TheKingsViper (12 page)

That made them all laugh.

“Well,” said her soldier, clearly playing up to his friends,
“I’m not sure I believe you, Freckles. I think we’ve just stumbled across a
Boscian vagrant and a penny whore, off for a knee-trembler at the back of the
livery stables.” His grin broadened and he reached out a finger, hooking down
the front of her blouse, lifting a knife-tip to cut the cord that closed the
neck of the garment. “Let’s have a look see if you’ve got virgin titties
still…”

From the corner of her eye she saw Severin lunge forward
with a bark of rage, until brought short by the dagger at his throat.

She saw her hand rise and slap the soldier’s face so hard
that the spit flew from his lips. Heat burned across her breast, like the touch
of a leaping ember.

“How dare you!” she screeched, as from somewhere deep inside
her all her noblewoman’s battered dignity finally found a way to erupt to the
surface. “Is that how a Mendean guardsman acts? Is that how your mother taught
you to treat a married woman?” She could hear her voice rising higher and
higher and a distant part of her was stunned by the tone of outraged gentility.
The voice seemed unstoppable, it just went on and on. “Aren’t you ashamed of
yourselves?” she finished, emptying her lungs.

Then she waited for him to hit her.

The solder had fallen back in astonishment. It took a moment
for him to react, the color flooding to his face. He took a sharp step toward
her. But by then his companions were guffawing so hard that they could hardly
stand straight. One punched the slapped soldier in the arm, pushing him aside.

“He’s just shitting you, Freckles,” the puncher said, and
then the first soldier laughed too, louder than the others. “He
knows
all the whores in this town! Take your husband back.”

The other knife-man released Severin and shoved him hard at
her. Eloise grabbed him round the neck as he caught her, and without pausing
for thought reached up to kiss him full on the lips out of sheer gratitude.
Then she buried her face in his shoulder. She felt Severin’s arms close round
her in a fierce embrace, pulling her tight against him.

“Good luck, Boscian,” said one of the soldiers. “With a
tongue on her like that, you’re going to need it. She licks your dick, she’ll
cut it to ribbons.” She heard them stomping away toward the street. Neither she
nor Severin moved. Only when the sound of the press gang was no longer audible
did she lift her head.

“Clever,” said Severin. His voice was as dark and soft as
the fur of sables. Eloise braced herself for the backlash, the cold sting of
his disapproval. He would be angry—angry at the soldiers, angry with himself,
angry with her for disgracing herself. It took her a while to work out that
there was only warmth in his expression. She was struggling to know how to
react when a tickling sensation between her breasts distracted her. When she
looked down at herself she saw scarlet.

“Oh!” she said as the burning sensation she’d barely
registered suddenly made sense.

“You’re hurt.” Severin’s hand went to her breast and she
flinched, though not far because he still held her close in his other arm.

“His knife… He caught me…”

“Let me look.” He turned her jaw in his hand. “Head back.
Let me see.”

She knew she shouldn’t let him, but she didn’t want to look
for herself. The glimpse of sodden red cloth had been more than she wanted to
see, and it was so much easier to surrender to his care. She held herself,
barely breathing, as he pulled the damp fabric away from her skin, baring her
almost to the nipple. There was a stinging sensation. His fingers were gentle
on the swell of her breast, probing. She trembled.

“Shush. I’m not going to hurt you, Ella.”

“I know.”

She heard him exhale down his nose. “It’s only a nick,” he
said. “Nothing to worry about. Hey—I’ve had worse accidents shaving.”

She laughed, not because it was funny but because he had
unwound enough to make a joke and she was lightheaded with relief. “Not there,
I think!”

“No.” Her giggle made him smile too. His hand deserted her
breast but brushed her nipple in doing so, and she felt her areola tighten in
response. “So…I tumbled you in the hayloft, did I?”

Eloise felt herself color. That improvised detail had been a
little too close to reality. “I had to say something.”

“Well, I hope we both enjoyed it.”

She caught her breath, making a muted helpless noise. But
before either of them could dwell on his impropriety he moved on.

“And how did you know that stuff about Mendean law? I didn’t
know any of that.”

She couldn’t answer—not while he was holding her like that,
so close that she was almost off balance as she looked up into his face, so
tight that she could feel the warmth of his hard body through their clothes.
Like a lover holding his beloved. Her legs were beginning to feel oddly weak.
She put one hand on his breastbone and pushed gently, to let him know he should
let her go.

His embrace didn’t slacken.

She felt like she was melting against him, growing softer as
he grew harder—and the full implications of that were not yet clear to her, but
clamoring for her attention.

“Well, why should you?” she said to gain time. “What
practical value could it possibly be to you?”

He arched a brow, waiting.

“Edith told me,” she admitted then, sadly. “My womanservant
Edith was Mendean, the wife of one of their noblemen. She was brought to Venn,
oh…years ago. In Henrick’s time. As a hostage. Her baby son was with her, but
he died. They made her my wet-nurse. She never got to go home.”

That broke his grip, as she knew it would. The light in his
eyes became shadowed and his grip slackened. “Then I owe her,” he said softly.
“And maybe for both of our lives.”

Eloise could only nod.

“Let’s find that inn,” he sighed, taking her elbow and
starting back toward the street.

She felt bereft. Her body churned with heat. “We need to buy
garlic,” she said, bunching the cloth of her slashed blouse over her breasts.
“To clean the cut. Garlic and fresh thyme.”

“We’ll get some brandy on it and it’ll be fine. That’s the
soldier’s remedy.”

“For my first battle-wound?”

He cast her a hard glance. “And it had better be your last.”

* * * * *

The taproom of the inn was crowded to the lintels. Severin
paid for a large mess of stew and bread from the woman by the fire, but turned
to find Eloise flattened against the bar, being loomed over by a large man in a
drover’s apron. Damn the girl—she had just that air of vulnerability that drew
the wrong sort of man. Severin dumped the bread in the bowl—the stew was hot
enough to use as a weapon if necessary, he judged—and pulled Eloise bodily out
from under the man’s shadow.

“Hoi!” said the man, slow on the uptake.

“What did you call my wife?” Severin demanded, locking
gazes.

The drover stared. “Your wife?”

“That’s right.”

With a mumble the bigger man lowered his gaze and turned
away.

“You need to keep close,” Severin admonished, towing her
through the crowd toward the rear tables.

“I told him I wasn’t interested!”

“Then you need to work on your technique.”

He found a single seat at the end of a bench by dint of
urging the occupants to budge up. Offering it to his “wife” in this company
would look ludicrous, so he sat down and pulled her onto his thigh.
No harm
in reinforcing the charade
, he told himself, attending studiously to the
bowl of food and ignoring the look of surprise that flitted over Eloise’s face.

She played along as soon as she recovered. They ate from the
bowl together, grateful for the warm meaty broth and the chewy bread. Severin’s
appetite was not all it could have been, though. Eloise’s rear end was soft and
pleasant in his lap, the warmth of her body soaking quickly through her skirts
and his trousers to merge with his. His cock responded. In moments he had a
most inopportune hard-on. A month ago—a few weeks even—this would have seemed a
disaster. Now it was only hugely uncomfortable and frustrating, and yet not
uncomfortable enough for him to wish it to cease. His standards of behavior had
slipped, he recognized; it was getting more and more difficult for him to keep
his hands off her. Right now, he knew, his cock was pressing into her. He
wondered, as she shifted her weight on him, whether she had noticed—and if she
had, did she know what it meant?

Mithras and all the saints in Heaven
. He felt a wave
of dizziness as he pictured himself pushing her face down over the tavern table
and lifting her skirts over her back so that he could plunge his stiff cock
between her rounded cheeks. In his mind’s eye the crowd vanished and the
taproom enfolded them alone, warm and shadowy. He imagined the sheen of the
lantern light on her skin, the satin-softness under his hands, the tight warm
slipperiness of his mark. He imagined her cries of shock and pleasure as he
plowed her so hard that the table shook.

She would welcome it—that was the unbearable thing. He’d
noted only too clearly the way she looked at him, with that frightened yet
yielding eagerness. Hadn’t she said it herself?
I wouldn’t be unwilling
.

He swallowed a lump of mutton half-chewed and felt it
descend painfully the length of his chest. It was all fantasy, he told himself
bitterly. She was no willing peasant girl. She was a lady of high blood and
marked naïvety. And her glances were not always eagerness. Sometimes they were just
plain fear. He had done horrible things to her, he knew. He had done them,
without any expectation of forgiveness, because they were simply necessary.
What he hadn’t anticipated was that it would make him feel so bad about
himself.

Severin was not a man used to the taste of guilt.

This quiet, innocent, gray-eyed girl could somehow make him
feel more alive than he had in years—or worse than he’d ever felt in his life.
Sometimes at the same moment. When he’d seen that soldier grab her he’d felt
quite sure that they were both facing death. The bastard who’d pinned him had
picked the wrong wrist, not knowing he was sinister-handed. Not knowing about
his knife. And what sort of fool uses a military poniard—made to jab through
chinks in armor, and nearly all point and no edge—to threaten a throat cutting?
Another wrong move and things would have got suddenly very bloody and
unpleasant for those men. It would not have ended well, of course. But he would
have done it for her. Without hesitation.

He recalled their conversation by the milestone, dragging
her words through his mind like bloody hooks.
Would you have to kill me?
For a moment he forgot both his food and his erection in a welter of pain. How
could she have asked him that? How had she expected him to answer?

No, he amended, she was innocent no longer. He’d seen that
stripped from her. He’d done it himself, fiber by fiber. Her early, easy trust
was worn away in tatters until only a thread was left, and now he had to haul
her by that thread over the river and the border into Ystria. Whether that
thread of trust would snap, or whether it would turn out to be cord twisted of
something much tougher, he had no idea. He was not at all sure he had the
strength to find out.

She had set his soul to war with itself, he realized. Hope
tore at despair, and delight struggled with terror over a black gulf of guilt.
He could feel the raw edges abrading within him.

She was destroying him.

Yet there she was, sat on his leg, the warm firmness of her
rump against his crotch—and every time she moved he wanted to grab hold of her.

* * * * *

“Your room.” The innkeeper’s wife threw open the door of the
upstairs chamber. Eloise dodged in out of the way of the scullion with the
buckets of hot water. There were heavy beams and a stone fireplace and a bed
big enough for two—the first feather bed she’d been able to sleep in, she
realized, since the shipwreck. The sound of clattering pans came up through the
floorboards, but no sound of revelry; they were over the inn’s kitchens rather
than the taproom.

“Yes,” she said, happy suddenly. The combination of security
and privacy was so luxurious after all they’d been through that she felt weak.

“It’ll do,” nodded Severin.

When the door had closed between them and the outside world
she sat on the edge of the bed and kicked off her shoes. Severin went over to
check the vistas beyond the shuttered windows.

“You’d better use the water while it’s hot,” said he. “I’ll
wait outside.”

“You don’t have to,” she said a little too quickly.

“Yes, I do.”

“You could sit by the fire,” she said. “I trust you.”

His bleak glance was softened by a half-smile. “I know you
do.” He walked to the door. “Throw your dirty clothes outside. I’ll find a
laundress.”

He left, and she stripped quickly and began to wash,
rationing the water from the first bucket. Kneeling over the bucket, she dunked
her hair and massaged the soap into her scalp, delighted to be free of the
smell of cowsheds. When she’d finished sluicing herself she wrapped a long
sheet around her several times, letting her hair hang down and soak the line of
her back. Then she went over to the bed.

There was something so uncompromising about a real bed with
a carved headboard and proper pillows. She patted one, almost shyly, feeling
the feathers within sink beneath the weight of her hand.

He’d make an excuse not to share the bed with her, she
realized. The room was warm and there was a high-backed settle by the
fireplace. If he had the chance, he’d avoid her company tonight. And they were
so near the border. Another day or so and they’d be safe.

Or dead.

This might be the last safe time they had together.

What if she did do something rash—if she spoke about the
yearning roiling inside her? How would he respond? She bit her lip, picturing
the scene, but after the first rush of excitement the colder voice of
experience broke through. He’d be appalled, of course. She could just picture
his cold contempt. And if it were not contempt—if he were moved to temptation
himself—then her best guess was that he’d be furious. He might strike her, she
thought.