I Loved a Rogue The Prince Catchers (9 page)

Tristan shook his mighty head, playing the bit, impatient to be off.

“Can’t let the ladies have it, can we, my friend?” Taliesin murmured to his horse.

The mare proved no match for the stallion. In a scant quarter mile he passed her. Taliesin looked over his shoulder and Eleanor was laughing.

Laughing
.

On the hill’s apex he pulled his horse to a halt, dismounted, and turned to watch the woman and mare come. Breaking to a canter, Eleanor lifted a hand and swept sunlit locks from her cheeks. Her eyes glittered above flushed cheeks and her lips were parted, every feature brilliant with exhilaration and joy. And in the moment it required Taliesin to draw a single breath, he was right back where he’d stood when he first knew that he would always love her.

He’d spent the winter and spring teaching her how to ride—she not even a woman at fifteen, he barely a man. Galloping one day she fell off, but with wisdom and sufficient experience to direct her fall into a hill of fresh straw. Her landing proved easy. Gasping for air and eyes alight, she had laughed and laughed at her failure, tears of mirth dribbling down her cheeks as his heart raced
.
He’d said she’d grown too bold. She replied that it was because of him, that she would not have left the house all winter if he had not promised to teach her how to ride.

At that moment, he had known that whatever came—wherever his wandering life took him, and whatever she did to push him away as she always did—he would never stop loving her.

Stammering, he’d told her she was pretty. She laughed harder, called him an idiot, and lifted her hands for him to help her from the straw. He took her up and never wanted to let her go.

That night at the May Day festival, beneath the old oak in shadows cut by slivers of moonlight through branches, he kissed her for the first time. Years of dreaming and finally he found the courage. She did not shy away or object, but offered up her lips, pure and sacred, as the altar upon which he might worship. He’d known he shouldn’t, that miles separated him from a gentleman’s daughter, that she was his superior in every way. And yet she allowed him to kiss her, simply, briefly. Afterward, the promise in her eyes and playful smile on her lips carried him through the summer traveling through Devonshire with his uncle’s family.

He’d been a fool. A young fool who’d known the absolute folly of his hopes, yet had hoped them anyway.

Watching her now he could force no words to his tongue, no taunt or even praise. He hadn’t been tongue-tied in eleven years. Only this woman could do it to him.

“Well?” Gold dusted her eyes. “Aren’t you going to gloat over your victory?”

He released Tristan and went to her horse’s side. “Would it suit you if I behaved unsportsmanlike now?”

She unhooked her knee from the pommel to dismount. He lifted his arms and as naturally as if it hadn’t been a decade since she’d last done so, she came down into his hands. Her waist was slender, the curve of her ribs soft.

She looked up into his eyes, her cheeks rosy with life. “You might marvel at what a bruising rider I have become.”

“I might, if I ever used such a word.” He held her beneath her arms and she did not seek to disengage herself.

“Bruising?” She laughed. “Isn’t that word in your Gypsy lexicon?”

He spent so little time with other Rom now, he barely knew. He knew nothing, in fact, with her so close. The sunshine tangled in her hair that had come loose. His brain was shutting down, her body in his hands and her scent of wind and sea and honeysuckle all he knew.

“What a bruising rider you have become, Miss Caulfield.” His voice scraped.

“I think I learned it so that I could gallop away from the life I was living if ever I wished to. I have done that, leaving my family to come on this ridiculous quest. I am doing that now.” Her eyes widened. “Why have I told you this?”

“Because you know that I won’t condemn you for it. I want my prize.”

“Your prize?”

“For winning this challenge.”

“Oh.” Her breaths were swift. “But you have the stronger mount, and I am riding sidesaddle. This contest was not fair.”

“Excuses? It seems you are shrinking from this adventure already.”

Her eyes flashed. “I will win the next challenge. All right. You won this time. What prize will you claim?”

No single pair of pink lips should be so tempting.

“I claim a kiss.”

The pink lips parted. Her gaze darted back and forth. “Wouldn’t you rather I rub down your horse when we come to the next village? Or perhaps conjugate a few dozen Latin verbs?”

“That wouldn’t be very courageous of you, would it?”

“No one said the prizes must require me to be courageous, only the challenges.” She spoke breathlessly, her eyes everywhere but on his. “And why you imagine that allowing you to kiss me would require courage of me, I haven’t the foggiest.”

“You are afraid.” God’s blood, he hoped she was too afraid to meet this challenge. Because he was quite certain that he was now stepping into the biggest mistake he’d made in eleven years.

Chapter 8

The First Kiss

“I
’m not afraid,” Eleanor whispered. The wind swirled about her, whipping her skirts about his long legs where he trapped her between the horse and temptation. Her cheeks were fire, her hands ice. A half grin of brazen male confidence curved Taliesin’s lips and she could no longer look away from them. They were perfect and she wanted, finally, to feel them against hers one more time. If she died an old spinster, at least she would die having kissed the most perfect lips in Christendom twice. Thrice, if she found the courage now.

“You aren’t up to it,” he said. “All dreams and no daring, is that it,
piran
—”

She pushed onto her toes and pressed her mouth to his.

There she thought it would end. But before she even had time to register the softness of his lips, the scent of his skin that she had remembered every night of her life for eleven years, his hand came around the back of her head, and he held her mouth to his and truly kissed her.

Coming home
. Thrilling. Frightening. His lips upon hers the only reality.

He kissed her without haste, briefly first, and then again, as though tasting her. Warmth spread in her belly. Shame warred with it, and she could not look at him.
She wanted this too much
. Her eyes closed. Voluntarily blinded, she allowed herself to feel his strength and taste his flavor and know the closeness of him that she had dreamed about for years. She fed on sips of him and longed to feast.

She didn’t entirely remember how it should be done; she had never really known. But he made it easy. Caressing her lips slowly, softly, he let her feel him. Then he took more. With his mouth he guided hers open and she felt all the heat of a summer day. She sank into him, touching him with only her lips as he held her securely with his hands, and she wept inside that
this
was the only thing he made easy for her. This caress. This intimate touching of lips and, fleetingly, tongues.

His hand came around her jaw and he urged her lips farther apart, and the kiss changed. His fingers threaded through her hair, his tongue her tormenter now, giving then taking away. He made her seek him, licking, drinking,
drinking him
, but never enough. Heat and need were everywhere and she felt as stripped and vulnerable as though she stood upon the hill naked, yet as powerful as a goddess. He
wanted
this. He wanted to kiss her.

The pad of his thumb passed along her cheekbone, his breath upon her lips, his lips touching hers again, claiming deeply, powerfully, as though he needed this too. Needed her.

Through the moan of the wind, the clatter of hooves and carriage wheels came from a distance. He released her.

Her eyes popped open to see him stepping back.

“Acceptable winnings,” he said in a low voice.

“That wasn’t an agreed-upon prize,” she said, biting his flavor with her teeth.

“There were no agreed-upon prizes.” He pivoted slowly on one fine boot heel, turning to his horse. “But if you’re worried you will continue to lose, feel free to cancel this game at any time.”

“I told you it isn’t a game.” There were no steady words in her throat. “And I will win next time.”

“Then I will look forward to you claiming your prize.” With a crooked grin, he took up the reins of his horse.

She sucked in salty wind, feeding now on the distance from him. “How am I to mount again?”

“There is a farmhouse ahead. We will walk there and stop for luncheon.” He drew his horse from the grass beside the road. “It isn’t far. It will allow you time to still your shaking knees before attempting to ride again.”

“My knees are not shaking.”
A lie
.

He offered her a skeptical brow and started up the road.

Fumbling with the reins, she drew them over the mare’s ears. “This horse is a splendid runner. What is her name?”

“Iseult,” he said over his shoulder.

A prickling tingle went up the back of her neck where he had held her. “And yours?”

“Tristan.”

Her throat closed, but the wind separating them now as he walked ahead like he owned the road made it difficult for her to respond anyway.

Iseult, a princess of medieval tales. Tristan, a knight of Cornwall devoted to her, whose love was thwarted by a powerful king.

Somehow the scandalous adventure story of passion, magic, and betrayal had found its way into her papa’s collection. She and Taliesin read nearly every book in his library, competing to prove which of them could read them all before the other. The story of Tristan and Iseult had been Taliesin’s favorite. At the time, young and naïve, she hadn’t understood why.

A shout came from behind. A boy rode a pony toward them. Passing the carriage, he raced forward.

“Miss!” he called. “Sir! Hold up!” He reined in, pulling off his cap to bow from the saddle. “Beggin’ your pardon, miss, but my pa got to thinking today about what you asked him about that wreck. He sent me to tell you he’d remembered something you might like to know.”

“You are the smith’s son, aren’t you? What did your father remember?”

“He said that a year or so back he had a visit from a fellow over at Drearcliffe who wanted him to break open an old box he’d found washed ashore. The thing was solid lead and soldered shut and he couldn’t make heads or tails of it all sealed up like that.”

“Drearcliffe? I don’t know that village. Where is it?”

“Not a village, miss. It’s old Sir Wilkie’s place, ’bout four miles inland by the crow. Pa says you could go lookin’ there. Sir Wilkie might have more old boxes like the one he wanted opened.”

“What was in the box?”

“Papers and such.” He wagged his head sorrowfully. “No treasure, miss.”

Papers
. From a box sealed in lead. Ships carried such boxes to protect the contents from water.

“Thank you. You have been very helpful.” She smiled. But the boy’s face only lit when Taliesin put a coin in his palm. The boy doffed his hat again, turned the pony about, and spurred it toward home.

Taliesin turned his attention upon her and quite abruptly she found her tongue useless. Her tongue that wanted to taste his again.

He bowed elegantly. “I await your command, my lady.”

“Don’t call me that. It’s silly.”

He laughed. “You really haven’t changed, have you?”

If he meant that his teasing still drove her insane, and that she always wanted his black eyes upon her, then she had not in fact changed.

“To Drearcliffe?” she said. “Can you find the way?”

A hint of a smile showed again at the corner of his mouth. “I can find my way anywhere, princess. That is, after all, what I’m here for.”

To help her make her way along the coast in the footsteps of Arabella and Luc’s unsuccessful investigator. But Drearcliffe was not on the investigator’s itinerary, just as kisses atop windswept hills weren’t on hers.

Gathering the mare’s reins and drawing her hood up about her ears, she ducked her head into the wind. Eyes on his shoulders, she followed him.

SHE
HAD
NEVER
wanted to touch another man.

Years ago the squire’s son, Thomas Shackelford, had tried to kiss her, the first time when she asked him to teach her how to drive his curricle. He let her drive them out of the village, then he’d taken the reins and slowed the carriage before putting his arm around her shoulders and his mouth on hers. She had pushed him away, and he had stiffly begged her pardon. But the following week he tried it again. At Christmas that year, after too much punch at his family’s caroling party, he made another attempt.

Once one of her papa’s tutoring students visiting St. Petroc for the term break from university had taken her hand while walking in the garden. He had tried to draw her near. She’d never regretted rejecting him.

Only once in her life had she ever wanted a man to touch her. Only once had she ever wanted to touch him too.

Late in her seventeenth year, a wave of heat beset northern Cornwall that had every window closed and everybody indoors in the cool shade of stone. The harvest was due in shortly, but the sun beat down on that September like a flogging to the earth. Not a soul stirred in fields or pastures.

Not a soul except the Gypsy boy who had worked at the vicarage every day of every autumn, winter, and spring since Eleanor had lived there. Sitting beneath the cherry tree heavy with fruit, writing in her notebook and trying not to drift off to sleep in the heat, she looked up and saw him walking toward the garden gate. She hadn’t seen him since the night of May Day four months earlier when he kissed her. She hadn’t even known that his family had returned to St. Petroc.

He did not open the gate, but halted on the other side of it and said, “Come for a walk.”

No greeting. Nothing except what she had wanted for four months and what frightened her the most—to be alone with him again. Nerves spinning, she set down her pencil and notebook and went.

They walked for hours, talking and laughing, a little flushed, each of them uncertain, she thought. They had known each other for years, doing chores and studying side-by-side, and he’d taught her to ride. But they had never done this. They had never simply been together for the sake of that alone. When she looked aside at him as they walked, she felt like she was tumbling through air.

Indeed, she could not stop looking at him. Something had changed in him over the summer. His hair was still far too long, his eyes still like coal, his jaw steeply angled and skin darker than ever from the summer sun. He didn’t look like an Englishman and yet she thought he was the most beautiful creature she had ever seen. She had never wanted to stare at Thomas Shackelford. She had never wanted to walk forever with him, or with any other boy.

The woods with their shadows beckoned and they found themselves in a clearing with a pond. The day sweltered, heat radiating in the dapples of sunlight between the trees, flowers in riotous bloom in the humid air, bees buzzing about and dragonflies speeding between water reeds.

“That water looks heavenly.” She dabbed moisture from her brow with a kerchief. She wanted to dab her neck and lip too, but she was not allowed to touch any intimate part of herself in a boy’s presence, even if she was dripping.

He looked at her for a moment, a peculiar study she did not understand. Then he unfastened the top button of his coat.

“We may as well cool off.” One button after another loosened until the coat hung open and her mouth hung agape. Gypsy men always went around bundled up to their chins with shirts, waistcoats, coats, neck cloths, overcoats, and hats. Taliesin rarely wore a hat, preferring to turn girls’ heads with his satiny black locks, she supposed. And she’d seen his poorly shod feet plenty of times. But she had never seen a Gypsy man remove so much as a kerchief from his pocket.

Now he removed his coat entirely. Then he pulled off his boots.

She stared. She knew she should not watch him undress, but desperate curiosity seized her. She resisted it, turning away as if to study the pond and clamping her attention on it.

“Cool off in that?” she said with forced skepticism.

“Where else?”

She heard something drop to the ground. A garment? She peeked. His waistcoat lay on the grass with his coat. He was unknotting his neck cloth.

“I suppose it would be refreshing to dip my toes in.” The thought of removing her shoes in his presence made her heartbeats thump. And Papa would scold if she caught a chill. Her lungs could not endure it. But the day sweltered, and her shoes pinched dreadfully. Cooling her feet would feel spectacular. “For a minute, perhaps.”

“Not only your toes,
pirani
.” She could always hear it in his voice when he laughed at her.

“What?” She looked around at him. “Do you think I should wade all the way into this pond? As though I were bathing at the sea?” She’d been to the seaside but was never allowed to bathe. The water was too cold, Papa said, and her constitution too weak. Still, she longed to. But this was just a puddle, really. In such heat it couldn’t possibly harm her.

“I do.” His neck was exposed, dark and sinewy with strength, his hair falling around his shirt collar.

“With you?” Dragonflies alighted in her belly now. “At the same time as you?”

He smiled slightly, provokingly. “Frightened?”

She laughed derisively. “Of three feet of water?”

Slowly he shook his head.

“Of you?” She gulped. Then she jerked her chin away and crossed her arms. “Never.”

“Then why not? Nobody’s around for miles. No one will know.”

No one will know
. Like no one knew anything of this. Of them. Of the time they spent alone together. The winter and spring before, she hadn’t told anyone about him teaching her how to ride—not her papa or Ravenna or even Arabella, who wasn’t shy with boys. Her sisters cared for Taliesin like a brother, and Papa held him in great affection. Still, she couldn’t tell them, and not only because Papa didn’t want her exerting herself.