Chapter Nine #2
Talon’s head pounded and his neck
seized every time he turned his head. He had no stomach for his
supper, which had Berta flapping over him like a wet hen. She tsked
at his half-eaten bowl of stew and said something in Anglbert’s ear
that caused the graybeard to pull on it as he peered at Talon.
Phillipe spoke into Anglbert’s other ear, the two of them grinning
and whispering and chuckling until Talon pushed his bowl aside and
stood.
“Madam.” He ignored the
braying asses across the table. “I’m retiring to my chamber. Have
the maidservants fill my tub, hot as a man can stand it, and leave
a pot of steaming water on the table.”
“Of course, Captain.” She
bobbed her head. “I’ll see to it at once.”
“Good.” He glared at his
so-called friends. “Then you can talk of me all you want.”
And maybe my lidi
will come out of hiding. He glanced over at the kitchen door, through which Lara
hadn’t walked once this evening, though it was part of her duties
to help serve supper. He considered that he was her master and
could have commanded her to do so, then he touched his hand to his
aching head. He’d bled enough today.
The maidservants filled the tub,
eyeing him and giggling every time they walked past with their
buckets of steaming water as he sat at the table, letting his tea
brew. Once they were gone, he drank one full cup of a brew that was
bitter at first taste and then sweet by the first swallow, the
easing warmth sliding down his throat and into his belly and
leaving a minty taste on his tongue. Drink by drink, swallow by
swallow, the knots in his gut and neck began to loosen. He sat back
and closed his eyes to a pair of big, hazel cat eyes fringed with
thick, dark lashes smiling at him.
“Damned.” He straightened,
poured his second cup of tea, and downed it as quickly as possible
without burning his tongue or throat. Then he stood and stripped
and stepped into the tub, lowering his tight, aching body into the
welcoming heat of the water. “Cursed and damned.”
Grabbing a drying cloth, he rolled it
up and set it on the tub’s edge and laid the back of his head on
it. He closed his eyes and tried to relax and enjoy the enveloping
heat, but still those smiling cat eyes danced around his mind along
with the constant question of how much Lara had heard of his
conversation with Sophie, and how much she’d understood. He soaked
and mooned a while longer, but still had no answers, so he sat up
and then slowly peeled the bandage from his head and dunked under
the hot water, wincing as his cut stung. He soaped, rinsed, and
soaked until the worst of the soreness had left his back and
shoulders and his head had stopped pounding and merely ached, then
he stood and dried himself and put on a clean under tunic and pair
of linen breeches. He was sitting at the table, wondering whether
to drink a third cup of the tea Sophie had told him to only drink
two of, when a soft knock came on the door.
“Enter.”
Lara carried a kettle in one hand and
a basket in the other. She set the basket full of clean linen
bandages down on the table, then poured steaming water from the
kettle into the washbasin before setting it down on the table. She
pulled a chair out and sat on it so she was almost knee to knee
with Talon, eyeing the cut above his brow while Talon studied her,
the arch of her brows, the high cut of her cheekbones, the fineness
of her pores, and the fullness of her lips. Sophie’s tea must have
been working, because he was content to sit and stare, to watch her
strangely shy smile and concerned gaze as she dipped a cloth in the
washbasin, wrung it out, folded it up, and gently pressed it to his
wound.
“How does your head feel?”
she asked.
“Like the Black sat on
it.”
“He just about did.” She
gave a quick grin, making Talon think he should have drunk that
third cup after all.
She removed the wet compress, then
gently probed the area around his cut with her fingertip, her
tantalizing fragrance of rose soap and earthy woman teasing his
senses. She lowered her hand, and Talon sucked in a breath of
cleansing air as she left the table to rummage through her bag and
pull a tub out. She returned to the table with the tub of liniment
she’d smeared on his cut in the stables and opened it.
“Willem told me you and
Patience have been friends since you were very young.” He tried to
distract himself from her nearness.
“Aye.” She smeared a
fingerful of ointment over his wound. “Since the day we met at one
year of age.”
“She’s Berta’s
daughter?”
“She is.”
“Can she cook as well as
her mother?”
“Nobody cooks as well as
Berta.” Lara wiped her hand on the washrag. “But Patience is a good
cook, when she gets good food to cook.”
“When doesn’t she?” he
asked as she closed the tub. “The valley is rich in field and the
woods in game, and Willem is a skilled leatherworker.”
“Aye, he is, when he can
get good work.”
Talon didn’t understand. The valley
was full of people, from field workers to farmers to tradesmen, all
of whom would need the talents of a leatherworker at one point or
another. “When can’t he?”
“Whenever it’s the count’s
work,” she said, arranging the bandages in the basket. “He refuses
to become the count’s man, so Nithard won’t send work Willem’s way.
Nor will others who are afraid of the count or covet his trade. So,
Willem and Patience keep their free status and their bit of land,
and Patience drinks mead and eats squirrel and chicken when she
needs red wine, beef, and venison.”
“There are difficulties
with her pregnancy?”
Lara shrugged. “Maybe. I’m not really
sure. It’s only…” She held his gaze and measured it, and he must
have been the right distance. “I feel anxious about this
pregnancy.”
“What does Sophie
say?”
“That everything’s
fine.”
Talon laid his hand over Lara’s on the
table, and she didn’t pull away. “Yet you’re still
worried.”
Her eyes grew mossy green, and she
dropped her gaze to their hands and nodded.
“Well, I’m not,” he said,
and she lifted her gaze. “Do you know why?” She shook her head.
“Because she has the best of healers watching over her.”
Lara slipped her hand out from under
his and stood. “Is that a compliment, Captain?”
Talon glanced from her hand at her
side to her teasing smile, wondering what his name would sound like
on her lips. Wondering if things would be different between them
had they met under other circumstances. But they hadn’t, and things
were how they were. “Aye.” He answered her with a purposely cocky
grin. “A compliment truly meant from an arrogant ass with meager
charms.”
“I see I pricked your
pride that day as well as your hand.” She gave the faintest twitch
of her full, lush lips.
Talon clutched his hand over his
heart. “Some wounds go deeper than others,” he said so mournfully
that Lara laughed out loud, soft, sweet, and melodious. He reached
for her hand, and she skittered away, pulling a bandage from the
basket. She stood behind him and started to wrap the bandage around
his head. Talon closed his eyes and gave himself up to her gentle
but firm touch, her smell, the rhythmic sound of her breathing.
Then she stopped and he felt the void as she stepped back from him.
He opened his eyes. She was standing in front of him, arms akimbo,
surveying her work. Talon reached his hand up and tested the
bandage. “You would be a good healer on a battlefield.”
“While I thank you for the
compliment, Captain,” she said as she gathered the used washrag and
bandages up, “I have no interest in going to war.”
“It was never my intention
either.”
“Then why did you become a
soldier?”
“Why?” He stretched his
arms up and back, wincing a little as his shoulders strained and
his neck pulled. Still, he wouldn’t have left his seat for gold as
Lara sat back down across from him. “Why was more
how.”
“How, then?” she pressed,
and Talon chuckled.
“Sophie isn’t the only one
to ferret out information in your house, I see.”
She gave him a saucy grin that made
him grit his teeth to stop from groaning. “It’s we west-end women.
It’s said a man can’t keep a secret from us.”
“Is that because you’re
all witches? Or because you all listen at cellar doors to private
conversations?”
Her eyes widened and her cheeks
flushed, then she lengthened her spine. “How is that any different
from listening to conversations in a language you feigned ignorance
of?”
“Other than being in plain
sight?” Talon said, and her chin lifted. “Nothing,” he admitted.
She dipped her chin to him, and they sat silent for a long, uneasy
moment, though he could see she clearly had something more to say.
“What is it?” She pressed her lips together and shook her head.
“Whatever it is, Lara, just say it.”
Hazel eyes held his, as hesitant as he
had never seen them. “Who, ah, who is the wildcat that has cursed
and damned you?”
Talon didn’t speak. He couldn’t.
Neither his mind nor his mouth could form a single coherent
response.
“I, ah, I heard you
mention her,” she added, “when you were speaking with Sophie
today.”
Talon’s first impulse was to tell her.
Tell her it was the vision of her standing in the river that had
cursed him on sight, his oath outside of his tent that had damned
him to protect her not only from Nithard and Ranulf but from
himself, from the fate that Sophie had warned him of. For Sophie
was right. He was a soldier in the king’s army. He would leave
here, he would leave her, sooner more likely than later. He had no
intention of leaving her with his bastard in her belly. “Then it’s
Sophie you should ask,” he said at last. “Or any other west end
woman, for I will not tell you, and you cannot witch it out of
me.”
***
Lara
The captain pushed himself up from his
chair, gimped over to the bed with a cricked neck and crooked
spine, and lay down flat on his back with a stifled groan. Lara set
the used water basin and rags outside the chamber door and then
wandered around, picking up and refolding clothes already folded
and stacked on the captain’s chest. She set another log to the
hearth fire, though it was plenty big and warm enough, and moved