The Conqueror. Kris Kennedy
This was about settling old scores, about taking back what was his. It was about conquest. The last thing he needed was an indebted woman, particularly one whose trembling body was pressed up against his, her slender, pale arm thrown around his neck.
“I’m no saviour, mistress,” he gruffed.
She cocked her head up. Green-eyes peered at him sidewise. Definitely, he did not need this.
“You just saved me,” she pointed out.
“We saved each other, then,” he allowed gruffly.
“You would not have needed any saving if it weren’t for me, Pagan,” she persisted.
A corner of his mouth twitched. “’Tis so.”
“Then I’m indebted.”
He lowered his gaze slowly. “Guinevere, ’tis best if you don’t see me as the saviour of anything.”
Her body was moving slightly now, not so rock-hard and rigid as it had been. This was encouraging, and disturbing, for it was leading his mind in directions he had no desire to go. A female body warm and pressed against him, swaying with every step Noir took. Into him. He glared at the tips of Noir’s furry ears and took a long, controlled breath.
A sudden shift of her weight brought his attention back down. She’d bent forward and cupped her forehead in her palms. He tugged Noir to a halt. “Your head hurts.”
“Only when I breathe,” she whispered.
He swung a leg over Noir’s rump, and dismounted, then rummaged through one of his saddlebags.
The dark, comforting space below Gwyn’s down-turned head was suddenly invaded by a pungent odour as he nudged a silver flask in front of her face. “Saints assoil me, knight,” she complained, lifting her head. “What in perdition is that?”
He lifted his eyebrows, then pushed the flask closer. “Say ’tis medicine and you’ll be closer than many others who call it by another.”
Gracing him with a suspicious slant of her eyes, she sniffed again. “It smells like something my dog would cough up.”
He laughed. “You’re priceless.”
“No one has placed a bid as yet.”
“Their loss. Drink.”
Levelling a doubtful gaze at her would-be leech, she tilted back her head and drank. The liquid ran hot through her throat, raking its way down in a fiery blast.
Griffyn watched as she tipped sideways, her hair flying as she sputtered and slipped halfway off the saddle. His hands flashed out and closed around her hips. The flat bones shifted under his thumbs. One long, slender thigh dangled beside his ribs. His fingers pressed into curving, soft roundness and for a heartbeat, all his world contracted to become womanly flesh and desire. He watched her heart-shaped face as she lifted it, wiping her dripping chin as she moved, rasping and astonished. A waterfall of black hair swung behind, fluttering over her face before settling around her shoulders. He let her slide to the ground.
Her neck was arched back the slightest bit, her eyes wide. Unsteady came her breath, he could feel it on his cheek, his jaw. Erotic. Her bodice lifted and fell, revealing tempting curves and satiny skin with each unsteady inhalation. He drew in a slow breath and removed his hand.
Bedraggled she was, but Griffyn knew women as well as he knew war, and beneath the dirt staining her skin was the face of a goddess. Her body, an expanse of silk and rose he’d seen full well before covering her in his cape, proved the splendor went on, over rounded breasts and down a curving spine.
“What was that?” she sputtered, her voice still raspy from the fiery drink.
He grinned slowly. “You tell me.”
She glanced at the bottle, back at him, and a smile spread over her face, turning the delicate features into a breathtaking vision of loveliness. “Good.”
Dirt-stained, disheveled, homeless lass, she was. She was also the funniest, most surprising female he’d happened upon in many a year.
And he was in danger of losing himself underneath the vision of himself as saviour to the homeless lass.
“I’m glad you liked it,” he said, then lifted her into the saddle again, this time ignoring the way her hips felt under his hands (perfect). He remounted behind her.
“So, are you in orders?” he enquired, more from a desire to focus his mind away from her body than from any true curiosity, “or was there some other reason for going to the Abbey?”
She laughed. “It was just…a way out. A way out of the city…away from Marcus…” She trailed off.
“Just away, is it then?” he said in a low, comforting rumble.
“Aye,” she admitted in a small voice. His thigh shifted under hers.
“Umm.”
She was relaxing further. Aside from the clues provided by reasonable, tear-free conversation, he could feel the weight of her increase against his arm as she leaned back. He flexed his arm the smallest bit to support her.
She chatted on, her words becoming a tinkling, background music. He was surprised it did not aggravate him. Reaching up, he unclasped the pin holding his cape and slung the heavy woollen material around her shoulders, covering her bedraggled dress, which was beginning to tempt his mind in directions he had no desire to go. Her cape he slid off and threw over Noir’s rump, a tattered, bloody mess.
“…which is why,” she was saying, her forehead wrinkling, “for me to cry in the face of brewing storm clouds tonight is such a plaguesome mystery. I mean, I do not cry. And so, ’tis most odd.”
“Perhaps you were not crying about the storm.”
Those impossibly green eyes turned slowly up to him. Rolling in fat tears that did not, as she had predicted, overflow, the emotion brimming in them was anguished enough to speak. So it was not necessary for her to say what she said next, because he knew it already.
“No, I believe I was crying about something else altogether.”
Good God, he could lose himself right here, on the back of his horse.
And that was unacceptable.
Recall your mission, he counseled himself grimly.
And not the one for Henri fitzEmpress. A more private, well-simmered vengeance, seventeen years in the making: Destroy the House of de l’Ami.
Chapter Seven
They sat at the edge of a small clearing. Lurking around its edges was the deep, dark forest, with its sharp-edged black trees and small scurryings in the undereaves. In the middle of the clearing squatted five or six daub-and-wattle huts. And in front of the ragged half-circle they created roared an enormous bonfire.
Gwyn sighed in relief, then considered it more closely. That was a great deal of wood and peat to be burning so wastefully. Some dim recollection coalesced in her mind. She looked to Pagan.
“What is the bonfire for?”
“All Hallows’ Eve.”
The night when the portal from the Other World to this world were opened, the only night in the year. Magic flowed, spirits dwelt.
The smokey greyness of his eyes was unreadable in the darkness. “Warm and safe and dry,” he reminded her.
“If you say.”
“If you behave.”
Her eyebrows went down. “Behave?”
“Don’t talk too much. Can you manage that?”
She dropped her head to the side. “Of course.”
“Good. And a ride to your Abbey tomorrow.”
“You?”