Defiant (5 page)

His kiss never wandered, his devotion to her lips never faded, he simply swept up her hand and pressed it to his chest, spreading her fingers out with this thumb. She was the one who started to slide it down his chest, the one whose head started spinning, the one who, suddenly and for no earthly reason, felt like crying. Felt like crawling inside this kiss.

One hand slid a bold route south to her waist, pushing under her cloak, leather glove tugging on the worn fabric of her tunic, pulling it tight against her breasts. Hot, competent masculine hand, now making her reconsider this reckless approach to taverns and men with sunlight kisses.

Then, without warning, his hands fell away. That was all. He simply removed his hands and stopped touching her.

Eva felt as if she’d been flung backward.

She tugged on the bodice of her tunic. The laces felt highly constraining. The sleeves were far too tight—who had hemmed them? Oh, yes. She had. The collar strangulated. The thread, old and worn, scraped like teeth against her wrists.

So much for alehouses and kisses. She was done with them.

Jamie’s rock-hard body shifted beside her. “They have left.”

“I know that,” she managed to say in a choked murmur. She’d known nothing of the sort.

The broad shoulders she’d clasped so . . . so . . .
wantonly,
dipped forward as he got to his feet for a second time.

“You will stay here,” he said grimly, his voice back to gravelly,
his eyes back to hard, as if they hadn’t shared . . . anything. “I will go see how things stand.”

“And if I do not wish to ‘stay,’ like the dog you have left behind?” she inquired coldly.

He considered her with equal coldness. “Do you wish to have me tie you up like one?”

She gasped. “You would not.”

He leaned in and sent his dangerous, arousing breath by her ear. “Do not tempt me to prove all the awful things I can do, Eva. Chivalry died in my heart a long time ago. Do not try me.”

He straightened and strode to the door. He swung it open, creaking thing that it was, and considered the street like a man used to surveying deserted streets. He did not look at all like a man who admired churchmen’s work.

He glanced back. “I shall return.”

B
UT
he didn’t. Because he couldn’t.

He headed for the quay, his fury honed to a cold, biting edge. Eva’s kiss had stopped him as effectively as a board to the skull: he’d simply gone down.

Worst of all, he’d known it. Somewhere inside, he’d known he was going down. Chosen her kiss over his quarry.

His fury dropped a few more degrees, into the realm of icebergs. Grimly he yanked his mind back to the matter at hand: Peter of London.

Retrieve the priest. Then ride away from the woman with gray eyes and stories of red, hot vineyards. Away from reckless, panting kisses that made him, for the first time in his life, choose to forget his mission.

E
VA
watched the draped, drunken Englishmen absently. Getting Father Peter out of London was supposed to have been a simple thing, a matter of the heart and a few blessed moments. Instead,
she was balled up in waiting, colluding with a dangerous man. An absent man. She sat up straight. Absent for too long.

He wasn’t coming back.

She slowed her suddenly quickened breath. “There is no time for panic,” she murmured, but already her mind wanted to spin away like a top, into all the awful repercussions of failure. One needed thinking at such hours, not the panic of spinning tops. She opened her mouth and took a breath. It dried her lips. Think.
Think.

At her last sight of the squint-eyed men, when Jamie had refused to pop out their eyes, they been speaking with two other men, both having the weathered, suspicious, capable look of seamen.

One was gone, but the other still stood there, tipping a tankard to his mouth. Upon closer inspection of his bearing and the manner in which others treated him, Eva realized he must be a captain. The squints had been purchasing passage from him.

Of course.

How could they risk dragging an insentient priest through the gates, past porters and armed soldiers? Much better to head for the quay, where the only people watching were people whose eyesight could go blind for the right amount of coin.

They were headed for the docks.

Jamie must have known.

Holding her body stiffly, her chin tilted just so, she rose and walked across the room toward the counter, fumbling for the purse under her cape, for her knife in case of need, for a reason to explain why her eyes were burning.

Fury. That was it. Sheer fury, that Jamie would think he could outfox her.

He did not know her well at all.

J
amie stood in yet another alley, midpoint between the tavern and the top of the hill that led down to the waterfront, shifting his gaze between the door of the tavern and the docks. Hard darts of rain slanted down, shoving stinging prickles into collars and loose boots. A dull, chilled breeze lurched up from the river through the city streets.

The docks were coming alive; the ebb tide was nigh. Men were climbing aboard little boats. Ropes flew from ship to shore, men shouted, dogs barked, cats stalked. It might be midday on a Saturday down at the quay.

And halfway down the line, amid the scramble of sailors, soaking wet in the rain, were the five squint-eyes.

I am using the waif’s terms,
he thought dimly.

Two of them supported the priest between them so he looked like a drunken companion. The other three stood in a protective semicircle, dressed in thick capes that were dark with rain.

All five, plus a deckhand.

Jamie yanked his hood up and looked back to the tavern impatiently, blinking through the rain. Where the hell was the accursed captain?

Why, there he was, walking out of the tavern right now. With
the gray-eyed waif at his side. He felt an oddly commingled urge: to grin in admiration and to throttle her slim, wet neck.

The captain put out a weather-roughened, almost protective hand, directing her through the door, then kicked it shut behind them. It squealed and slammed with a hollow, damp thud. Eva’s pale face was tilted up as she spoke in low tones and passed him a small, bulky pouch of what looked like coin. Jamie’s coin.

He drew a long breath, calming himself. Impatience had never been his weakness. It would not become so now. He was accustomed to switchbacks on a route. His entire life had been about readjusting course. Eva was an unexpected curve, a steeper climb, nothing more. He would simply crush her on the way by.

“. . . as your daughter.” She was murmuring some plan or instruction to the captain.

“That’ll only get you so far,
bairn,
” he replied in a gruff voice, gray bushy eyebrows furrowed over hard eyes that were scanning the streets ahead. “You’ll be needing more of a plan than that. Especially if there’s a rogue knight out here like you’re saying—”

Jamie stepped out of the alley, directly in front of them, sword out.

“What a coincidence,” he said, looking at Eva. “I was just thinking of you too.”

Eva gasped and looked at the captain, but he was wisely keeping his gaze on Jamie. Or rather, Jamie’s sword.

“I realize now I ought ne’er have left you with all that coin,” Jamie went on in a scolding, affectionate tone. “What have you spent it on?”

“Jamie.” The rain spit down on Eva’s shocked face, making her pale cheeks gleam.

The grizzled seaman looked between them.

“My wife,” Jamie explained kindly, then indicated the pouch
of money with the tip of his sword. The captain thrust it out on his upturned palm, presenting it like a platter of food, muttering out of the side of his mouth, “You made no mention of a husband.”

“That is because he is a very
bad
husband,” Eva snapped. Her hood, tugged up for the rain, revealed a white face, her dark brows running in a stern line above her angry eyes. “And that is not his money. His money is down here.” She touched her belt.

The captain glanced down briefly before putting his gaze squarely back on the tip of Jamie’s sword.

Jamie smiled. “I rarely give her the coin. She spends it so recklessly. Bolts of fabric, spices, ship captains.” He nodded to the pouch still squatting damply on the man’s flattened palm. “I am happy to allow you that, sir, and a good deal more, if you aid me but a piece. ’Twill take but a moment of your time.”

The captain brought the sack of coins back to his chest.

Eva seemed to regard this as a discouraging development. She took a small, evasive step to the side, and Jamie snapped his hand out and closed it around her neck before she could put her foot back down. He kept looking at the captain, but he felt Eva swallow under his thumb.

The captain looked at Eva—or rather, at Jamie’s hand around her throat—and cleared his own. “What were ye needing, sir?”

“Those men are abducting a priest.”

“That’s what the lass said.”

“Did she? I wish to stop them.”

“So does she.”

Jamie smiled. “Then our interests are aligned.”

“What do ye need me to do?”

A sudden shout at the end of the road made them all turn. There, at the top of the hill, stood three of the kidnappers, looking wet and angry. “God’s bones, Cap’n, the tide’s ripping out. What the ’ell is holding you—”

They stopped short at the sight of their captain with a pouch of money in his hand and Jamie blocking his way, a sword in one hand, Eva’s throat in the other.

For a moment, they gaped.

It was the sort of long, stationary moment that allowed shock to translate into action. Jamie was fairly certain what the action would be. Four against one, if he put the captain in the squint-eyes’ camp. He felt Eva swallow again. Make that five against one.

“Jamie,” she whispered.

His mind was hurtling through options.

“I can help,” she breathed.

He loosed his fingers and pushed her backward into the alley, then stepped in behind her. The men thundered down the road. The captain ducked in after them, backed up to the wall on the far side. Jamie bent his elbows out, holding his sword hilt before his chest in both hands, the blade trembling so close it almost touched his nose, ready to be swung up and to the side, the backswing to a mortal blow. He put his spine against the wall.

“There were three of them,” she whispered.

“I noted that.”

His heart hammered, his hands opened and closed around the hilt, minute readjustments to perfect his hold, every sinew in his body screaming for release. Fight, maim, slice, destroy. It was what he was built to do.

He kept his gaze on the empty corner. “How are you with that little blade of yours, Eva?”

“Sticking, beyond middling,” she said promptly. “But I made a promise not to kill anyone today.”

He absorbed this in silence. The sound of running boots came closer.

“A most solemn vow,” she assured him.

“Eva, you should have something else exceedingly helpful planned, or you should run.
Now.
”

The bootsteps reached the alley. Eva crouched low as the first man rounded the corner, sword out. Jamie pushed off the wall and Eva . . . launched herself forward.

Curled in tight, she crashed into the first man’s knees like a boulder. He was bowled backward and smashed into the soldier close on his heels. It knocked the two of them to the ground in a sprawling, boot-kicking mess. Jamie leapt into the fray.

It was a silent, swift fight. With deft swipes, he sliced through the chest armor of the third man as he rounded the corner and tripped over his fallen companions. Spinning, Jamie kicked him in the head just as he was clambering back to his feet. This time he went down like a rock and stayed there.

Eva fought like a mad thing, kicking her hard-soled shoes and scraping her nails and hands past hair and ears and the gripping reach of men, until she found one man’s neck and pinched, just so, closing off something important. He slumped to the side, unconscious.

With similar, if more violent, efficiency, Jamie took down the last one and, before the soldier’s eyes had fully rolled back in his head, was dragging the load of iron, leather, and stunned flesh over the muddy, hay-strewn cobbles, back into the alley, out of sight.

The captain stood in a forward crouch, his long dagger out but unused. He looked at the bodies strewn about, swords scattered, Eva lying entangled with the unconscious men. Jamie reached into the mess for her hand.

The captain looked at him. “Been married long?”

“Newly wed,” Jamie replied curtly as he yanked Eva free. “There is a great deal more coin in this for you, Captain, if you but delay the launch until I come down.”

“Agreed,” he said firmly. “But if these ones awaken”—he
gestured to the downed men—“and come pelting down that hill after you, a delay will not assist you. Nor me.”

“They will not be a problem,” Jamie assured him.

The captain walked off, while Jamie dragged the other two back beside the first one. Eva followed, and they stood side by side, staring down.

“You knocked him clean out,” Jamie observed between breaths.

She nodded, breathing heavily, and brushed a lick of dark hair pasted across her cheek away with the back of her wrist. “I have this effect on many men. They see me and go completely without sense.”

He dropped to a knee and began searching the soldiers’ bodies, searching for any clue of who they might be, of who else was hunting for the priest.

“Why did you not run?” he asked as he rooted through their pockets and pouches.

“Why did you not strangle me?”

He shook his head. “I suppose, deep inside, I suspected you might curl yourself up like an iron cat, roll into their ankles, and knock them down like ninepins.”