The Elusive Bride Read online

“Let’s hope they’ll all sleep soundly after the chase you led them today.” Slapping the dust off her cloak, Cecily emerged from the cave, into the uncanny warmth of the night.

  Moonbeams frosted the countryside with silver. In the black velvet sky, swaths of stars glittered a spectral enchantment. If ever a night belonged to the fairies, this was it.

  Before she could think to restrain herself, she reached for John FitzCourtenay’s hand. It was firm and strong, with a reassuring warmth. The touch of it sent an answering spasm of heat pulsing through her.

  “Have you ever seen such beauty?” she breathed.

  He stiffened. “I’m not apt to notice such things.”

  Lifting her face to the night sky, Cecily soaked in the mild breeze that wafted the perfume of ripe fruit and dew. “I pity you, Master John. If ever I doubted divine grace, a night like this would restore my faith.”

  “If we stay here much longer, we run the risk of capture,” he reminded her in a voice hard as flint. “Then you’ll need every scrap of grace you can muster. Pray, lead on.”

  For some reason his severity struck her as comical.

  “At your service, master,” she answered in a tone of good-natured mockery. “Let us head this way. I can marvel at the beauty of the night just as well while I walk. Perhaps better.”

  “So you may.” He fell in step behind her. “Only have a care to keep your wits about you while you marvel.”

  What would he say if she blurted out what she was thinking? That he had a worse affect on her wits than any amount of moonshine and starlight. That part of the night’s potent sorcery was his nearness.

  “We’ll need to drink our fill before we go much farther, and bathe your wound.” Her deeply ingrained practicality asserted itself. “So it’s back to the stream where we hid this morning. After that we can strike out across the Downs. Had you a destination in mind?”

  An owl hooted from the woodlands below. Cecily kept her eyes trained upon the shadowy ground. It was uneven and hazardous to descend even in broad daylight.

  “Unless my travels abroad have ruined my memory of English geography, Lambourn Castle lies on a fair path between here and Ravensridge. I reckon I saw old Ranulf Beauchamp among the barons with Empress Maud at the Devizes. Is he her liege man?”

  “Aye, Lambourn is for the Empress, and Lord Ranulf might well aid us for my father’s sake. The two of them were fostered together. But unless you can fly, it is more than one night’s journey away.”

  “Depend upon it, I am no angel in disguise.” More than a trace of bitterness soured this weak jest at his own expense. “Is there any other castle loyal to Maud within a night’s walk?”

  Cecily thought for a moment. “Hungerford. But it lies to the south and I’m not certain we could make it before sunrise. Besides, I mind an old byre on Ewe Hill. We can hide there when daylight comes and press on for Lambourn tomorrow night.”

  “Lambourn it is, then.”

  He might not be aware of it, but Cecily sensed his confidence in her from the tone of his voice. It resonated with his reluctantly bestowed trust. Who had hurt or betrayed him, to make him so censorious? Of himself more than anyone.

  His father, perhaps? Some noblemen set great store by their illegitimate offspring. Others treated them worse than servants. His father’s wife—taking out her spleen against old DeCourtenay’s mistress on a far easier target? What if Rowan DeCourtenay himself had wrought this damage on the soul of his half brother?

  Cecily shivered.

  “Are you cold?” John asked. “You may have this cloak, too, if you want it.”

  Whatever FitzCourtenay’s other faults, Cecily warmed to his generous nature. “Cold? No. Anxious, perhaps…that we not…run into any of Fulke’s men tonight.”

  He seemed to take her at her word, for he asked no more questions.

  Cautiously they approached the stream and drank their fill.

  “Now let me tend to your arm.” Under her breath, Cecily cursed the darkness. How could she hope to do John any good if she could not see?

  With a gentle touch, she unwrapped the scrap of cloth that bound his wound. As she nudged his arm into the leisurely flowing water, he let out a sharp hiss of pain.

  “I’m sorry I don’t have any soothing herbs to apply,” she murmured. They knelt so closely together, she could feel the warmth emanating from his body. Only a hair’s breadth away from an embrace.

  Perhaps it was the intimacy of their nearness in the dark that made her add, “I don’t suppose you’d settle for anointing it with a kiss like my brother Geoffrey always wanted.”

  Speaking his name brought back all her grief for Geoffrey. FitzCourtenay’s knife wound could not ache half as cruelly as her heart did just then.

  “I always wanted a sister.” He sounded surprised by his own admission.

  “Soon you shall have one—when I wed Lord Rowan.” For some reason the words tasted bitter on her tongue. There was nothing sisterly about her perplexing feelings for this man.

  He ignored her comment. Did the prospect hold no appeal for him, either?

  “Your brothers were lucky fellows to have you. Did they all die in her grace’s service?”

  She nodded, not caring that he couldn’t see her. Finally she mastered her voice sufficiently to say, “That is another reason I must get Brantham back. To fight on for the Empress in their stead.”

  “Bind my arm, then, so we may be on our way.” With a deep, warm chuckle that tickled her ears and made her smile in spite of her fresh sorrow, he added, “Go ahead and kiss it first.”

  Fighting to keep awake, Rowan trudged after Cecily Tyrell. After its baptism in the cool water, his arm wound scarcely pained him at all. Or had it been the healing magic of her kiss?

  He shook his head to clear it of such foolish fancies.

  At his urging they had stopped some hours ago for a brief rest. He would like to have called a halt again. He’d been without sleep for almost a full day and fasting for nearly all of that time. No wonder his mind was vulnerable to absurd notions.

  Cecily had slept only a few hours, and consumed no more than the remnants of his depleted stores, Rowan reminded himself. Yet on and on she walked, eating the miles of undulating downs with her brisk, graceful stride. He couldn’t decide whether he envied or resented her.

  He wondered if she might have been right after all, about traveling north with less need for this kind of exhausting stealth.

  Suddenly, on the upland breeze, Rowan thought he heard a faint murmur of voices. He froze, peering into the darkness in hope of determining the source of the sound. Years of soldiering had honed his faculty for sensing danger.

  There, ahead! Two bobbing lights—torches, no doubt.

  In a heartbeat, he brought Cecily down, plunging on top of her to shield her as best he could. Fleetingly, he considered covering her mouth so she would not cry out. The notion fled his mind as quickly as it had come. Time and again, Cecily had proven capable of keeping still when necessary. She’d taken mischievous exception to his previous attempts to stifle her. In memory, sharp as a bolt of lightning, Rowan recalled the flick of her tongue across his palm. Brazen little vixen!

  The lights and voices drew nearer.

  Dipping his lips to Cecily’s ear, he whispered so softly that he could scarcely hear himself. “Keep your face to the ground. Our dark clothes will hide us, but pale skin will catch the torchlight.”

  Before they set out tomorrow night, Rowan decided, he would find some ash or dirt to blacken their faces. If they set out tomorrow night, he amended silently as the travelers strode past them, perilously close.

  Judging by the snatch of conversation he overheard, the two men did not sound as though they were searching for fugitives. Rowan wondered what they were doing abroad on the downs at such an hour. Once the footsteps passed without pausing, the tension in his body slowly began to ebb.

  “Can you get off me now?” Cecily muttered. “You weigh more than one would guess to
look at you.”

  “Hush,” Rowan whispered. “Not yet. Let them get well away.”

  She wriggled beneath him.

  Even as he took more weight on his knees and arms, Rowan fought the urge to roll Cecily Tyrell onto her back and silence her with his lips. How might she react, if he did?

  And if he went further? Would she remember her intended husband, Rowan DeCourtenay, and the armed might she needed to liberate Brantham? Aid for which she would barter her maidenhead and her freedom. Or might she respond to him, the man. One with nothing to offer her but a battered heart and a soul compromised beyond redemption?

  Part of him longed to know the answer. Another part feared what he might discover.

  The lights disappeared from view.

  Rowan forced himself to roll off Cecily, though his body protested. He hated the keen pitch of feelings she stirred in him, all battling one another for supremacy.

  “Did you have to hurl yourself atop me like that?” She sprang to her feet. Her voice was quiet, yet sharp with vexation. “I feared you’d flatten me like a hotcake.”

  Something in her tone inflamed him.

  “I was only doing my best to protect you, ungrateful scold!”

  “Protect or smother, Master John?” She batted at her tunic—his tunic—as if trying to rid herself of his touch. “I can do well enough without your sort of protection.”

  “Can you, now?” Battle had been well and truly joined. His senses hummed with the familiar exhilaration of it. “You almost walked us into those fellows with their torches. Traipsing along, marveling at the night. Not bothering to look out for danger. If I hadn’t brought you down when I did—”

  “What if they had seen us? They weren’t Fulke’s men.”

  “How can you be so sure? And what if they had been?”

  “I’d have thought of something. I’m not helpless and I’m not daft.”

  “No, just heedless and fanciful. These are evil times. They call for sterner stuff.”

  Rowan waited for her counterstrike to come hurling at him from out of the darkness. His blood sang with righteous wrath. When a mocking whisper in the back of his mind dared suggest that he was enjoying their quarrel, that he hadn’t felt this fully alive in years, he ruthlessly quashed it.

  Then he heard the very last thing he expected.

  Laughter.

  From out of the waning night’s blue-black shadows came Cecily’s deep, spontaneous chuckle.

  “You are more than stern enough for the pair of us. Don’t let’s quarrel, John. I am so weary I could fall asleep on my feet, and dizzy with hunger to boot. Forgive me for snapping at you when I should have given thanks instead?”

  Her hand blundered into his and clasped it warmly. He felt a fool for venting his spleen on her. A bullying fool, at that. It was not her fault that he felt as he did—confused, overwhelmed. Buoyant.

  “I’m sorry…” Oh, but that word came hard, quarried from beneath a heavy pile of pride. “…if I hurt you when I flung you onto the ground.”

  “No bones broken,” she replied cheerfully. “Your arm?”

  “It’s fine.”

  “Come, then. We’ve wasted time arguing that we can ill afford. We must make haste if we’re to find shelter by sunrise.”

  He tried to disengage her hand from his, but she held firm. After the tenderness of her touch when she’d cleansed his wound, the strength of her grip surprised him.

  “I don’t want to take the chance of losing you in the darkness,” she said. “And this way, if you hear or spy someone coming toward us, you can just pull me down beside you.”

  Something wondrous and frightening bubbled up from within him then, hoarse and cracked from long disuse. At first Rowan DeCourtenay scarcely recognized the sound of his own laughter.

  For some time, they trudged up the rising ground in silent fellowship. Then…

  “There it is. Just ahead.” Cecily pointed. “The byre. Do you see it?”

  Rowan peered into the distance. His eyelids felt so heavy. A pair of battle-axes would be easier to hold aloft. “I’ll take your word it’s there.”

  Warily he glanced over his shoulder. The deep, rich blue of indigo dye drenched the eastern sky, while tendrils of crimson and gold streaked upward from the horizon. Long checked sensations stirred within Rowan. Wonder. Reverence. Delight.

  He tugged on Cecily’s hand. In the past several hours, he had grown accustomed to the warmth of it in his. How empty his grasp would feel when he finally had to let go.

  In response to his signal, Cecily looked back. Rowan could just make out her expression in the dimness. Her brows were drawn together in an unspoken question.

  “The sunrise,” he murmured. “I thought you might want to admire it.”

  She smiled then, in the faint rosy light of dawn, stealing an instant to savor the beauty. What daybreak could match her luminous charm? Rowan wondered, as rapture pierced his palms and his heart.

  Fickle as an April breeze, her expression changed again. Cecily pulled a droll face. “Who’s gone fanciful now, John FitzCourtenay? I must be contagious.”

  Had he caught something from her? Rowan mused, even as he grinned at her jest. Ever since meeting up with Cecily Tyrell, he’d felt in grip of a fever. First hot, then shivering. Now racked with pain, a moment later delirious. What could the remedy be?

  If he discovered a cure, would he be fool enough to take it?

  Like quicksilver, a look of alarm overset Cecily’s cheerful grimace. “Hurry to the byre. We’re too exposed on this hill. If anyone’s looking for us, they’ll soon have enough light to see.”

  Marshaling his waning reserves of strength, Rowan rushed the last steep furlong to shelter, while Cecily loped along beside him.

  The byre was a rough-built structure, just sturdy enough to withstand the howling March winds that gusted over the downs. At the moment it was stuffed to the rafters with hay, to see the sheep through a long winter of lean forage. Early next spring it would provide the ewes with a shelter for lambing. For now, it offered Rowan several of the things he most longed for.

  A soft bed. A drink from the spring that gurgled into a stone trough of ancient pedigree. And food from a hardy, gnarled pear tree.

  One thing more Rowan longed for. Longed for with a sharper appetite than he’d ever experienced in his life. And he was looking at her.

  “Oh, leave off your gawping, Master John.” She shielded her face with one hand. Even in the feeble glow of dawn, Rowan could discern the fierce blush that flamed in her cheeks. “I know I must look more foolish than any clown in motley. Even so, ’tis ill-bred to stare.”

  Drawing water from the trough in cupped hands, she splashed it on her face. “Now that I can almost see what I’m doing, shall I tend your wound again?”

  Too flustered to answer, Rowan shook his head. At the moment, he did not dare expose himself to any more of her tender ministrations.

  He joined her at the trough, where they drank and drank until he, at least, was almost bilious. Once they had both quaffed their fill, he gulped a deep breath and thrust his whole head into the water. He came up sputtering and shaking himself like a wolfhound after a ducking.

  For a few moments, the bracing chill of the water numbed his carnal urges. Then Cecily shed her cloak and moved to the pear tree to harvest their breakfast. She reached high to pluck the ripest ones from the top branches.

  Why was the most tempting fruit always just out of reach? Rowan wondered. As a reward for the boldest, most enterprising husbander? Or was it just distance and the challenge of garnering the prize that made those topmost pears seem so attractive?

  Attractive. The word echoed in his thoughts as he watched Cecily poise on tiptoe. Her slender arms reaching upward. Her long, lithe calves and feet showing below the hem of her borrowed tunic. Where she had wet it while drinking, the garment clung to her willowy figure.

  Plucking one golden pear from a high branch, she spun on her toe and tossed it to Rowa
n. “Break your fast, Master John.” Crashing back to reality with a start, Rowan fumbled and almost dropped the fruit onto the grass.

  “You do need your rest,” Cecily teased. “You’re falling asleep on your feet.”

  She glanced at the eastern horizon, then a spasm of alarm gripped her features. “We must get inside.” Quickly she gathered as many more pears as she could hold.

  After picking up her cloak from where she had dropped it, Rowan followed her.

  “In the loft,” Cecily called back to him. “God’s teeth! I’ll never be able to climb this ladder with my hands full.”

  Rowan held out the cloak. “Put them in this.”

  “Your wits cannot be as badly addled as I thought.” Carefully, she let the plump, yellow pears tumble onto the cloth.

  Gathering the garment into a sack, Rowan slung it over his back gently, so as not to bruise the fruit.

  He looked up in time to see Cecily scrambling aloft, a provocative span of her lean, supple legs bared to his admiring gaze, before she disappeared into the haymow.

  A notion spawned in his sleep-deprived mind—subtle, persuasive and dangerous as the serpent in Eden.

  If he wanted her so badly, why not have her?

  Cecily Tyrell had been promised to him—nay, foisted unwillingly upon him, by her grace the uncrowned queen of England. As Maud’s faithful liegeman, was it not his right to bed the wench? Right be damned! It was his duty.

  He would reveal his true identity and claim her. After a lusty tumble in the hay, he’d wed her the minute they found a priest. At Lambourn, perhaps, with old Beauchamp standing in for her father.

  Rowan couldn’t imagine a lass more apt for a tumble in the hay than Cecily Tyrell. There was a refreshing earthiness about her that was neither coarse nor common. She did not strike him as the type to cower timidly from a man’s touch. If she disliked it, she’d probably break his arm. But if the lucky fellow took her fancy, well…

  He lapsed into a bemused smile just thinking about it. Her gleeful curiosity. The eager exchange of kisses and touching. Welcoming the hundreds of sweet pleasures a skillful lover could bestow. Giving herself without reserve.