A Raven's Heart

by K. C. Bateman

  He’d stayed awake for hours after she’d fallen into an exhausted asleep, assaulted by a whole host of unfamiliar emotions. The feel of her warm, naked body curled around his filled him with such a sense of perfect belonging that it was terrifying. He’d never once spent the night with a woman. Never wanted to, after the sex was done. But with Heloise he’d savored the rightness of holding her in his arms. He’d gazed up at the painted stars and wished that time would stop. That he could deny the inevitability of the coming dawn and simply stay in that moment, perfectly at peace. But every heartbeat, every breath, was one closer to the moment he’d have to leave her.

  A profound and hopeless yearning had twisted his gut as he’d tried to imprint the image of her lying next to him into his mind forever. He’d reached out and pushed a stray tendril of hair from her cheek and discovered, to his amusement, that his hand was still trembling. She’d wrinkled her nose and sighed in her sleep and he’d smiled in bittersweet longing.

  He’d wanted to wake her and take her again. Wanted to kiss her, long and deep, to stoke the hunger that burned in her until it was a conflagration that matched his own desire.

  He’d had sex with women far more skilled, but not once had he so lost himself that he’d forgotten to use a sheath or withdraw. With Heloise he’d done neither. It was as if his body was trying to sabotage his brain. The odds of her becoming pregnant from just the one encounter were slim but his stomach still knotted at the idea of his child in her belly. Every primitive instinct howled at the rightness of it.

  If she was pregnant there’d be hell to pay. He’d have to marry her. For one brief moment he allowed himself a vision of the unthinkable, of himself married to Heloise, allowed to touch her without guilt. Anytime. Anywhere. Every day of his life. All the blood left his head.

  Raven shook it. She deserved better than that. Better than him. She deserved a man with a whole, unsullied heart, not one who’d inevitably hurt her, frighten her, disappoint her.

  A part of him was fiercely glad he’d taken her virginity. He felt a surge of savage satisfaction that this, at least, was one thing that could never be taken from him, never be undone. He wanted be the first, the last, the only man she ever slept with for the rest her life. But that couldn’t happen. There would be no question of a repeat performance. That one night would have to be enough to last a lifetime.

  She was up and dressed when he returned to the clearing, helping the women. His chest tightened with a fierce possessiveness. Mine. Except she wasn’t, and never could be. He forced himself to stroll over to her, even as he memorized every nuance of her appearance. “I’m going for Kit now.”

  She stiffened then turned, a slight blush staining her cheeks. “Where’s the exchange taking place?”

  “An abandoned church, over in the next valley. Alejandro knows the place. If all goes well, we’ll be back here with Kit before sunset. He’ll probably need medical attention, so be ready to help the women if you’re needed.”

  She nodded, uncharacteristically meek and obedient. He narrowed his eyes. “You know you can’t come with me, Hellcat.”

  “I know.”

  “Swear to me you’re not planning something. This is not the time for an adventure.”

  “I’m not planning anything. I intend to stay right here until you get back.”

  He blinked and feigned astonishment. “Are you feeling quite well? Did Alejandro give you some of his ‘special’ sangria?”

  “No, why?”

  “I’m just a little suspicious of this docility, that’s all.”

  She pursed her lips. “I’m not a complete idiot, Ravenwood. I’m not about to purposely endanger either myself or you by ignoring your advice this time. I had quite enough excitement at the caves, thank you very much.”

  “Well, good. It’s a relief to see you repress the habit of a lifetime and be sensible for once.”

  She didn’t rise to the bait. He drew one of his pistols from his waistband and offered it to her. She shook her head. “You might need it.”

  “No, I won’t. I can’t take them with me. I need to maintain the illusion of being a prisoner.”

  “Isn’t that a little risky?”

  He shrugged and pressed the gun into her hand. “I’ll have my knives and I’ll feel better if you’re armed. There are sentries posted all around the camp, but that sniper might still be out there.”

  She tilted her head, her brow furrowed. “This could be a trap. What if the French have discovered the Baker is dead? Won’t they kill whoever’s sent to deal with them?”

  “It’s a chance I have to take. Kit would do the same for me.” He held her gaze. There was so much he wanted to say, but now was not the time. There might never be a right time. “If something goes wrong—” he cleared his throat “—Alejandro will take you straight back to Scovell. You take my ship straight back to England.”

  “Don’t you dare get yourself killed, William Ravenwood.”

  He gave her an elegant ballroom bow. “Of course not, my lady.”

  She stepped up close and put her hand on his cheek, cutting through his flippancy. He couldn’t stop himself from leaning into the touch, trying to absorb some of her softness, her goodness. Without a word he took her into his arms and felt her lean against him. It wasn’t even a sexual embrace. He simply held her, offering mute comfort, willing the warmth of his body into hers, barely aware of what he was doing, just conscious of the need to hold her.

  After an endless time the tension flowed from her limbs and her shoulders relaxed. He drew back reluctantly and paused, hovering over her mouth as if waiting for permission to kiss her.

  She closed the distance between them. It was a brief, hard kiss, tasting of sweetness, regret, and despair, and he had to force himself to step back.

  He pushed her from his mind as he rode out of camp with Alejandro and Carlos, both of whom were wearing the distinct bright red uniforms of officers in His Majesty’s armed forces, provided by Major Scovell.

  They reached the ruins around midday and made certain they were the only ones there. The exchange had been set for one o’clock, so they took up a position inside the church and waited.

  The ruins had been a good choice. The French border was just over the next pass, and the remoteness of the location ensured there would be no accidental interruptions. The little church had been abandoned for some time, and had obviously been the site of various wartime skirmishes. The blinding white stucco was pitted and pockmarked with shot; inside, the wooden pews had been toppled like dominoes and lay strewn and dusty under the arched roof.

  Anything of value had already been looted; empty niches and the bare altar showed gaps where statues and ecclesiastical plates had once sat, and the leaded windows were riddled with bullet holes. Intense rays of sunlight shone through the jagged glass and the shards that littered the floor crunched beneath his feet.

  Raven had just checked all the doors when Carlos’s whistle came. A horse-drawn cart was trundling along the valley floor, flanked by four men on foot and one man, clearly the leader, on horseback.

  Raven squinted, trying to make out the features of the sixth, a huddled figure, lying prone in the back of the cart, but they were still too far away to confirm his identity.

  Alejandro fastened a pair of metal cuffs around his wrists. The deception was necessary to maintain the illusion that he was a prisoner, but Raven’s stomach still churned at the feel of them binding him. Now was not the time to remember his imprisonment. He needed to do this for Kit.

  He felt naked and horribly vulnerable without his pistols, but at least he had his knife, hidden under his shirt. If things went wrong it would be three men against five. He’d survived worse.

  The cart rolled closer.

  —

  Heloise had watched Raven ride out of camp with a sinking feeling.

  The thought of him facing his enemy almost completely unarmed made her stomach churn. She didn’t doubt his ability with a knife, but what good w
ould that be against a loaded pistol? And surely there would be more than just three Frenchmen at the exchange. He’d undoubtedly be outnumbered.

  She resisted the urge to follow him for a good ten or fifteen minutes. But then a flock of birds darkened the sky overhead, cawing and screeching, and she’d taken it as an ominous sign. The man she loved was out there, facing the enemy. If he thought she could just sit here and sew something pretty while she awaited his return then he didn’t know her at all.

  She beckoned Rafael over and began drawing in her sketchbook. It took quite a few scribbles for him to understand where she wanted to go, mainly because she had no idea what the ruined church looked like, and the concept of “the next valley over” was surprisingly difficult to convey.

  Her English churches with pointed spires met with blank stares. And then she remembered the little church she and Raven had passed outside Santander. She drew a simple box with a bell in a niche at the top and a cross on the door.

  Rafael nodded enthusiastically. “Ah! Quieres ir a la iglesia en las colinas! No está lejos. Vamos.”

  “Sí. Raven. You must take me to Raven. Now! This instant.”

  Worried that she might be under a polite form of armed guard, Heloise decided not to risk informing the others. She didn’t want an escort. If the men Raven was meeting heard a large party approaching they would no doubt assume they were being attacked and react badly.

  She managed to persuade Rafael to take their two horses and ride a little way up the track while she slipped out of the camp under the pretense of going to the stream.

  At Heloise’s urging they kept away from the road that led into the valley and made their way through the forested slopes until Rafa pointed out a tiny whitewashed church in a clearing. He seemed perfectly content to remain with their horses while Heloise crept forward to the edge of the trees, keeping as quiet as possible.

  She couldn’t see anyone outside the church, but a flock of birds had perched on the roof and sat, as if waiting for something. Heloise shivered with a strange sense of foreboding. The clearing was eerily quiet. And then came the sound of a rattling cart, horses, and marching boots.

  She ducked down to watch.

  Chapter 38

  “Here they come,” Alejandro murmured. “I don’t recognize the leader.”

  Raven grunted, and then his heart stopped in his chest as he caught a movement across the valley and spied a tumble of pale hair. Heloise’s face poked up from behind a bush. His temples pounded. Against his express orders. He was going to wring her neck. He sent her his most fearsome glare. She was about a hundred yards away, on her stomach under some low scrub, directly across the clearing. The cart was too close for him to risk shouting at her—he’d betray her presence to the approaching Spaniards.

  Bloody hell.

  Stay there! he mouthed, then schooled his face into an impassive blank as the entourage rolled up the hill and came to a stop in front of the church. Alejandro stepped out from underneath the porch.

  “Alvarez?”

  The Spaniard nodded warily and dismounted. “Yes.”

  “It’s about bloody time. Step to it, my man.”

  Raven almost laughed aloud at Alejandro’s impeccable English accent. When he’d taught him the language, lazing around the campfire all those years ago, Alejandro had been merciless in mimicking his upper-class vowels. Now the wily old devil sounded as though he’d just stepped out of White’s. Raven gave him a mental salute.

  “You have our man?” Alvarez grunted.

  Alejandro pulled Raven from the shadows of the porch and gave him an unfriendly shove forward. “Indeed. Here’s your damned ‘Baker.’ ”

  Raven shuffled forward. Now was the moment. If Alvarez knew what the Baker looked like, he’d cry foul and all hell would break loose. But the Spaniard merely looked Raven up and down and grunted, apparently satisfied. Raven’s heart thumped hard in relief.

  “Now let’s see our man,” Alejandro said.

  Alvarez nodded. Two of his men let down the back of the cart and hauled their prisoner out. He fell to the floor, clearly too weak to stand, then groaned and rolled over in the dirt, exposing a face that had been beaten to a bloody pulp and a shock of blond hair, matted with dried blood.

  Relief and fury welled up in Raven’s chest. Kit had been given the code name Apollo, god of the sun, for his guinea-gold mane. Raven and Richard used to tease him about it mercilessly. It was Kit. Alive, but only just.

  Kit shielded his eyes from the sun, as if he’d spent too long in the dark. Every one of his ribs was visible on his too-thin frame. His once-muscular physique was little more than a skeleton. Even worse, when he rolled over, Raven could see that his back was a mass of stripes, from where he’d been repeatedly whipped. A murderous rage burned through his veins like acid.

  Alvarez’s soldiers lifted Kit by the arms, half dragged him to the center of the clearing, and dropped him at Raven’s feet. Raven glanced down and caught his friend’s eye.

  Kit blinked and his eyes widened in sudden recognition. Raven held his breath, fearful Kit might expose him, but he needn’t have worried. Kit was an agent to the core, no matter that he was half dead. His lips twitched in a tiny smile, even as he closed his eyes and feigned oblivion.

  Alejandro unlocked Raven’s manacles with every evidence of loathing. They dropped to the ground with a dusty thud and Raven heaved an inward sigh of relief.

  “Thanks for the hospitality,” Raven said sweetly in French. He shot Alejandro a taunting smirk, stepped over Kit’s body, and sauntered forward. “Seems I’ve fared better than this one, eh?”

  Alvarez sneered, apparently having no difficulty following his French. “Couple more days and we wouldn’t have had him to exchange,” he chuckled in the same language. “On death’s doorstep, that one. He’ll be lucky to make it back to England.” He slapped Raven on the back and shook his hand. “Come on, my friend. Let’s go.”

  “One moment!”

  Every head snapped toward the new voice and Raven’s blood froze as he recognized the man who emerged from behind the church, a gloating smile on his thin face: Georges Lavalle.

  Raven did some swift mental calculation. Had Lavalle followed Heloise? No, that was impossible. The only reason for a French agent to be here would be to corroborate the Baker’s identity.

  Shit.

  Lavalle’s left arm was bandaged over his coat, tied at the biceps with a piece of cloth. So it had been him, up there in the hills.

  Lavalle trained his rifle at Raven’s chest. “You’re being deceived, Monsieur Alvarez. That man,” he nodded at Raven, “is an impostor. Another British spy.”

  “And who the hell are you?” Alvarez said.

  “Lavalle. The Butcher. Savary sent me here himself.”

  Alvarez glared at Raven as if for confirmation of his perfidy.

  Raven shrugged. “I don’t know what he’s talking about,” he said. “I just want to get away from these pig-sucking bastards.” He tilted his head at Alejandro and Carlos, who made a fine show of pretending not to understand his French.

  Alvarez’s guards were clearly confused. Two of them trained their rifles at Lavalle, the other two aimed them at Raven and Alejandro.

  “Stop right there,” Alvarez told Lavalle as he drew closer. “And put down your weapon.”

  Lavalle ignored him and continued walking. “You idiot. Seize him and you’ll have two English spies to execute instead of one. Savary will be delighted. And when the emperor returns, as he did from Elba, we’ll both be rewarded in his glorious new republic.”

  Raven curled his lip and edged closer to Alvarez.

  “There’s not going to be any bloody republic,” he drawled in English. “And your precious Baker is dead.”

  —

  Heloise couldn’t understand what was going on. Everyone in the clearing seemed tense, their movements deliberately slow. Raven conversed with the leader of the Spanish group and a body—presumably Kit—was dragged out
of the cart and deposited on the ground.

  When Alejandro released Raven’s manacles she exhaled a shaky breath. His identity as the Baker hadn’t been questioned.

  She blew a strand of hair from her eye. Did Raven plan to leave with the five soldiers? He said plans were for people with no imagination, but he must have some idea of how he was going to extract himself from their company. She had a horrible feeling that whatever he planned wasn’t going to include handshakes and pats on the back.

  She tightened her grip on his pistol. A crow perched on the arch above the bell on the crumbling roof and cawed insistently as a thin man sauntered out from behind the church. His gun was trained at Raven’s chest.

  Oh dear.

  Words were exchanged, and while she was too far away to hear what was being said, the look on Raven’s face and the sudden tightening of his shoulders suggested the newcomer was both unexpected and unwelcome.

  Heloise was more used to decoding written languages than human reactions, but she had no doubt that things had just gone very wrong. What could she do? She bit her lip. Every instinct she possessed rebelled against shooting one of the men in the clearing, but the situation clearly called for a distraction. And then it came to her. She steadied the pistol against a rock, took aim, and fired.

  The church bell tolled wildly on its wooden axle. The sound echoed around the valley and the startled crows took flight in a great, screeching black cloud.

  Chapter 39

  Raven was the first to recover.

  Alvarez reached for his pistol as the nearest guard stepped forward to seize Raven’s arms. Raven barged his shoulder into Alvarez and sent him sprawling to the ground, grabbed the guard’s pistol, and shot the man at point blank range.

  The man fell back, clutching his chest as his comrade attacked. Raven used the spent pistol to whip him across the face then threw the gun aside and launched himself at his attacker, pounding his fists into his kidneys, earning an agonized grunt. They fell to the ground in a jumble of limbs.