On My Lady's Honor (All for one, and one for all) (23 page)

He would not attack her – not even to defend himself.
 
With a last, frantic lunge, she broke through and scored him in the pit of the belly with the tip of her sword.

He looked up at her, surprise and disappointment written all over his face.
 
“You cut me.”
 
He sounded as if he could not quite believe it.

She had not meant to cut him quite so hard – just to prove to him that she could.
 
Guilt made her defensive.
 
“What else did you expect.
 
We were fighting and you would not defend yourself.”

He put his hand over his stomach, and when he drew it away again, blood was dripping off his fingers.
 
He looked at the blood with a puzzled eye.
 
“I did not think that a woman would do this to me.”

Sophie gazed at the blood in horror.
 
She had meant only to provoke him into forgetting that she was a woman and fighting her soldier to soldier.
 
She had meant to wound only his pride, not to seriously hurt him.
 
She tossed away her sword and fell to her knees in front of him to see how badly he was hurt.
 

Blood was seeping from under his tunic.
 
She wanted to be sick at the sight of it.
 
“Lie down,” she commanded him in a shaky voice.
 
“You are hurt.
 
You need to be attended to.”

With unaccustomed obedience, he stretched out on his back in the dirt, his face unusually white.
 
“I don’t know that I trust you to treat the wound you caused in the first place,” he grumbled.
 
“You are a vicious woman.
 
You’ll be the death of me yet.”

With fumbling fingers, she pulled open his jerkin and unbuttoned the white linen shirt he wore underneath.
 
She cut through the lacing of his breeches with her dagger and pulled the fabric back to expose the wound she had made.
 
The shirt was ruined with blood anyway, so she tore a strip off the hem and dabbed away the blood that seeped out of the cut.

The cut was long but not deep, and the bleeding had nearly stopped already.
 
She felt her stomach settle as she realized that she had done him no lasting damage.
 
“It could be worse,” she said as she started to bind him up with more strips torn off his shirt.

She liked the look of him without his shirt, she decided as she bandaged him up.
 
His chest was a deep golden brown with well-defined muscles.
 
Her fingers itched to run her hands over his chest, over his hard, flat stomach, and into the curls of golden hair that peeked through the opening of his breeches.

She stopped herself just in time.
 
She couldn’t do that.
 
They had agreed that he was her husband in name only.
 
She had no right to touch him.
 
Besides, it would be asking for trouble to let him see her curiosity about his body.
 
“You won’t die of it.”

He looked aggrieved at her lack of sympathy.
 
“I might.”

Her composure had returned now that she was satisfied she had not hurt him.
 
“No man worth his salt would die of such a pathetic little scratch.
 
I doubt it will even leave a scar.”

“Sacre bleu.
 
Is that all the sympathy I get?
 
If you had caught me an inch or two lower down, I wouldn’t be a man at all anymore.”

She gave a snort of laughter which she hastily muffled in the sleeve of her jacket.
 
No wonder his face was white.
 
No man could face the fear of being unmanned with any equanimity.
 
She leaned over and patted him gently on his groin.
 
“Don’t worry, Monsieur, your manhood is still intact, as far as I can tell.”

He gave a grunt of annoyance.
 
“Men do not cut other men below the navel in case the favor is returned one day.”

She leaned over him to secure the bandages.
 
“In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m not a man.”

He gave a pointed glance at her chest, just inches from the tip of his nose.
 
“How could I possibly forget?”

She sat back on her heels again to remove her chest to a safer distance from where he could not ogle it so obviously.
 
“Besides, I did not mean to hurt you badly, just to shake you up a little.”

“Kiss it to make it better, then, and I will be happy.”

She glared at him.
 
What pathetic kind of plea was that? “Soldiers do not kiss other soldiers to make their booboos better.”

He screwed up his face in disappointment.
 
“But wives kiss their husbands better when the poor men have been wounded in battle with fierce, bloodthirsty Amazons.”

She took a quick look around.
 
No one was in the courtyard.
 
She leaned down and, under pretence of adjusting his dressings, planted a light kiss on his scratched belly. .
 
Then, before she succumbed to the temptation to kiss him again, she knotted the lacings of his breeches together as best she could and pulled his jerkin shut.
 
“There now.
 
I thank you for the compliment you made me in calling me an Amazon, and I have paid in full for wounding you.
 
Are you satisfied?”

He put his hands under his head and looked at her with a measure of triumph in his eyes.
 
“You were worried that you had hurt me and you kissed me to make it better again.
 
I knew you still had some semblance of a true woman about you.”

His idea of true womanhood was so narrow and unenlightened that she wanted to shake him.
 
Could she not be a woman and a soldier both at once?
 
“I was concerned that I had disabled my mentor, that is all.
 
Who but you can teach me all I need to know?”
 
She swatted him lightly on the shoulder as she squatted next to him on the dusty ground.
 
“Get up, you lazy lump.
 
I’ve done bandaging you now.
 
Besides, it was only a scratch and we have work to do.”

He didn’t move.
 
“Kiss me again first.”

He was teasing her and she didn’t know what to do with him.
 
“Why should I do that?” she temporized, not moving any closer to him, but not moving away either.

“Because you hurt me.”

He didn’t exactly look very hurt, lying on his back at his ease in the sunshine with a satisfied grin on his face.
 
“I’ve already kissed you once to make your stomach better.
 
That excuse won’t wash with me.”

He gave a mock frown.
 
“Because you’re my wife, then.”

She frowned in earnest at his words.
 
“In name only.
 
Don’t forget that.”

“Then how about because you have the most beautiful blue eyes in the world and I love to look at them until I feel that I could drown in their cool depths.”

“How poetic.
 
Unfortunately, I have no feeling for poetry.
 
You should save your fine words for the tavern girls – they have more use for them than I do.”
 
Despite her mocking dismissal, she couldn’t help feeling disturbed by his words.
 
Jean-Luc had never mentioned her eyes.
 
He had complimented her on the sharpness of her vision and on her accuracy with a bow, but she doubted he even knew that her eyes were blue.
 
She had no remembrance of what color Jean Luc’s eyes had been – if indeed she had ever known.
 
She had been too intent on admiring the daring way he rode his horse to worry over much about his eyes.
 
It felt strange to be appreciated for something so ephemeral and impractical as the color of her eyes.

He took her hand in his, holding her fingers lightly in his own.
 
“You have beautiful eyes.
 
Just like your brother’s, only even more blue.”

She looked at him suspiciously, but his voice was all sincerity.
 
His eyes were beautiful, too.
 
They were a deep green with flecks of tawny gold and surrounded by a band of darker tawny gold around the edge.
 
Truly beautiful eyes, like the green of the marshes, glinting in the sunlight in her home in the Camargue.
 
“You have green eyes just like a cat.”

He laughed delightedly, showing his white teeth.
 
“Then we are well-matched, you and I.
 
I have the eyes of a cat, and you have a wildcat’s sharp claws.”

“Female cats are the most vicious killers,” she reminded him, as she rose to her feet and stretched out his hand to help him up.
 
“You should remember that in future before you ask them for a kiss.”

He held on to her hand as he leapt lightly to his feet, showing not a sign of discomfort from the scratch on his stomach.
 
“You have given me graphic proof of that – twice.
 
I shall not dare forget again, or I will be a dead man.”

She raised her sword in front of her.
 
“So you will forget that I am a woman and fight me properly this afternoon?”

“I could never forget that you are a woman. but I will endeavor to fight you as if you were a man.”
 
He rubbed his arm when she had wounded him the first time and patted his belly a little gingerly.
 
With a slight grimace he bent over and picked his sword up from the ground.
 
“Indeed, I dare not do otherwise.”

She attacked him before he finished speaking.
 
He defended himself vigorously this time, testing her defenses whenever she left him an opening to do so.

Within a minute he had disarmed her with a flick of his wrist that jarred every bone in her arm.
 
Dispite her discomfort, she smiled to herself in triumph as she bent down to pick up her sword from the dust.
 
She had won that battle.
 
He would see her as a danger and treat her as a soldier now.
 
She had seen to that.

After half an hour’s swordplay, she put up her sword and held her side for a moment to catch her breath again.
 
“That’s better,” she said, as soon as she could speak again.
 
“I did not like being treated as a child.”

A movement from the shadows caught her eye and she turned her head to look.
 
A figures dressed in a dark cloak and hat was signaling with furtive desperation in her direction.
 
She sighed.
 
She was enjoying her lesson immensely, but she was a Musketeer and sworn to help those in need.
 
“Excuse me a moment.
 
It seems I have some business to attend to.”

Lamotte followed the direction of her glance to where the dark figure waited in the shadows.
 
“With him?”

She nodded.
 
“It seems so.”

He glowered at her.
 
“What business do you have with other men, wife?”

She ignored his last whispered word.
 
“I’ll be back soon enough.”
 
She strode over to the shadowy figure in the corner of the yard.
 
Lamotte followed her, a couple of paces behind.
 
“You want me?”

The man blanched at her direct approach.
 
He pulled his hat further down on his head and wrapped his cloak over all his face but his eyes.
 
“I would speak with you only, not with your fellow.”

She looked at Lamotte, a question in her eyes, but he shook his head.
 
“Where you go, so do I,” he said softly.
 
“Even vicious wildcats need someone at their back.”

She turned back to the stranger.
 
“I will vouch for his trustworthiness.
 
Whatever you say to me, you may say to him as well.
 
Go on.”

The stranger looked sideways at Lamotte, as if trying to make up his mind.
 
After a moment’s reflection, he shrugged his shoulders.
 
“I suppose I have no choice, if you will insist.”

Lamotte looked even more unhappy than the stranger at the situation.
 
“I do insist.”