Defiant (21 page)

“'Tis not your concern.”

“Four?” he pressed.

Heavens! The numbers ran into the double digits. A shaming amount.

Why on earth did he want to know this? Something about his judgmental gaze made her feel as if she’d somehow shown up naked for Mass.

She shuffled her feet, drawing a figure eight in the leaves with her toe.

“Seven?”

She squirmed, then wanted to kick herself for doing so. What right did he have to condemn her! Facing him squarely, she asked, “Why are you no longer a monk? Did they kick you out of the monastery for asking questions which were none of your concern?”

A glimmer of pain touched his eyes and then was gone. He shrugged. “It was not the life for me.”

“I see,” she said, trying to match his tone of condemning judgment.

“Have you had nine offers of marriage?”

A pox on him and his bloody questions.

“I have not counted them.” But she had. Twenty-six offers of marriage and she had managed to manipulate her way out of each of them. So, why did this man’s assessment of it bother her so? He was a man like all others. Nay, he was even worse: a monk who had repudiated his vows, been found unworthy of God.

Never care about a man’s opinion, Irma had instructed. They are mindless dolts who care only about their fleshly desires.

But, although ‘twas obvious that Jared desired her, he did not seem particularly inclined to act on that. He appeared to be in complete control of himself.

She flipped her hair over her shoulder in an effort to distract him, get him to lose some of that iron control.

His mustache twitched downward as he gave her a look of searing disapproval. As if he were an abbot rather than a man who had been tossed out of a monastery.

Mercy. Other men tripped over their feet when she so much as looked at them for too long, but it seemed that Jared scorned her attention.

Nay. Not scorned. He noticed her as much as other men, but he did not stammer or blush. She twisted a strand of her hair round and round in her fingers and flipped it again.

“If you keep doing that, you might hurt your neck.”

She frowned at him.

His legs were braced apart and wide shoulders bespoke power and control. He stroked his goatee, running his thumb back and forth across his chin. She recalled how he had been the only man to look at her face rather than her cleavage all those years ago at the feast. He looked at her as if he were more interested in actually knowing something about her than any flirtations she did.

“Eleven?”

She tried to nod, but he must have caught the look in her eyes, for he seemed to peer directly into her brain and she knew he would know if she lied.

“More?”

It had been years since anyone made her feel awkward.

He tapped his chin, his long fingers ruffling his goatee.

Her patience snapped. “Twenty-six!” She should be proud of her conquests, but somehow he made her feel ashamed, embarrassed of them. In her mind, she saw the dejected, hurt looks men had given—of how she’d flirted with each of them, batted her eyes, flipped her hair, but turned them down with a flat no. She hadn’t wanted to hurt them, but in her heart she knew she had. Some had given her baubles, some scarves, other small favors. These she always kept, sold them and used the coins to buy more women out of prison. She had reasoned that she had good motivation to use the men—after all, it was generally a man’s fault that the women were imprisoned in the first place.

Jared gave a low whistle. “Twenty-six offers of marriage and you stole a man from a brothel to gain a husband.”

That, too, had been a sacrifice for her women, but Jared would not care about such things. She crossed her arms over her chest. “Do not remind me.”

Abruptly, his hand covered hers and pressed it to the flat bars of the brank. A not-so-subtle warning. “Watch your tone. I am not one of the men you toy with and toss away heedlessly. You belong completely and wholly to me, and you
will
speak respectfully.”

She swallowed past her pride. “Grant pardon, my lord.”

“Did you and Irma poison any of them?”

She slid her foot against the cave’s rock. “Nay.”

“So I was the only one offered that possibility?”

A shame that she had not allowed Irma to follow through. She smiled sweetly. “Best to watch your food.”

His hand tightened atop hers. “Best to watch your tongue.”

She lifted her chin but kept her voice level. “Yes, my lord.”

Their gazes locked.

“We must go soon.”

She glanced around at the walls of the cavern. “Why are you living in a cave?”

“To keep people from finding me.” His shoulders hunched forward.

A wave of apprehension swirled over her. Something dark lurked just beneath his skin. Something frightening. What sort of man had she bound herself to?

“Who is looking for you?”

He opened his mouth to speak, then, apparently changing his mind, closed it. Her heart iced as she gazed into his green eyes.

He was an enigma. A stranger who now owned her.

“What do you mean that people are looking for yo—”

His hand sliced through the air, cutting her off.

The sound of hooves crunched leaves. His shoulders tightened.

“We must go.”

The sun drooped in the sky the same as Gwyneth’s shoulders drooped on her body as they headed for her dower lands. Jared’s chest had been in close contact with her back for what had seemed like hours. In every moment of that time she had felt his every flinch, his every breath, his every motion. His scent—the enticing smell of outdoors and leather—toyed with her senses.

Most of the day, Jared had plied her with question after question about Irma and the brothel, and she was tired from fending them off.

Aeliana flew overhead, following them, and Gwyneth envied her freedom to fly.

The horse, too, was exhausted. It swayed rather than walked, and reminded her of a large, sluggish boat with torn sails.

She wriggled to one side, wanting to lurch from the slow-paced mount and hide in the woods from her captor. The skin beneath Jared’s large hand tingled and her slight wiggle pressed his fingers even closer to the curve of her breasts.

The sun sank and the treetops glowed purple. Her eyes felt gritty, and she longed for a bed.

In typical manner, Jared seemed to be in no hurry to rush along and Gwyneth found herself torn between resentment at their slow pace and fascination that a man could be so patient with a horse.

Her father would sometimes beat his mount so hard with a crop that hair would fly off its haunches.

Spying a patch of green grass, the stallion veered to one side. Jared gently led it back to the middle of the road, disallowing their mount from stopping, but he did not prod the horse to speed up.

“'Twould be faster if we walked,” Gwyneth groused with another resentful look at Aeliana’s freedom to soar. At this pace, nightfall would be upon them afore they reached her castle.

“You wish to walk?” Jared asked.

She shifted slightly. The movement brought his hands even more into awareness, of how his long fingers and wide palms grazed her ribs. Masculine hands.

The heat radiating from him was oppressive, and once again she cursed her bad choice of husband.

Husband. Lord. Master.

Irritation flamed into anger at each familiar turn, at each bend of the road that brought them that much closer to her dower lands. Jared should have been long gone, not bringing her like a prisoner to her own properties.

Her properties. Not his.

She had visions of her people taking one look at her exhausted face and rallying into a war band to rid themselves of the intruder. She took deep breaths to relax, but the nearness of his body grated on her nerves.

Dismayed, she resigned herself to the agonizing ride, looked forlornly at the passing hedgerows, and tried to think up a plan to get herself out of this current predicament. Could she send a missive to Adele? Get Irma to bring poison? Consult Brother Giffard?

The turrets of her keep could be seen now, and hope sprang in her heart as it always did when she saw her lands. Soon she would see the small but neat castle, the green lawn, the whitewashed walls. It was a perfect place for her to build a shelter where women could come for help. All she had to do was be able to manage and control the land in her own right—something that had eluded her for years.

Jared’s heat pressed against her back, reminding her that her latest attempt at gaining control was not going as she had planned at all.

More hedgerows passed.

A foul stench wafted their direction as they passed another bend in the road and her small castle was just ahead.

She covered her nose and mouth. Flies swarmed the area. Garbage clogged the flow of fresh river water into the moat and an oily brown scum floated on the surface of the dark waters of the moat.

Appalled, she sat up on the horse to better scrutinize the area, a perplexed frown worrying her brow. She had not been here in nearly two years, but her estate, small as it was, had always been kept in pristine condition.

The evening sun’s light reflected a murky orange off the scum-crusted water.

Horrified, she peered at what she could see of her keep.

Crumbling walls. Rotting roof. Dead grass.

She nearly choked. Her precious inheritance, her key to an independent life and would-be home for women, was in ruin?

“Sweet holy Mary.” She had been told that her lands were in order! The last time she had seen them, she had overseen a new coat of lime on the walls and the keep had sparkled in the sunlight.

Anger coursed through her in a long, flat wave—at last giving her some energy.

Swiveling her head to better glare at her captor, she addressed Jared sharply. “Stop the horse and dismount.”

“Nay.”

Her shoulders knotted.

For a moment her eyes clouded and the vision of the rundown buildings went fuzzy. She should have been here to take care of things instead of leaving it in the care of men!

“Not much of a keep, lady wife,” Jared drawled. “From what you said afore, I had expected something grander. ”

Grander. It
had
been grander last time she had been here.

She stiffened, made to lurch from her mount, but Jared’s arm around her rib cage prevented the action.

“Let me down,” she demanded again, determined to discover exactly what had happened. She would go straight to the steward.

Jared’s breath whispered against her neck as he pressed her closer to his body. Barbarian!

Sharp pain pierced her palm; her nails dug into the tender pads of her skin.

She shook out her hands, wishing she could shake off being his captive just as easily. She longed to leap off the horse, race to the keep, and exact answers. She craned her neck this way and that, taking in the dilapidated outbuildings and ill-kept grounds. Whole walls had been knocked down. Vines grew in a tangle over the cistern.

Horror pitted in her stomach. It was like a graveyard.

The oddest part of it all was the silence. The utter silence. No workman’s hammer. No seamstress’s gossip. No children playing or dogs barking or chickens clucking.

Where was everyone? Had the keep been raided and everyone dead? Surely she would have gotten a message …

On the heels of horror and apprehension, guilt weighed down her chest. The missives she had received on her properties had indicated that all was well. She’d been betrayed! Lied to.

She should have come here and determined the state of the estate herself! The events of this past year: her father’s exile, her sister’s marriage, being forced by the king to be under Montgomery’s control had kept them all busy and on edge for months.

“Please,” she hissed. “I would like to see about my people.”

They rode farther into the bailey across the patches of overgrown grass. The horse’s slow pace made her feel as though she would jump out of her skin.

“You will stay with me,” Jared said.

She gritted her teeth. ‘Twas so unfair the places of men and women—that men should have control.

“I am not going anywhere,” she reasoned—indeed, where would she go? “I only wish to see about my lands.”

“Lands sorely neglected for quite some time. A few more moments will not matter.”

Men had allowed her castle to deteriorate: The sludge-filled moat, the pockmarked walls, and the crumbling roof were the fault of her brother, her father, and Montgomery. Men who had only their own interests at heart and took no care for the people at all. They had let the land sink into such turmoil! And then lied to her about it!

A woman wearing a dirty muffin cap and wrinkled apron appeared in a doorway at the top of the stone steps that led into the great hall.

Squinting, Gwyneth recognized her as Kaitlyn, one of the senior maids responsible for the running of the keep when the lady of the manor was not in residence.

“Kaitlyn.”

She looked thinner, harder. Older. Her face had more lines on her forehead and her lips seemed to turn down in a permanent frown.

“What happened? Where is everyone?”

With a shrug, the woman gave a questioning look at Jared.

“Where is my steward?” Gwyneth pointed at the dilapidated walls. “What has happened to my keep? Where is—”

In his unhurried pace, Jared’s hands became firm on her rib cage, cutting off the rest of her questions.

“I am the lady’s husband, good woman,” Jared interjected before Gwyneth could gather her wits to finish her sentence.

“I see, my lord.” Kaitlyn bobbed her head, taking in Gwyneth’s disheveled hair and the stains and rips marring the blue silk of her dress with a dispassionate gaze. If she was shocked or upset, it did not show on her wrinkled face. As if she’d faced so many horrors that one more—a small one such as the lady of the keep being disheveled—was naught but a petty grievance.

“The larders are nigh empty, milady, milord. Winter is coming. Irvine died. So did Thomas. Starved for lack of milk. My breasts have no more life in them.”

More weight fell on Gwyneth’s chest until the guilt threatened to consume her. “Children died?”