.

Additionally, of course, for the king to seize yet another estate from another noble family would only hammer another nail into his political coffin. But in the end, John had not filled Everoot because of fear, fear the heir was out there, lurking. Fear of what he would do when he discovered the king had taken his birthright.

Perhaps retrieve those fabled treasures in the vaults and bring John’s kingdom crumbling down?

“How much loyalty do you think Everoot could buy me, de Lisle?”

“A great deal, my lord,” he said slowly.

The richest honor in the realm, the earldom of Everoot. The powerful barony of d’Endshire all along its eastern borders. How often did such glittering riches come up on the auction block?

Once in a lifetime.

God’s bones, de Lisle might just bid on it himself.

The king gave a clipped nod. “Deliver the news to these few select men.” He rattled off a few names. “Keep it secret; no one else shall know until the deal is struck. Then they all shall find out together: the rebels, Langton, the French king. The country shall fall, shire by shire, and there will be no need for any charter a’tall.”

T
hey stood in the stables early the next morning, checking weapons and speaking in low murmurs by the light of torches that burned against the foggy air with a ruddy glow.

“There should be a back entryway to the vintners’ hall,” Jamie said in a hushed voice as he rechecked the buckle of his sword belt. Roger handed him another small, thin blade. He bent and tucked it in his boot. “It may be guarded, but you can manage that, can you not? You and Roger?”

Roger snapped a nod. “Aye, sir.”

Ry looked equally grim and far less enthused. “Aye.”

Jamie paused in sliding a dagger back into its sheath on his leg and tipped his head up. Dark hair fell forward to his jaw. Eva resisted the urge to push it back. She was always resisting hair-pushing urges for the men she loved. Instead, she listened to him address Ry’s unspoken but loud concern.

“Have you something to say, Ry?”

Ry’s regard was close and level. “You need to have a better plan than ‘I go in and come out with the priest.’”

Jamie paused. “It sounds like a goodly one to me.”

“Aye,” Roger whispered.

Ry and Eva exchanged glances of the long-suffering sort. “I
believe Ry speaks to the ‘how,’” Eva explained kindly, to ease their way through this complicated idea.

Jamie shoved his last blade in and Roger turned to her. They both shoved hair behind their ears. She sighed quietly.

“I shall go in however needs must, Ry, but only if it comes to it will I draw a sword. We’ll be in and out before they can gather their wits.”

“That takes care of coming
out
the door, Jamie,” Ry pointed out. “First you must get in.”

“How about if I break down the door?”

“And then? When they all jump you and grab you?”

“You’ll come crashing in?” Jamie said hopefully, but with a hardness to his voice. Eva saw an equally hard look on Ry’s face, perhaps because, in this, he realized Jamie might at last accomplish his purpose of discovering the danger that was too much. Ry did not know Jamie had made her a promise to no longer do such things.

“I can only do so much,” Ry insisted.

“It will have to be enough. I have nothing more.”

“You have me,” Roger said into the tension. Jamie and Ry turned. Roger looked pale, but he repeated himself. “You’ll have my arm.”

Jamie clapped him on the arm and nodded.

“And as for me,” Eva chimed in.

They all turned and looked at her.

“You,” Jamie said coldly, “will wait here with the horses. Right here.” He pointed at a particular spot. Eva moved an inch to the left to occupy it. He was not amused.

“Precisely. Right there.”

The curt order belied the emotion she now knew underlay it. His face was set in hardness, his jaw tight, his eyes shadowed by dim torchlight and banked emotion. He needed focus and single-mindedness now, not worry or strong
emotions. As she had no intention of doing anything
but
waiting here with the horses, very docilely, she gave a tranquil nod.

“This will make the horses happy. They like me. Yours especially. I am fairly certain he likes me more than you.”

His gaze stayed on her a moment more, then the men went back to finalizing their plans, which seemed to consist of “I hit... then you slash... and we run...”

Suddenly Angus poked his head in from where he’d been keeping watch out front. “Sun’s rising,” was all he said.

Jamie turned and, without any explanation to Ry or Roger, although surely they did not need one, took her by the waist, lifted her up on her toes, and delivered a single swift, hard kiss, which made her heart hammer. He set her down and turned away without a word.

The three of them strode off into the misty predawn to see the slave trader Mouldin and ransom back the priest.

T
HEY
strode through the wakening world. The gates were open, and early fairgoers and traveling merchants and the entertainment—tumblers, tricksters, the men who ran the dogfights—flowed into the town and spread out through the streets inside.

The old vintners’ guild hall occupied a corner lot and was abutted on either side by shops. Across the way was a tavern. But inside, it would be deserted.

Smart choice. Enough people passing by just outside to keep people in line, but still deserted, with sufficient shadowy corners and upper balconies to make the others worry on where Mouldin had placed all his men.

Jamie, of course, knew precisely where they were: where he and Ry had left them after dragging them into the woods five days ago.

Some people were around, early shoppers. Roger and Ry and Angus went up the back alley and Jamie strode boldly up to the door. As anticipated, no one even approached.

He paused, closed his eyes to help quicken their adjustment to the darkness he knew he would find inside, and flexed his hand around his sword hilt. How many times had he stood thusly, about to go in and report to fitzWalter, his old mentor and trainer in assassination? To the king? Always to men he had no respect for but was nonetheless bound to?

No longer, though.

He was done with it. He’d told Eva true. He wanted very much to see her cottage, to repair her roof, revel in her body, make her feel safe. He would take Eva, and everything else could go to hell.

He unslung his sword. Keeping his eyes shut, he kicked the door open and leapt to the side, out of the doorway, out of the light. A sigh of coldness extruded from the cavernous interior as if it had substance. It smelled of old wood and cobwebs.

He opened his eyes.

A moment passed in silence, then a voice said quietly, “Enter.”

Two torches were burning, illuminating a few other figures in shadowy blotches. Sunlight leaked weakly in through the line of shuttered windows on the upper floors.

He heard someone shift.

“God’s teeth,” the person hissed. FitzWalter. Good, he was here. “You always were one for sneaking up, Lost.”

“Aye. You trained us well.”

Silence for a moment. Jamie’s eyes searched the interior. There was fitzWalter, standing in a wash of pale light. He was smiling faintly.

“Ah, yes. I heard you saw Chance.”

“It was fleeting.”

Another small grin lifted Baynard’s glossy beard. “She was hog-tied and had a rag stuffed in her mouth, her hands this close to being broken.”

“What I meant was, it did not take long.”

Baynard gave a bark of coarse laughter.

“Jamie Lost.”

Mouldin’s gravelly voice was recognizable anywhere, even to Jamie, who’d only heard it once, on the streets of London. Jamie turned toward it.

“I am honored,” Mouldin said. “In a hundred years, I never expected you to show up here. But I am pleased to have two such esteemed emissaries from King John.” Mouldin turned and indicated the other shadowy figure in the room, standing against the far wall. Cig. Damn. “How sad for you all that you cannot kill me.”