Fairest Of Them All (13 page)

Her panic surged as the slope steepened and she realized how far she’d fallen behind the others. They were already crossing the murky cauldron of a brook that lay in their path. Wishing she’d had the foresight to sneak her leg over the mare’s neck while they were still on level ground, Holly hastened her horse forward, tangling her hands in both reins and mane to keep her tenuous seat.

As the mare splashed into the swirling water, its front legs disappearing from hoof to fetlock, a gauzy thread brushed Holly’s naked nape. Terror seized her. Icy gooseflesh erupted on her skin. She dropped the reins and twisted in the saddle, screaming and batting wildly at her head and shoulders.

The startled horse reared, dumping her rump first into the chill water. Holly could not have said if it was the jarring thump of her landing or the icy shock of the water rushing up her skirt that restored her to sanity. One moment she was screaming hysterically; the next she was gaping dumbly up at the innocuous twig she had believed to be the skittering claw of some venomous spider and the willow leaf she had feared was its lair.

The expectant silence swelled. Holly turned her head to find the others frozen on the slope, gawking at her as if she’d fallen not off a horse, but out of the sky.

She might have overlooked the grin Carey attempted to hide behind his discreetly raised gauntlet She might have tolerated Nathanael’s snickering or even the feet that Elspeth—her loyal, beloved Elspeth —had compressed her lips so hard she was turning a mottled shade of red from lack of air. What she could not endure was the absence of both amusement and reproach in her husband’s eyes. They reflected only a wary pity that made her feel even more foolish than she was.

Her ragged fingernails dug into the muddy stream bottom as homesickness crashed over her in waves of misery. She wanted nothing more than to be nestled back in her bed at Tewksbury. She wanted her hair, her eyelashes, her flawless complexion. She wanted her papa And most defeating of all, she wanted her mama. It was a primal yearning, subdued for so many years that she had forgotten its power to close her throat and bring tears welling to her eyes.

As she suppressed a crude sniffle, waiting for that first tear to brim over and spill down her cheek like a priceless pearl, it occurred to her that she no longer need practice the art of weeping prettily. There were no suitors poised to dry her tears, no tutor who would dare chasten her for reddening her nose, no papa to chide her for giving free and selfish reign to her un-happiness.

With that liberating realization, Holly Felicia Ber-nadette de Chastel, lady of Gavenmore and the fairest woman in all of England, tipped back her head and let loose with an earsplitting wail.

“Good Lord, man, can’t you make her stop?”

Even if Austyn had a reply for Carey’s plea, which he did not, Carey would have had to pry his hands away from his ears to hear it Austyn and his companions sat paralyzed on their mounts, gaping at his bride with varying degrees of horror and disbelief. The horses shifted restlessly, desperate to bolt

Austyn could hardly blame them. He was tempted to do the same. He had entertained the naive hope that his new wife might be a helpmeet, someone who would share his cares and responsibilities, thereby lessening them. But it seemed he had only earned himself another burden. And a deafening one at that.

She had thrown back her head and was bawling like a newborn calf. Fat tears streamed down her face. Austyn would have wagered it impossible that human skin could flush brighter than her sunburned cheeks, yet her nose had deepened to a ripe cherry red. She resembled nothing so much as a homely little troll having one hell of a temper tantrum.

Her childish display should have enraged him, but Austyn could not dismiss the plaintive note in her wailing. Twas as if she’d hoarded a lifetime of misery for just such a moment

“For bloody’s sake, Austyn, do something,” Carey pleaded. “Comfort her. Offer her a kerchief. Go pat her on the ... on the”—he fumbled for an appropriate body part—”shoulder.”

Austyn was more than ready to take action. He swung one leg over his horse, dismounting with unmistakable resolve. ‘Take the others and ride ahead. Don’t turn back no matter what you may hear.”

The priest and nurse broke into a dismayed clamor.

“Oh, please, kind sir,” Elspeth said, appearing dangerously near tears herself. “Ye mustn’t be too harsh on her. My mistress is quite delicate.”

Austyn cocked a skeptical eyebrow. Her delicate mistress was presently beating at the brook with both fists, sending great gouts of water spraying into the air.

“What she means to say,” the priest shot Austyn’s gauntleted fists a nervous look, “is that our lady’s constitution is such that she might not survive a beating; therefore, we implore you—”

“Enough!” Austyn roared.

They all recoiled, even Carey.

“The only person I’m going to beat around here is the next one who dares accuse me of beating someone. Now go as I bid you.” He turned to Carey. “If either of them tries to turn back, put an arrow through them.”

Carey and the nurse scrambled to obey him, driving their mounts up the steep slope toward the ridge. Only the priest hung back, shooting a pensive look over his shoulder. Austyn glowered after him. The man’s proprietary attitude toward his wife was beginning to gall his temper.

Determining that her howls showed little sign of ceasing without intervention, Austyn drew off his boots and gauntlets, waded straight into the brook and squatted down a few feet away from her, resting his elbows on his knees. The cool water lapped at his hose.

Holly had squinched her eyes shut and drew breath for a fresh howl when she sensed someone nearby. Not just any old someone, she realized, sniffing a wintry breath of mint through her clogged nose. Her husband.

Her exhalation dwindled to a strangled hiccup as she peered through puffy eyelids at the curious sight of Sir Austyn of Gavenmore squatting placidly in the middle of a rushing brook.

He smiled encouragingly at her. “Feel better, Ivy?”

His unruffled composure insulted her beyond bearing. Her misery flamed to rage. “My name is Holly, you dolt! Holly! Are you so stupid you can’t remember your own wife’s name?”

Too incensed to ponder the consequences, she hurled the contents of her hand, which happened to be a fat gobbet of mud, directly at his smug face.

Holly was immediately surprised to realize that she did feel better. Immensely better. Twas as if she’d just shoved the crushing weight of a stone gargoyle off her chest. But her recovery came at a very inopportune moment. She might have muffled her giggle at the sight of her husband’s forbidding visage spattered with mud, but his confounded expression as he blinked the stuff from his eyes undid her entirely. She pointed at him, her sobs rising to shrieks of laughter.

He erupted from the water, striding toward her with lethal intent. Although alarmed to realize a fifteen stone Welshman with murder glittering in his eyes was a more substantial threat than an imaginary gargoyle, Holly was as helpless to stop laughing as she’d been to stop crying.

She skittered backward like a freshwater crab, fully expecting him to throttle her as she deserved.

Instead, he swept her up into the cradle of his arms. Her weighted skirts streamed water and she was forced to coil her arms around his neck or risk plunging right back into the brook.

Her shock grew as he sank down on a flat-topped rock on the bank, his implacable grip binding her to his lap. She thought to wiggle away, terrified he would discover the sodden lumps of cloth padding her skirt, but quickly realized that squirming only increased such a risk. She had no choice but to relax against his chest, his lap a cozier perch than she cared to admit.

In stoic silence, he retrieved a dry kerchief from his tunic and dipped it in the brook. Holly expected him to wipe the silt from his own brow, but instead he bathed her face with surprising tenderness. She closed her swollen eyes with an involuntary moan of pleasure, the cool water a heavenly ablution to her sun-scalded cheeks.

When she opened them, Austyn was drawing a leafy herb from a small leather bag. He held the pinch of green to her lips.

She drew back, eyeing his offering with a suspicion she didn’t bother to hide. “Is it poison?”

His crooked smile didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Poison’s a bit subtle for the Gavenmore tastes.” He bit off a leaf of the herb, chewing with obvious relish. ‘Try it,” he challenged, brushing the stalk against her parted lips.

Holly would have tried hemlock itself to put a halt to his disturbing teasing. She snapped off a leaf, barely missing his fingertips. As she chewed, a foreign tingling besieged her mouth. Foreign, yet hauntingly familiar. As familiar as the scent of this man’s breath on her throat. As familiar as the tickle of his mustache against her upper lip. As familiar as the taste of his kiss, the beguiling contrast of warm tongue and cool mint

Plunged into confusion by the memory, Holly dropped her gaze to his lips, wondering again what manner of face lay beneath the mask of his beard.

“ Tis wintergreen. For purifying the breath and teeth.”

His matter-of-fact words snapped her back to reality. She was not the same woman he had kissed in the garden. Her teeth were no longer the snowy steeds of Eugene’s ode, but a herd of mottled nags.

She clamped her lips together, driven to mute shyness by her appearance for the first time in her memory.

“So your name is Holly, eh?” he asked, wiping the mud from his own face with the damp kerchief.

“Aye. Tis whispered that I was conceived beneath the hollyhocks in the castle garden.”

Austyn grinned at his wife’s prim bluntness. It seemed he hadn’t been the only man to succumb to the garden’s enchantment. “From your prickly disposition, I thought it might have been the holly bushes.”

She shot him a sullen glance. “Better to be spawned from thorns than hewn from unfeeling oak.”

The beauty of her eyes startled him to silence. It was like tipping over a moss-encrusted rock to find a diamond beneath. He doubted she even realized it but she had kept one arm draped around his neck for balance and was now toying with his hair, twirling first one strand, then another, about her slender fingers. The intimacy of the act sent a strange shiver across his nape.

“Why do you find me unfeeling? Because I didn’t drag you out of the water, bend you over my knee, and give you the sound thrashing you deserve? Or is it simply because I haven’t granted you the attention you’re so desperately craving?”

She stared straight ahead, her delicate jaw set at a mutinous angle. “You are a most churlish man. I care nothing for your attention.”

“And you are a most dishonest girl.” Something odd flickered in her eyes. “Now why don’t you tell me what made you so wretchedly unhappy?”

She bowed her head. Austyn almost wished she hadn’t. With her face hidden, he had only her naked nape to contemplate. Unlike the blotchy skin of her cheeks, her nape was pale cream dusted with baby fine hair. He was distracted by the overwhelming desire to feather his lips across it He shook off the disturbing urge, making a mental note to order some fine silks for wimples and veils.

“I was unhappy because I wanted my mother,” she confessed softly.

Austyn frowned. He could hardly fault her for grieving at being wrenched so abruptly from her mother’s arms. “I saw no sign of the countess yesterday. Was she ill?”

“No. She was dead. She’s been dead since I was five.” Holly fixed him with those stunning eyes again. “So you must find me utterly ridiculous to be carrying on so over nothing more than a ghost”

Austyn found her much less ridiculous than he would have conceded. “Do you remember her?”

“Not as well as I’d like. Sometimes it seems as if time were melting my memories.”

‘Time hasn’t been so kind to me. My mother’s been dead for almost twenty years yet I remember everything about her. Her voice. Her smile. The angle at which she tilted her head when she was singing.” He lowered his eyes before they could betray the full measure of his bitterness. “Would to God that I could forget”

Holly continued to weave her fingers through his hair, her touch dangerously near a caress. “She was unkind to you?”

There were some delusions Austyn could not allow himself, no matter the solace they would give. He met Holly’s gaze squarely. “Never.”

He would have found her pity abhorrent and her compassion suspect, but he could hardly resist the offhand grace with which she drew the kerchief from his hand and dabbed a missed speck of mud from his temple. He found himself gazing not at her ravaged hair or sparse lashes, but at the pursed temptation of her lips.

He had believed there to be no surer cure for his unabated ardor than his bride’s presence on his lap, but at the tenderness of the wifely gesture, his loins surged as if galvanized by a jolt of lightning.

Austyn scrambled to his feet, catching her elbow before she could tumble back into the brook.

Fearing his conflicting urges would attract her notice, he started toward the horses at a brisk stride, hauling her along beside him. “Let us dawdle no longer, my lady. We must make haste if we are to reach Caer Gavenmore before nightfall.”

“Very good, sir,” she replied, the haughty bite restored to her voice. “Perhaps we shall yet reach your keep before I waste away to skin and bones for lack of sustenance.”

If anyone was surprised when Austyn and Holly emerged from their private parley with Holly mounted behind her husband and the mare plodding after them on a rope, they were wise enough to keep their opinions to themselves. Since twilight was fast approaching and they’d left the shelter of the forest for a windswept slope, no one thought it unusual that Nathanael would draw up his cowl to shield his face.

Holly discovered that her husband’s broad back provided shelter from any number of unpleasantries. Since she rode sidesaddle behind him, her arms secured around his lean waist, she no longer had to fret about revealing her padded skirts. Her papa had forbidden her the pleasures of hunting, hawking, or simply cantering across the countryside, and the rustic charm of the breeze ruffling her cropped hair was impossible to resist She found she could even allow herself to doze by resting her cheek against Austyn’s back.