Fair Border Bride (16 page)

“I shall not!”

He looked at her. It was a big barrel. Perched on top of it she was at eye level with him. He stepped close and wagged a finger under her nose. “You are behaving like a child, Alina. I made an honest mistake, for which I’ve apologised, and may do so again if you change your tune. Now tell me what’s really annoying you. I can’t believe you were afraid of the dark.”

She attempted to slip down. Harry caught and held her in place. “Get off that barrel and I’ll put you over my knee and spank you.”

“You wouldn’t dare.”

Nose to nose with her, he glared back. “Who,” he asked delicately, “will stop me?” He spread his arms to encompass the empty stable and smiled.
“Certainly not you.”

The mare whickered, nudged him so hard between the shoulder blades he took an inadvertent step forward.

“You’d better see to your horse before she sets about you.” Alina’s lips twitched.
“Though you won’t get any oats from this barrel.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m sitting on the lid.”
Suddenly cheerful, she folded her arms and crossed one leg over the other. She looked adorable.

Harry leant forward and gently pushed her knees apart. “Dream of what follows this, sweetheart.” He kissed her lightly on the lips and drew back before she could complain.

Her mouth remained open.

Satisfied that her mood had changed, Harry stepped back. With a lingering glance that promised her all kinds of things, he smiled. “My horse will be munching oats before she knows what’s hit her, I promise you.”

He jumped, grasped the rim of the loft, got his feet on the stall and hauled himself up in three easy movements.

“There are stairs over there, you know.”

She sounded unimpressed, but he’d heard her startled gasp as he swung himself up and saw how she craned to keep him in view. Feeling smug, he kicked down enough straw to make a decent bed for his mare, and dropped back down into the stall.

Harry raked the straw into a rough bed, led the horse in and unsaddled her. Grabbing a discarded sack, he rubbed her down, well aware that Alina watched his every move. Returning from the yard with a bucket of water, he dumped it beside the stall, grabbed a wooden scoop and approached the barrel.

Alina gripped the rim with both hands and braced herself. The antagonism had gone. This was to be a challenge and she was ready to defend her position. Harry hesitated, studying the situation.

The barrel stood in the corner. Hiding his grin, he strode toward her, leaned hard against her and pushed sideways. Her weight transferred to the wall and allowed him to tilt the lid sufficiently to sweep the scoop into the oats. He withdrew it, let the lid fall and tilted the scoop over the manger. Oats streamed down. He looked at her, laughing.
“Told you so.”

He patted Bessie affectionately as she snuffled among the oats, slung his saddlebag over his shoulder and made to walk out of the stall.

“Harry! What about me?”

He stopped, slapped his forehead and turned back. Halfway he stopped and folded his arms. “Shall we talk sensibly, or are you still at odds with me?”

Alina held out her arms. “I’ll talk.”

She smiled engagingly but he did not weaken.
“Promise?
You won’t change your mind once you’re on your feet?”

Shuffling forward on the barrel, Alina shook her head and waited for him.

“Do I have your promise?”

“I promise! Now lift me down!”

He caught her beneath the arms and swung her to the floor. Holding her made him want to touch her again, anywhere,
everywhere
. He wanted to fill his hands with her, smother her with his mouth. He swept an arm under her knees and lifted her to the ground.

Overwhelmed by his closeness and the easy strength with which he carried and set her down in the big stone-flagged kitchen, Alina remained where he placed her. The scent of burning pine logs and beeswax candles replaced the odour of horse and stable, and beneath it all and much closer, she breathed the subtle scent of Harry.

Her muscles lost their tightness.

“This is nice.” He looked around him.

Alina tried to see the kitchen as a stranger might, and was not disheartened. Firelight shone on the dark wood of the vast carved dresser and gleamed on the few pewter dishes and the copper jug. Everything was clean because she had scrubbed, swept and polished to keep her mind occupied, and found that scrubbing didn’t occupy her mind at all.

The only thing missing was food.

Under normal circumstances, Mama and the servants would have doled out bowls of broth from the big cauldron hanging in the hooded fireplace, and her father would have carved whatever meat had been prepared. She had nothing to offer him and her stomach rumbled with hunger.

Harry heard it. Amused, he looked at her. “Hungry?”

“Yes, but there’s nothing to eat.
I thought Matho might have…I haven’t seen him.”

“Matho was in Corbridge. He told me where to find you, and to be sure and whistle otherwise you might shoot me. He gave me bread, bacon, and a couple of eggs.” He walked to the table in the middle of the room and laid his saddlebag on it. “I suppose I was lucky you didn’t let fly at me because I was so late.”

“Eggs!”
Her face lit up. “How—”

“He wrapped them in straw and then in a cloth.” He shrugged. “If we have to, we’ll pick out the bits of shell.” He fiddled with the leather straps of one saddlebag. “How shall we cook?”

She rattled the iron frying pan off its hook at the side of the fireplace. “The eggs can fry in the bacon fat.”

She took the unbroken eggs from his hands and sent a silent whisper of thanks to Matho. Soon the thick scent of frying bacon filled the kitchen. When the fat ran hot and smoking she cracked the eggs into the pan. Harry used his knife and offered slices of bread cut from the loaf. “Fry those, too. I love bread fried in bacon fat.”

She put the pieces in the pan. It was odd to know he liked bread dipped and fried in bacon fat. There must be a thousand more little quirks she would learn about him now that he was here. But for the moment, they ate in a hungry silence filled with mumbled sounds of satisfaction and enjoyment. While Alina licked a fingertip and picked up crumbs from her platter, Harry used a piece of bread to soak up all the juices from the pan.

“Best meal I’ve eaten all day,” he announced, sitting back from the table.

“It was good,” she sighed. “And there will be enough for breakfast tomorrow.”

Harry stretched his legs out towards the hearth. “We have a whole night ahead of us before we need to think of breakfast. Is this the master’s chair?”

Alina nodded.
“An old one.
We left it for the shepherd and cowman. They use the house sometimes.” Sitting there, he looked in total control of the situation. He was far more confident than she, but she put that down to education and travel. He had seen a good deal of the world. Edinburgh, at least, possibly London, while the furthest she had travelled was Tynemouth on the east coast.

All the doubts of the dark hours came flooding back. If he wasn’t a Scott, who was he? And the biggest question of all she could hardly bring herself to consider.

But he was here. He wouldn’t have come if he didn’t want her.

She had no idea what would happen next. Her thinking had not taken her beyond the point of his arrival and now a strange sensation of doubt, fear and longing roiled through her. Running from home may not have been the wisest thing she had ever done in her life.

They were alone here, and it struck her forcibly that she had put herself at some risk. If her instincts about him were wrong, she might get her throat slit in the middle of the night. He might take her to bed and then ride off next morning.

She shuddered. These dismal thoughts had to stop. That was Harry ensconced in the old oak chair, not some stray reiver wandered in out of the dark. Smiling at her own fears, she wondered what he would say when she told him all the beds had gone to Aydon.

Her heart beat faster. It wasn’t that she objected, exactly, to the thought of going to bed with him. She knew she wanted to, eventually. But the thought of doing it now, this very night, loomed large in her mind. A question of how, and when and would she know what to do when the time came? She had got herself into this predicament. Her thoughts bobbed about like a rabbit in a meadow.

Harry seemed composed. He rested his head, eyes closed, on the carved chair back. Days of riding under clear Border skies had turned his skin so brown it almost matched his jack and hose. Only the white shirt at his throat relieved the drab shades. Firelight glittered on silver embroidery at the edge of the shirt collar, but no long lace cuffs like those John Errington favoured dangled beneath the sleeves of Harry’s doublet.

An image of John, sitting disconsolate by the fireside, rose in her mind’s eye. At least she had avoided that marriage. She could see how impossible it had been now that she looked at Harry. She thought of the ease with which Harry swung himself up into the loft, and a ripple of excitement rolled through her. And yet, she knew very little about him.

“Harry?”

His eyes opened and he squinted lazily at her before shoving one long, muscular leg towards the hearth. His riding boots, covered in mud and dust, reached above the knee and left very little hose on show between them and his breeches.

She shrugged, looked away. “I don’t know anything about you.”

“Of course you do. You know—”

“I still don’t know your real name. I’ll wager it’s not Scott. In fact you’ve admitted that.” Her hands struck the air in a gesture of helplessness. Rigid in her chair, she fixed him with a steady glare. “You could be anybody, Harry. Don’t you think it’s time you told me who you are? I need to know before
I…
before we…go any further.”

He shuffled upright, leant his elbows on his knees and clasped his hands together. “Why do you think I’m not Harry Scott?”

“Of course you’re not. Any fool can see that. Stop grinning at me, and tell me truth.”

He did not answer immediately, but watched her, his blue eyes shining in the firelight. His skin clung close to the bones of his face, though no one would call him thin. Nervous and on edge, Alina got up and gathered their plates.

“Why did you choose to go through that ridiculous drama with my father? You nearly died, Harry.” She carried their plates to the stone sink. “Why not tell him your real name?”

“Harry certainly is my name.”

She glanced at him over her shoulder. The firelight struck one side of his face and threw shadows across the other half. She remembered she had once laughed at the fanciful thought that he was two people. Now she saw that she had been right without knowing why. She scoured the greasy plates with a handful of sand and rinsed them in the bucket of water. “But Scott isn’t, is it?”

“No, it isn’t. But how the hell did you know?”

“Ha! We get to the truth at last. Tell me.” She put the plates into the wooden rack to drain and wondered if his real name would scare her any more than the fictitious one.

Elbows braced on the arms of the chair, Harry glanced down at his clasped fingers. Firelight washed over him and added a ruddy hue to his skin. She walked slowly to the fireplace and stared down. Firelight revealed every line of his face, gilded the curve of his eye, deepened the shadowed socket and lengthened his black lashes.

“Well?”

Firelight hit the dense blue of his eyes as he looked up. “My name is Harry Wharton.”

Wharton. There were several families in the Borders with that name. There was nothing she could think of that would make him hide such a name.
Unless…she inhaled rapidly.
The name hung in the air between them.

“Wharton? Your father is…”

“Sir Thomas Wharton, Deputy Warden of the West March.”

She sat down in the chair she had vacated so recently. He was still a puzzle. If he had flaunted his father’s name instead of hiding it, she would have found it more natural. “Why should Sir Thomas’s son hide his identity?” She tossed her plait back over her shoulder with an inpatient gesture. His gaze flickered away from her. Alarm rushed through her. “You weren’t spying, were you?” She leaned forward and grasped one of his warm hands. “Harry, were you spying on my father?”

He shook his head. “I volunteered for a task in Edinburgh and my father did not want the name Wharton attached to it.”

Relief rushed through her. His mission had nothing to do with her family. It was something, at least, but she had to know more. “What kind of a task in Edinburgh?”

“Must you know?” He flicked an assessing sideways glance at her.

Another rebuff.
Alina swayed back in her chair and surveyed him while she gathered her thoughts. “I ran away from home for you, Harry. I have nowhere else in the world to go yet you still do not trust me.” It was mortifying. She inhaled deeply, and lifted her head. “Yes, I think I must be told.”

He stared into the flames. “It’s nothing that’s going to bring harm to anyone. In fact, it should have been beneficial, both here and in Scotland.”

She raised her brows and waited.

In brief, simple sentences he described how he bribed several Scots to bring the baby queen to England, at a date as yet unspecified, for a marriage with King Henry’s son. “It would have brought our two nations together and hopefully prevent more bloodshed,” he finished.

“You mean they would kidnap her?
A babe only months old?”
Alina did not hide her shock.

Harry nodded.

“But such a child may not survive rough handling! Her mother will be distraught! Did you think of that?”

Regret flitted across his face. “No, I didn’t,” he confessed. “My father wanted it done, and I wanted to do it. I did not think about it too much at all. Perhaps she will be older when—”

“You are no better than all the reivers who rape and steal!”

Harry jerked his feet under him and sprang from the chair. “It was done with the best of intentions.”

“But with little thought, Harry.”
She gazed after him as he prowled the room. “What if it were your child?”

He wheeled round to retort, and then reconsidered. Tight-lipped, he returned to the fire, hunkered down and settled a new log on the fire. Sparks flew high and vanished up the chimney.

“You may be right.” He remained crouched before the hooded fireplace, frowning into the flames. “But there is no guarantee that it will ever happen. It was probably all a waste of time, for the Treaty of Greenwich took place while I was heading north. That’s a formal agreement to marry the little queen to the prince nine years hence.”

Alina relaxed.
“Exactly what you wanted to happen!
But it will happen properly, with the little queen’s mother present.”

He rose effortlessly to his feet again, stared down at the flames adventuring around the new wood and shook his head.
“All that effort for naught.”

Alina eyed the slope of his shoulders. “Don’t be despondent, Harry. I am sure your father appreciated your efforts.”

“Hopefully, yes.” He did not look around.

“And I appreciated it,” she added softly. “For without it we would never have met.”

He half-turned and regarded her. His grim face made her unaccountably wary. “Are you glad, Alina? Here you are, run away from a marriage, outcast from your family and all because of me.”

“All because of you?
You have a good opinion of yourself, sir.” She tried to smile, but her mouth quivered. Surely Harry was not regretting what she had done?

“It is a serious matter. I shall have to marry you.”

The words reverberated through the quiet, firelit room. Swallowing the rising lump in her throat, she met his gaze steadily. “I thought that was what you wanted…what we wanted. I thought you…” Her hands crept together in her lap, twined around each other for comfort. She swallowed again, quickly. “Have you…have I done the wrong thing?”

He took a swift stride and knelt at her feet.
“No, of course not.
I am of the same mind. I’m tired, so I express myself badly. Forgive me. But I regret that you and your family are estranged. I wish it could have been done a different way.” He cradled her interlocked hands within his own and dropped a kiss on her knuckles. “I have a plan to present to your esteemed parent,” he added with a wry smile. “Somehow we’ll have to approach him and explain everything.” He looked down at their intertwined hands. “If we marry, we can make everything good with your family. My father knows and he has no objections.”

“You spoke of me to your father?
To Sir Thomas Wharton?”
Suddenly things did not seem so bad after all.

He nodded. “He was surprised, I must admit. He said he would ride over if he could and lend his support with…with your father. But meanwhile…”