I Loved a Rogue The Prince Catchers (8 page)

He couldn’t suppress his smile. “Sure have, Princess Invalid.”

Every day after that he went to her and teased her into reading. Some days she was sullen, exhausted, especially at the beginning. But eventually when he came into her room he would find her sitting up in bed, her hair combed or tied beneath a cap, her eyes cautiously eager. Ravenna told him that Eleanor was eating more now, and that she was able to walk as far as the parlor.

When the Reverend learned of Taliesin’s visits to the sickroom, he did not object. His little scholar was reading again, studying. The grief left his eyes.

The morning that Eleanor met Taliesin in the garden instead of in her room, he nearly crowed aloud. Sunlight dappled her drawn face and sparkled in her eyes. As he closed the gate behind him, a soft smile of triumph shaped her mouth. He picked strawberries from the patch and she ate them, carefully, one by one in tiny bites, and read aloud from Malory’s
Le Morte d’Arthur
. Occasionally she lapsed into silence, but when he looked up from pulling weeds, she would still be reading. Lost in the story, she’d only forgotten his presence.

Shortly after that, his family packed up their tents and left St. Petroc for the summer. Never had the wandering season lasted so long. Never had he wished so acutely to be somewhere he was not.

When he returned to St. Petroc that fall, the first day, as his family was still pitching camp by the squire’s north wood, she came to him. A surge of pleasure had gone through him, from the soles of his feet right into his head. Still far too thin, with purple smudges beneath her eyes and sallow cheeks, she had greeted his aunt and Lussha and the other women with a quick curtsy. Then, without even saying hello to him, she demanded that he teach her how to ride a horse.

Now he walked into the center of the taproom, not quieting his footsteps. But she did not wake. Her breathing remained deep, her folded hands rising and falling slowly with the movement of her ribs. He took his time enjoying this vision of her, from bared feet and slender ankles, up the length of a nightgown so thick he could use it as a saddlecloth, to the buttons that cinched the fabric snug about her neck. Then to her face.

No longer gaunt, but soft, her skin shone luminescent in the moonlight. Her lips, parted and pink, drew him down to the chair beside her. He could stroke the rippling gold satin so close to his hand now and she would never know. Years ago he’d done so often enough in his imagination.

But years ago he’d been a fool of a boy, infatuated with a girl far above his station. And he didn’t touch women who did not invite it. Not as he wished to touch her now.

And if by some miracle she did invite it, there was no way in Hades he’d take her up on it. The feeling of her in his hands on the beach would not leave him, the old insanity back in his body and—worse yet—in his head, from even that brief touch. She turned him inside out and made him forget who he was, a man who lived according to his will only, and who damned well liked it that way. An aching chest and endless nights of seeking satisfaction—in bottles and troublemaking—yet never finding it had taught him an excellent lesson: a man alone was a man free to make something of himself. He wasn’t about to let lust drag him into hell, no matter how tempting. He’d made a vow to himself never to do so again.

As she had on that day thirteen years ago, now she stirred, drew in a quick, sudden gasp, and her lashes fluttered up. She seemed not to see him for a moment. Then gradually the golden green jewels grew aware. The familiar pucker appeared between her brows.

“Why are you in my bedchamber?”

“This is not your bedchamber. You are in the taproom of the inn at Piskey.”

She blinked and turned her head, squinting. Her feet tipped inward to cross her toes over each other. “I fell asleep,” she said in an airy mumble.

“It seems you did.”

“I was dreaming. There was a horse . . .” She blinked again and snapped accusing eyes to him. “I wanted to ride it and Papa would not let me. I begged. But he gave it to you.”

“Your father never gave me a horse,
pirani
.”

“I was jealous of you.”

“They were not my horses. They were my uncle’s.”

“Not of your horses.” She pushed herself up, dropping her feet with a thump to the floor. “Of Papa’s attention.”

“You are intoxicated,” he said, because the linen had caught and was tugging across her thighs and he couldn’t keep his attention on her fogged eyes. “You must return to your bedchamber now.”

“I am intoxicated.” She gripped the seat of the chair beside her knee. “But I’m speaking the truth. He always wanted a son.”

Perhaps. But not him. Not as she believed.

He stood and offered his hand. “Come now.”

She swung her head from side to side. “No.” She climbed to her feet without assistance, pushing her hair from her brow when it fell like shimmering summer before her eyes, and swaying. She reached out and he caught her arm. Gripping the back of the chair with her other hand, she drew away from his hold.

“I don’t think you should touch me,” she said to the floor.

“All right. But I will follow you up the stairs.”

“I would like you to,” she mumbled, and plunked onto the chair again with a jointless lack of grace. “That is, not follow me. I would like you to touch me. Like you did on the beach without permission. But of course that would be an immeasurably bad idea.”

Immeasurably bad
. Yes. Her nightgown cinched under her knee, exposing her foot, ankle, and entire shapely calf, and Taliesin’s brain was shutting down. Like a boy who’d never seen a woman’s naked legs before. But he’d seen plenty of women’s naked legs.

Not this woman’s. On the beach he had put his hands on her legs and she had allowed it for a full ten seconds before bolting. But she’d remained still long enough for him to imagine urging those legs apart while she moaned his name. Long enough to imagine her eagerly wrapping those legs around his waist.

He swallowed across his pounding pulse. “Right.” What had she said? “Of course.”
Years
. It had taken him years to get over her. Years of struggle and hard labor. He should not have touched her on the beach. She was right.
Immeasurably
bad idea.

“But . . .” Her eyelids fluttered and she leaned her head back against the chair. In her neck, the slow throb of her heartbeat beneath pale skin taunted him to touch it. “I should like . . .” She breathed deeply, her breasts tightening the simple fabric, a contrast of purity and voluptuous temptation. “I should like you to touch me, you know. No one has since you. That time.” She whispered, “I wish . . . you would.”

He acted then without thought, with only the instinct that had saved him dozens, perhaps hundreds of times in dangerous situations: he scooped her up in his arms and strode toward the stairs.

She was soft and light, and urgency made him quick. He ascended the narrow risers before he’d time to think, to alter his course. Setting her on her feet with an arm around her, he reached for the door handle. Honeysuckle and sage hovered about her unbound hair, filling his head, and his hand brushed the underside of her unbound breast. For a moment—barely a moment—he succumbed. He pulled her close, fitting her body to his. He bent to her, sank his nose into her hair, and breathed her in. Sweet and musky and silken soft. The scents and sensation of lust. Of longing. Of everything he’d fought so hard to forget.

God’s blood,
what was he doing?

Against his neck she murmured words, or perhaps only sounds of pleasure. His hands found her shoulders, her back through the linen, spreading, touching—after eleven years waking to the memory of her.

He opened the door.

He would regret this.
Of course
he would.

In a single stride he carried her to the bed, untangled her arm from about his neck, and left before the maid could rouse from sleep. Closing the door, he descended the stairs to the taproom and the unfinished bottle of whiskey.

Chapter 7

The Prince of Night

S
omeone had dropped every book of Holy Scripture on her skull from a very great height. Or an anvil. Eleanor’s head throbbed, and a pudding that had been stored in the chicken coop had wrapped itself about her tongue.

The whiskey had put her to sleep. That she’d no memory of returning to her bedchamber she must now store away in her private room of shame that no one else ever entered.

She dragged her head and then the rest of her body from bed. Sunlight cut a long, sharp angle through the shutters. Betsy had gone, leaving clothes laid out on a chair, including a pair of boots fashioned of soft, rust-colored leather with delicate silver buckles. The traveling boots Taliesin had taken from her on the beach were not to be seen.

She dressed with fumbling fingers, then slid her feet into the new shoes and with an aching head left the inn. The sleepy little village boasted only a dozen shops and few cottages. She’d spoken to people in every one of them the day before, with no luck. One woman had suggested she search in the church records, but her husband said the church flooded in a storm in ’08; all the records had been carried out to sea.

Eleanor went toward the archway to the stable, her borrowed boots making each step a pleasure.

The clopping of shod hooves upon cobbles sounded nearby, and Taliesin appeared beneath the archway, leading a horse by either hand. The stallion jerked its head at her. The other horse, a sleek young chestnut mare with four milky socks and a blaze between her eyes, tilted her face to the man guiding her as though seeking his attention, or perhaps approval from him.

Eleanor’s breaths left her in tiny bits of memory. Seeing him like this, years ago beneath the shadow of tree cover, she had invented a story.

In some ancient past, the moon had wagered the sun that she could bear a son of such dark beauty, with hair black as a Saracen’s and eyes like shining opals, that forever after all who saw him would be jealous of the night. The moon’s boast came true; the Prince of Night was born to her, black-eyed and handsome as the stars. Conceding defeat, the regal sun gifted the boy with wisdom and strength, so that every creature would be drawn to him and find happiness.

For his part, the prince loved only one maiden, as fair and frail as he was dark and strong, and as ordinary as he was beautiful. Confined in a bower of twining vines that she could not escape, the maiden waited for him, and each day he would come. She knew she was loved and, never fearing to lose him, she rejoiced in his visits, however brief they were. But secretly she hoped that one day he would destroy the vines and take her with him.

A fanciful tale written by an infatuated girl the season before Taliesin had left St. Petroc without a word.

He halted. “Good morning.” It seemed a question.

“When did you return?”

“Late.”

Where did you go?
“I’m looking for Betsy.”

“She has gone to the cobbler’s to demand that he return your old shoes.”

“Demand? Why? Did—” A jolt of understanding. “Did you purchase these?” She poked a toe out from beneath her skirt. “I did not ask you to.”

“You left your shoes in my keeping. I found them in need of replacement.”

“I . . .” She had not precisely left them in his keeping. In panic she had fled him. Unprecedented lack of care. But he had always made her do things she’d never done before. “These are very fine shoes. Too fine for me.”

“Your sister is a duchess.”

“And yet, remarkably enough, I am not.”

A smile crooked the corner of his mouth. It pained her that after all these years he could simply show that confident humor and her eyeballs became glued in place staring at him. His lips were too fine, his smile too provoking.

He started forward again, drawing the horses into the sunlight. “Betsy confronted me at breakfast to demand that I return your shoes. She believed that I stole them.” He looked over his shoulder. “You have a valiant guardian. My compliments to your duchess sister.”

But she had the suspicion that Arabella had not intended Betsy as her protector. Rather, the opposite. Arabella had been too eager in urging Taliesin to assist in this journey.

Her sisters had never understood how it was between her and Taliesin. How it had been. They didn’t know. No one knew but them.

“Betsy doesn’t like you,” she said.

“I think I had noticed that.”

“Taking my shoes didn’t help.”

“I will remember that the next time I seek to ingratiate myself to a sixteen-year-old lady’s maid.”

“You should not have taken it upon yourself to buy me new shoes.”

He turned, the horses’ hooves clacking on the stones. “You did not tell me that your shoes had been ruined by your walk in the rain on the moor two nights ago.”

“Why should I have?”

“Perhaps you prefer to go about barefoot.”

“I don’t.”

“Last night in the taproom was an exception, then?”

The taproom?
Good heavens
. “I was . . . foxed.”

The grin deepened at the side of his mouth. “First chocolate. Then whiskey. What will it be next, I wonder?”

Him
. She wanted to drink him, to pour him into her mouth and taste him on her tongue and get drunk on him. Her cheeks felt as hot as the flames of hell, where she was surely headed. “You are impertinent.”

“If I had a shilling for every time I’ve heard you say those words to me . . .”

“You would be a rich man. But you seem well off enough without those extra shillings.” If he cut his hair and removed the silver rings in his ears he would look like any other comfortably settled gentleman, dressed with easy elegance. His skin would mark him out, of course, and the spark of danger in his black eyes—the spark that coaxed something buried deep in her to the surface. “Still—”

“I wasn’t the one drinking whiskey alone in a taproom last night.” His horse snorted as though chuckling.

“Did I do anything that . . . well, that I should not have? Say anything?” Vague recollections tugged at her. But they must have been dreams. She would never have said anything like that to him in reality, even foxed.

“What would you have said that I have not heard before, do you imagine?” He said it like a caress.

Her face was hot. “It isn’t right that you bought shoes for me. I will repay you.”

“You owe me a prize.”

“A prize?”

“You ran from the water first yesterday.”

“But I was in the water longer than you.” But she had fled from the beach. When he had touched her, she had not been up to the challenge. And he knew it. “All right. I concede,” she said. “But if the prize goes to you, then I should be buying you shoes.”

“My prize will be that you are comfortably shod.”

“But—”

“Enough arguing. It is my prerogative to choose whatever prize I like.”

And then she remembered: A boy’s bare feet stained with ash and dirt, and cracked from the cold of winter. Her papa’s oldest shoes, and his instruction to cut them into scraps that could be used to mend book bindings. But she had not done as her papa asked. Instead, in secret, she gave the village cobbler all the pennies she had saved. Three days later she left the repaired shoes in the barn.

“Thank you.” She could not look at him. “Where is the carriage?” She turned to the mews and marched forward. “It’s nearly nine o’clock. Shouldn’t we be off soon if we are to make any headway toward the next village today?”

“Treadwell is harnessing the team now. I thought you wished to ride.” He drew the mare forward and the animal sidestepped, keeping her head close to his arm. The horse wore a lady’s sidesaddle.

Her eyes rounded. “Is she what you went to fetch last night? But I didn’t think— That is to say, I thought . . .”

“You thought that you could not have what you wished. You were drinking whiskey in a public room at midnight last night. Nothing holds you back from mere riding now.”

Stifling the smile that wanted to tear open her lips, she put her hand beneath the horse’s nose. The mare’s snuffle tickled her palm. Taliesin proffered the leathers and her fingers itched to grab them.

“Where did you hire her?” she said, barely above a whisper.

“I didn’t hire her.” He grasped her hand and placed the reins in it, then released her. He drew his horse into the sunlight. “And before you add your accusations to your maid’s, I didn’t steal her either.”

Fingers curling around the leather straps, Eleanor swung her head around. “When did you purchase her?”

“I sent the Hodges’ boy to retrieve her yesterday.”

“From where?”

“A stable I know of to the south.” He swept her toe-to-shoulder with a swift glance. “Have you suitable garments for riding?”

“Yes, but—”

“Are you unhappy to be able to ride?”

“I am not.” It was his business, of course, to buy and sell horses. She mustn’t think anything of it. “Did you purchase her so that I could ride? Because I said that I wished to?”

Releasing the reins of his horse, he walked toward her, the giant black beast remaining where he left it like a dog ordered to stay. Taliesin came to her and she forced back the urge to retreat. This close, he made her feel weak, unsteady, tangled inside, and overflowing with happiness.

“Two nights ago you claimed that you wished to break free of your bonds.” His dark gaze moved across her features. “Was that all bravado?”

Her heart rattled like Gypsy tambourines. “I can ride as well as you. For an hour or for a day.”

The corner of his mouth curved upward. “I suppose we’ll see, won’t we?”

Betsy appeared from a shop along the lane. “The cobbler has already dismantled your shoes to use for other purposes. The
gentleman
here told him to do so.” She set a narrow eye on Taliesin.

Eleanor looked at him. “You told him to?”

“If you are to do this, there’s no turning back,” he said.

No turning back
. He meant more with these words. He meant no going back to the girl with the cage around her life.

“No turning back,” she said.

In his smile was both danger and beauty.

THE
SUN
SHONE
brilliantly over the wind-battered road that curled around hills fronting the ocean, meandering between farms quiet in this season, dotted with sheep and cows and scrubby winter green. The mare’s gait proved smooth and even. Taliesin would never acquire a horse of inferior quality.

He rode behind her, the carriage far back on the road. She suspected she was fanciful to imagine it, but she felt him watching her. It made her giddy, her nerves singing from the sunshine on her cheeks, the reins in her hands, and the beautiful horse beneath her. And the man.

He’d bought her a horse. To use on this journey only, of course.

But he’d bought her a horse.

She looked over her shoulder and her heart flipped upside down. Taliesin lifted his gaze without any show of discomfort at having been discovered staring at her behind. She knew she should be offended; any modest woman would be. But she was not modest, only pretending for years. Her hands conveyed her pleasure to the mare. The animal sidestepped.

“Certain you can handle her?” he said with a lifted brow.

“Most assuredly.” She bit her lip. “Like Eleanor of Aquitaine handled her mount while leading the Crusaders on to victory.” Legends told of the queen going bare-breasted to inspire the army.

Taliesin knew this. Eleanor knew he knew this. They’d read of it together when she’d been far too young to understand the significance of it.

“I should like to see that,” he said.

“Should you like to see the dirt that this mare tosses up at you as I beat you to the crest of that hill?” She pointed.

“Are you challenging me to a race?”

“Of course.”

He laughed. “You’re challenging
me
? To a race on horseback?”

“I am. Are you up to it, Mr. Wolfe?” She gathered the reins. With salty wind tugging at her bonnet and the road stretching like a twisting band of possibility, she took off.

HE
WAS
UP
to it. After appreciating every nuance of the curve of her behind settled in the saddle, and blessing the thinness of her cloak that defined those nuances, he was up to much more than a ride on a horse. How a woman in a plain dress and unremarkable cloak, with her hair bound in a prim knot beneath a bonnet suited to a country spinster, could rouse him as she did . . .

But he knew her to be more than she allowed herself to appear. She had never been perfect. She had been willful and proud and prone to secrecy and far too intrigued by a poor Gypsy boy than a vicar’s daughter should be.

He pressed his heels into Tristan’s sides and started after her. The road was even and hard and her pace quick. Astonishingly quick. He’d known the mare could run, but he hadn’t quite realized the woman still could. As a novice years ago she’d ridden superbly. He should have anticipated this.

She pulled away swiftly, her cloak billowing and her laughter tumbling through the sea wind. A gust swept across the hill, her skirts billowing to the side. With a snap, the prim little bonnet went flying. She did not release the reins to grab for it, or slow. The mare’s gallop remained steady, fast, directed. They were halfway to the crest of the hill already. Eleanor intended to win.