Chapter Nineteen
Idyll
Talon
The cure to his curse, Talon
discovered, wasn’t to tame the wildcat, but simply to take her as
she was: wild and thorny and imperfectly perfect. A thing he found
as easy as breathing in the quiet peace of the Hollow. As for the
rest of the world, they’d deal with it when they returned to
Oloron. For now, Talon was happy to be with Lara in their own
little Eden that was the Hollow, a place he was exploring and
learning more about each day while walking about with the help of a
chestnut walking stick that had belonged to Sophie.
The cabin, Lara told him, had been
built as a hunting lodge by Count Gerhard, Nithard’s and Reginald’s
father. Neither of the brothers had been hunters, but Orlando,
captain of Reginald’s guard, had. He’d also been Sophie’s lover,
not, Lara admitted, her second husband. It was Orlando who’d first
brought Sophie to the Hollow. They’d come for a time every summer
for five summers, until Orlando died in battle and came home no
more.
It was to the Hollow that Sophie took
Lara as an infant, and where they’d stayed for the first year of
Lara’s life, from one autumn to the next. They’d spent a month here
every autumn since, as well as an odd month each summer or spring,
stocking and planting and tending the place until it was
self-renewing.
The sturdy cabin, built of good timber
to begin with, had been well maintained, making for a warm and
comfortable home. The barn, built to stable the mounts of a full
hunting party, were twice the size of the cabin, and almost as
airtight, its meadow thick with good grass. Talon had never seen
the Black so lazily content. Even Fulrad’s bay, whom Lara called
Shadow, was growing fatter and friendlier by the day.
An earthen aqueduct such as Talon had
seen in old Roman towns moved water from a year-round stream to the
orchard and the garden. There was a pond where Lara netted fish
that she cooked with wild, bitter greens that grew along the pond’s
edges, and the orchard was ripe with apple, plum, peach, and pear
trees, as well as a row of grapevines that separated the orchard
from the vegetable garden full of yellow and green squashes,
onions, garlic, and green-topped roots they’d been eating in
delicious stews.
A hedge of rosemary and lavender
bordered the garden on the other side, and vining mint and licorice
root grew along the stream from which Lara made a sweet-tasting tea
that calmed a person’s head and belly. She’d taught Wolf to leave
the covey of quail that lived in the meadow alone, guaranteeing
them a steady supply of eggs, along with the squirrel, rabbit, or
pheasant she trapped or Wolf caught.
Talon was sitting on the porch,
shelling a boiled egg after his afternoon nap, when Lara came out
of the woods beyond the meadow, carrying a basket full of something
heavy by the way she was moving, Shadow on her heels. Wolf loped
alongside them. Talon eased to his feet, intending to help her with
the basket, but she pointed a finger at him.
“Sit.”
Talon and Wolf both sat.
Lara laughed and set the basket down
at Talon’s feet. “There.” She nodded at the basket full of pieces
of ash, chestnut, and beech. “That should keep your backside down
and your hands busy.” She reached into her skirt pocket and pulled
out Talon’s carving knife. “There are thirty-two pieces of wood
here,” she said, handing him the knife. “By the time you’ve carved
them, I’ll have the top of an old table from the barn dyed like a
game board.”
“You want me to carve
pieces for a Shah game?”
She rubbed the dirt from her hands.
“It’ll give us something to do at night.”
“I can think of plenty of
things to do at night.” Talon gave her a leer that brought a rosy
pink to her cheeks. “But making a Shah game does sound intriguing.
I’ve never carved so many figures at one time.” He eyed the pieces
of wood, sizing them up in his mind. “It’ll take me two to three
days at least.”
Lara grinned, looking quite pleased
with herself. “Good.” She sauntered past him into the cabin, where
pots and pans were shuffled around.
“What’s for supper?” He
picked a long piece of blonde ash from the basket and turned it
about in his hand.
“Bee’s knees and butterfly
wings.” That was her answer when she didn’t yet know what she was
going to cook and he was already pestering her about it.
“Yum, my favorite.” He
settled back on the bench, put his knife to the ash, and made his
first cut, pleased with the color and grain. “Aye, this will do for
my white queen.”
He cut and carved and smoothed the
piece until his queen was just as he wanted her, with a mop of
short curls crowning her head and a body that flowed and curved
with the natural grain of the ash. He stood, stretched, then
hobbled into the cabin, where a bubbling cobbler sat on the kitchen
table.
“What kind?” He went over
and inhaled the delicious aroma.
“Blackberry. They grow
wild upstream.”
“Smells
delicious.”
“It’s my favorite.” She
gave a sad smile. “Sophie would bake one every year for my
birthday.”
“When is your
birthday?”
“October
thirty-first.”
“On All Hallows’
Eve?”
“Aye.”
Talon chuckled. “That explains a
lot.”
“Such as?” she said, brows
raised and arms akimbo.
“Such as how you’ve
managed to cast your spell over me, my lovely, lissome witch.” He
nibbled at her ear, and she gave him a playful slap. “And I’d have
it no other way.”
“You think me worth the
price after all?”
“I always thought you
worth the price.” He offered his scarred palm, touched the scar
above his eye, then laid his hand over his bandaged side. “And I’ve
always paid it. Have I not?” She smiled in answer, and another part
of their conversation her first day as his prisoner came to him.
“How can you be certain of your exact birth date if you were left a
swaddling babe at the abbey’s gate?”
Lara stared at him for a lengthy
moment. Then she took a deep breath, and her words came tumbling
out. “I wasn’t left at the abbey’s gates. I was born here, on the
thirty-first day of October in the year 755 with a full moon
rising. My mother died that same night and is buried in an unmarked
grave here in the Hollow.”
When he could speak again, all Talon
could say was, “Your mother?”
Lara nodded.
“Then you know who she
was? Her family name?”
“No.” Lara shook her head.
“My mother swore Sophie to a secrecy she never broke, not even to
me.”
***
Lara
Lara set the newly finished game table
next to the hearth, her fingertips stained a bluish purple from the
berries she’d used to color the dark squares. She pulled the
cabin’s two chairs over and took one as Talon pulled the game
pieces out of the basket and arranged them on the checkered board,
putting the king of blonde ash and the queen with the crown of
curls on his side, and the darker pieces on hers. She picked up a
horse head of stained beech and ran her fingers up and down the
proud arch of its neck, much as she had done her first night as
prisoner in Talon’s bedchamber at the keep only four months
ago.
She gazed at him over the crude wooden
board and pieces, so different from the glossy ivory and onyx
pieces back at the keep, and thought of how different everything
was now. She’d gone from freewoman to lidi to Hamm and back to
freewoman, from hating Captain Guiscard, her captor, to loving
Talon without really knowing when or how it happened, only that it
had. She’d lived a lifetime in the past four months, and except for
losing Sophie, she didn’t regret a thing. Especially when he
grinned at her like he was now.
“What?” she
said.
“You look like a queen who
just stole my king.”
“I, ah…” She picked up her
dark queen and ran her fingertip down the whorls of waist-length
hair that blended into her robe. “I was thinking if you ever quit
your wandering warrior ways, you’d make a good living as an
artist.”
Talon’s grin grew. “I’ve been thinking
the same thing. In fact, I had my eye on a tinker’s wagon at the
last market. Would’ve bought it too, if I hadn’t had to go after a
wildcat being chased by a pack of curs.”
“Lucky for her you did,
else it would’ve been her bones bleaching in the woods.”
He clasped her hand with the queen and
lifted it to his lips. “Lucky for me as well.” He dropped his voice
to a husky rumble. “Else who would I have to play with?”
Her entire body flushed at the tactile
memory of where his hands and mouth had been playing last night.
Then she remembered how he’d stiffened and grimaced when he’d
twisted his side during their bed play, and thought it best they
stick to playing Shah for now. She picked up a pawn and made her
first move.
“Ah.” Talon rubbed his
hands together and bent over the board. “The game
begins.”
They played for two days and nights
straight, stopping only to eat when they were hungry and to sleep
when they were tired. It was the third morning when Lara woke to
Talon roaming his touch the length of her body over her nightshift
that she knew the distraction of the board game had run its
course.
“Your wounds.”
“Are healing well, thanks
to my nursemaid.”
“But…”
He cupped her backside and pressed her
to the hard heat of him.
“You, Captain, are a
rutting rogue.”
His grin was pure male. “A rutting
rogue in dire need,” he rumbled. “A need only you can cure, my
lovely nursemaid.”
“Are you sure?” Lara
weakened…wanted. “Your bandages were only removed
yesterday.”
“Does this feel sure
enough?” He placed her hand over his full, hard erection beneath
his breechcloth.
A melting warmth spread through Lara.
“We’ll need to be very careful.”
“Ah, my beautiful, thorny,
troublesome temptress. All you need do is say yes and I’ll likely
come undone.”
His words filled her with a strange
and wonderous power. “Yes,” she murmured as she slowly straddled
his hips. “Yes,” she said, pulling her nightshift up over her head
and tossing it onto the floor. “Yes,” she growled, untying his
breechcloth. He lifted his hips as she stripped it off him, her
eyes growing wide as his unrestrained cock jumped free and kissed
her flesh. “Yes,” she purred, lowering herself over him, thrilling
at the hot, hard heat of him nestled against her belly. “Yes.” Her