Chapter 4
Head throbbing, William opened his eyes. Bright sunlight blinded him for a moment. He jerked his dagger free and shot up into a squat in one swift motion.
Linnet screamed.
He cursed and flinched.
"You are not dead," she said, her eyes wide.
"Deaf perhaps, but not yet dead." He looked around. "Where is he?"
"Gone. He mounted his horse and rode off through the woods."
William groaned with disgust and sheathed his dagger.
"Are you badly wounded?" Her voice was a worried whisper.
He sat back in the grass and rested his arms on his raised knees. Pain shot through his head. He touched the knot on the back of his head and winced, then pulled his hand away. His fingertips had smudges of red blood.
"You're bleeding!"
" 'Tis nothing." He started to stand.
She grabbed his arm, her eyes watchful and her brow furrowed as she tried to assist him.
If it wouldn't have hurt to do so, he would have laughed aloud.
He was twice her size. She could never hold him up should he pass out again.
But he rose with her, her arm around his waist and her shoulder leaning under his arm.
She laid her hand on his chest, right where his heart beat and gave him a look that was tender with concern.
His cynicism drained away as he looked down at her, and he felt something more than just his desire to have this woman.
He felt somehow bound to her by a strong sense of responsibility.
For more than just her safety. For her happiness.
He was used to taking charge of people's lives, his men-at-arms, his friend and king, those weaker and unable to fight.
Such were a knight's duties, duties he accepted with pride because he had worked so long and hard to earn his golden spurs.
But he had never been responsible for something as unfamiliar to him as a woman's heart. He frowned, and a cut on his forehead sent an annoying trickle of blood into his eye. He swiped at it.
She studied at his head, then looked in horror at his bloody hand. "Come. Give me your other hand and I'll help you to the river's edge and tend your wounds."
He let her help him, fighting the urge to smile.
Tending to him seemed to make her happy, so he went along with her, feeling strangely comfortable and staring at the strangeness of her hand threaded through his, then at the top of her head.
Every few steps she would look up as if she expected him to faint from such puny scratches.
"Not much farther" she would say, then squeeze his hand. At the river she insisted he sit, attempting to ease him onto a tuft of bright green summer grass as she clucked and fussed. His head no longer ached. In fact, he felt rather well.
She knelt and dipped a small cloth into the river, then turned and gently cleaned his cuts. Kneeling behind him, she braced one hand on his shoulder while she tended the cut on the back of his head. After a moment she said quietly, "I have never seen anyone do such as you did."
"Have you not seen a joust?"
"Only one, but that was not what I meant. I have never seen a man swing over the side of a horse as you did."
"A trick I learned from the Turks." He watched her come back around and kneel down next to him again, her interest captured.
"They would attack on horses swifter than any warhorse, their swords swinging as they charged toward you.
To survive one had to learn to ride like they did.
" He laughed at the way her eyes grew wide and wondered if he had looked so stunned the first time he'd seen those horsemen.
"They rode like madmen. ’Twas as if they drank the wind. "
She didn't respond, but seemed to be attempting to create the image in her mind. He liked that in her. She listened to him. She smiled, and he sat there, stunned by his reaction to something so simple as her smile. At that moment, had she asked, he'd have conquered the world for her.
She had busied herself by wringing out the cloth in the river. When she finished, she sat back in the grass and hugged her knees to her chest, then cocked her head. "Who was that knight?"
"I don't know." He stared at the grassy hillock where he'd first spotted the black knight. The man had taken great pains to make certain his identity was hidden. He had his suspicions that Arden had sent the knight, but he said nothing. Instead he turned back and watched the river flow.
"Why would he attack us like that?" Her voice was tentative. “Then leave?”
He glanced at her. Her face was pale, emotion and fear there for anyone to see.
She was truly frightened. He hadn't thought of her reaction.
He was used to violence and combat. But she was a young woman who had led a sheltered life, especially if Arden wished to keep her from marriage as he had said.
He shrugged, hoping she would drop the subject.
He saw she was bravely trying to cover her fear and she rocked slightly, as if her thoughts were racing so that she was unaware of her body's motions. Finally she asked, "Do you think he meant to rob us?"
In a voice filled with feigned hope, he asked, "Did he take the cats?"
She stared at him blankly, then she must have caught the amusement on his face because she began to laugh. "No," she said, shaking her head. "He took nothing."
"I must not have had good fortune on my side today."
She laughed again. "I like it when you jest with me."
"Why is that?"
She twisted some grass, then looked up again. "Because you seem less frightening, more human, I suppose."
He didn't know how to respond to that. How to say he was human, as human as the next man, with the same fears and weaknesses. He just never let anyone see them. He wanted to admit that to her, but his pride stopped him and he changed the subject. "Why do you have twenty-five cats?"
"Twenty-six," she corrected.
"Twenty-six cats . . ." He looked at the pack animals grazing in the grass near the bridge, then added, "Five rabbits and two ducks."
She rocked back, her hands still clasping her knees and the toes of her soft leather slippers pointing daintily into the lush river grass.
"Because there was no one to care for them but me.
Some were starving, others, like Ignatius, Jerome, Kentigern, and Lambert were left to die.
I was taught to believe that we are caretakers, put here to help care for all living things.
Not to abandon them. Not to starve them, drown them, or worse.
The rabbits I freed from traps. Only one of them still has four legs.
A rabbit cannot live in the forest with only one back leg. " She was silent.
"And the ducks?" he asked.
She smiled. "They followed me home."
His mind flashed with the image of her running back to the castle, her arms filled with wounded animals, ducks trailing behind her, and he saw himself, a knight watching her with a need that was stronger than anything he had ever felt before.
Some part of him wanted to have been there when she had found the animals, instead of the day he actually had seen her, the day she danced and sang to them.
But still he felt a lightness inside, a sense too profound to name whenever he thought of that first moment he'd seen her. He must have frowned, because a moment later he felt the trickle of blood from the cut on his forehead.
She moved toward him, kneeling just inches away, and she wiped the cut.
He spent a pleasurable few moments judging the size and weight of her breasts, then eyed the tender white skin of her neck. She smelled of flowers and summer— exactly as he had imagined she would smell—clean and pure and intoxicating.
She slowly ran the cloth down his cheek and he was aware of more than just her scent and her shape. He was greatly aware of the gentleness of her touch. She still cleansed his face, then ran the cloth over his jaw which was becoming more tense the closer she shifted.
In a sudden motion, he grabbed her wrist and the cloth fell from her fingers. She blinked at him, startled. He realized his grip was too hard and slackened it, then gently stroked his thumb over the thin and fragile blue veins beneath her honey-colored skin. "Enough." he said gruffly.
"Did I hurt you?"
"No." He didn't release her hand.
She returned his direct look for the longest time— time that seemed to have stopped—until she finally averted her golden eyes and stared at their joined hands.
Since the moment he had first seen her singing in the woods, he knew his life was nothing.
nothing because she had not been part of it.
And now, as he watched the top of her bent head, he wondered if he should give in to the urge that was consuming him.
He wanted nothing more than to lie as one with this woman in the sweet grass. To lie in her for all his tomorrows.
But something stopped him. Some emotion that tasted of a morality he hadn't known he had.
Morality and something that had the sour flavor of a sudden lack of confidence—a weakness foreign to him.
He had always known he could win any battle, so he had won.
Whether his confidence had come from a foolish and youthful idea that he was invincible, or actually from bravery he knew not.
What he did know was that his confidence had left him when it came to Linnet.
He felt awkward and out of place with her, afraid to speak lest he say the wrong thing, afraid to touch her lest she recoil.
Perhaps it was because he had never had to court a woman. And he did not know how to go about it. The women he'd known needed nothing but a look that promised long nights of hot passion or a morning's reward of silver coins.
He'd known Eastern women who were schooled in the art of bedding, women whose skill and purpose was to satisfy a man, and who had taught him that his strongest satisfaction lay in firing a woman's passion to as hot a flame as his own.
There were the women who waited on the fringes of a battle, ready for men whose blood still ran wild, women who liked it rough and savage. And there were the skilled women of the court, who wanted to bed a new baron, the king's friend, or the man whose reputation made him some kind of sexual prize.
But he'd never known a woman like Linnet. A woman with a heart so big she cared for a herd of cats, ducks, and rabbits. A woman whose gentleness tamed a forest and a fierce knight's wild heart.
So for the first time in his life he played coward and stood quickly, startling her.
"William?"
The sound of his Christian name on her lips almost broke his resolve. He wanted to hear her say his name again. He wanted to hear her say his name in passion.
She frowned up at him.
The look he gave her was hard and emotionless, the opposite of how he felt inside. But his stony manner covered his weakness for her, a weakness that frightened him because it came upon him so strongly. He turned away.
"What is wrong?" She sounded hurt.
He had been so concerned that he would do the wrong thing. And now he'd done so. He had hurt her. He took a deep breath. "We've tarried here long enough. Half the day is gone!" he barked over a shoulder and strode toward the horses. Away. Safely away from a battle he had no idea how to win.