by Nicole Locke
‘My father punished me,’ she said. ‘When I failed as a child to retrieve a piece of information, I received one lash. He could do it with a perfect flick of his wrist to achieve the exact depth he wanted. My father is trying to—will—kill me. He’s behind all of this. Behind me, the way I am, and I don’t know how it all went so wrong.’
She startled when he grabbed her hand. He wasn’t supposed to touch her, not after she threw herself at him. Ardently kissed him when she was supposed to do nothing but cry prettily, dabbing her eyes with a cloth that was at the ready.
The front of his tunic was still darkened from where her tears soaked through the linen. ‘Let go of my hand.’
He squeezed her fingers. ‘Tell me who he is.’
She wrenched her hand free. ‘No.’
‘You protect him?’ He shook his head. ‘There are matters... Your being brought to the King must occur, but if your father had a play in all that you do, perhaps there would be leniency.’
That sounded like a promise made by the ocean. In other words, it was a lie. All the worse for she could still feel his arms comforting her. ‘There is no leniency for one like me.’
‘But if—’
‘No!’ she bit out. ‘You, who have so much, can’t have everything. You aren’t telling me all, are you? You and your questions. You said there’s more here than your friends dying on the battlefields. What more is it? And don’t pretend there’s only more because of me or my father.’
A muscle ticked in his clenched jaw. ‘If he’s committing treason, then everything changes.’
‘Nothing changes! Your friends are dead. If you wanted your vengeance, you’d simply kill me. Instead, you want to take me to King Edward. Why!’ She pointed at him. ‘Hah! You won’t tell me everything either.’
‘So what will you tell me?’ His brows drew down. ‘You killed my friends and I’ve been pursuing you to bring you to justice, and all this time you’ve known it. You’ve known it and evaded me, but you can’t now. So tell me.’
She paced, looked around the small cabin. The fact they could take two steps between them meant their quarters were luxurious, but the space was far too small to ease her restlessness. ‘Why this ship?’
‘You needed a healer and we needed to hide.’
She swirled around. ‘We’re trapped here.’
He gave a curt nod. ‘To evade my capture, you’ve been an intelligent adversary for months. Whoever plagues you won’t expect you to make stupid decisions. They won’t expect us here.’
‘What of the owner of this ship? The men who operate it?’
‘Extra protection, and even more so when we travel to France later today.’ He pushed up on his knees. ‘You reacted to that.’
Of course she did. Could she be that fortunate to go the very direction she was meant to?
His eyes narrowed. ‘You want to go to France. You told me the truth when you said you were waiting for your family. You lost your father and now you’re following him. He told you not to, didn’t he?’
He did. But she couldn’t follow that order. She was a weapon, but she was a daughter first and a daughter would question why she had to remain behind.
‘His missive told you to accept death, but if he’s trying to kill you, why wouldn’t you stay away?’
Because she had no one otherwise. She didn’t need to tell Eldric anything; he was guessing the truth.
‘It’s the child, isn’t it? You’re after the child.’
She wasn’t after the child. Without her father’s love, without his missions and protection, she was nothing. Had nothing. But now, she was realising the child couldn’t be incidental. Not since his message. Her father wanted her dead. He’d made her an enemy. It hurt. She had no one, but if she could save the child from the same fate as she...
If she was dead by her father’s hands or by the King of England’s, so be it. But until then she would escape, she would confront her father and she would rescue that child. Until then...
‘If I tell you details, you’ll take me to France?’
‘Any details? What if I want to know about you, about your watching me? Is that why you scarred my arm and—’
‘I started watching you when I was a child. Off and on for years.’
Eldric pinched the bridge of his nose.
‘That concerns you?’
‘I never saw you. I don’t know what you saw.’
His whistling, his friendships. She’d learned from this man.
‘Much.’
He exhaled and lowered his arm. ‘With women? Did you see me with women?’
His was her first kiss; she knew what they shared wasn’t his. Was it terrible, did he mean to mock her?
‘Why is this important?’
‘It’s not.’ He shook his head, waved his hand. ‘Ignore it for now. No, wait. At what point were you to kill me?’
‘That didn’t come until later, when my father ordered—’
Eldric held up his hand. ‘I won’t understand this unless we start at the beginning. Tell me your tale of your childhood...before me.’
She’d regale him with all her observations of him over the years, but her revealing her childhood wouldn’t be easy and she didn’t know the purpose. ‘So many questions, when your keeping me prisoner makes you my enemy as much as he is. And you haven’t agreed to take me to France.’
He stilled. ‘You’ll get to France, but tell me this: I know who you are to me, but what would make your father your enemy?’
She was at the whim of men! She had thought her father was strict, but kind, and now he wanted her dead.
Eldric wanted vengeance for his friends. Even if she told him the truth, that she hadn’t killed all three of them, but only one and accidentally, she didn’t know if it would make a difference. For reasons she didn’t understand, he wanted to take her to the Tower. All this time she’d thought, when he captured her, he’d simply kill her. Eldric, too, had his own schemes he wanted fulfilled.
She was merely an object for both men, but she wasn’t the only one. That child, whom she thought only a rumour, was also at the whim of these men and it was up to her to rescue her.
But Eldric wouldn’t let her go until he had his questions answered. Refuse him and they’d go around and around as they already had. Answer him everything and she would have given him too much of herself and he had his own agenda.
To tell him enough, to lull him into thinking she cooperated, could she keep her heart out of it? She wasn’t sure. She had little experience with conversations and what did she know of this man?
Eldric wasn’t her enemy, he couldn’t be, but she’d been treating him like one. Oh, he believed he was and would, no doubt, want some retribution against her. He seemed determined to take her to the English King.
That was her fate and, given all her deeds, perhaps deserved, but her life wasn’t the only one in the balance. Maybe if she trusted him with her past, he’d trust her or at least understand why she needed to save the child—her half-sister, she realised.
‘What is it?’ Eldric said.
‘You asked if we were enemies,’ she said. ‘I want to answer, but I will have to start with my childhood.’
He gave a curt nod.
‘You are not my enemy, Eldric, but I am yours. Even so, before I tell you all my past, I have two requests.’
‘To which you want me to blindly answer?’ He crossed his arms. ‘Tell me.’
‘When we are done, I want to find the child and return her to her family.’
‘With my help.’
‘My father is a demanding man, skilled, cunning.’
‘And you want me to believe you need my help. No. You don’t stop. You’ll try to escape when we finally touch land. You won’t, but what do you need from me since this is a condition?’
‘
Save her, if I cannot. Find her family and return her.’
‘You can save her and I’ll be at your side when you face your father.’
‘If I survive, I want to talk with her.’
‘You expect me to bring you to the Tower still.’
‘What has changed?’
A muscle ticked in his jaw. ‘Nothing.’
‘Good, then, we are agreed,’ she said.
‘What is your second request?’
This...this there could be no compromise on.
His holding her, touching, his kindnesses—they were like tiny daggers filling her with such longing of needing more that she didn’t think she could bear it.
‘You kissed me.’ At his curt nod, she continued, ‘Don’t do it again.’
Chapter Ten
‘My father raised me,’ Cressida said. She’d do this her own way. He wanted answers to questions. She’d answer what he needed to know, which meant her childhood, her father, all that pain, would have to be laid out before this perfect man. Then she’d lose...no, she had never had Eldric in the first place.
‘When I was very young, my father left me in one abbey or another. In between, he came to visit me, to give me lessons. When I was old enough, he kept me with him. He was always moving then and constantly changed camps and mercenaries. Though I was with him, he kept me separated from everyone, my hood always raised. Eventually, he sent me away on different tasks to complete for him.’ This is where she deviated from the whole truth. Not quite ready to tell how she was abandoned, though she knew it was ridiculous. Eldric already knew her father wanted her dead. ‘I was at Dover following my father. I didn’t know I had a sister. But that mercenary made it all too clear I do.’
‘Sister? But that’s—impossible.’
‘Half-sister. He wouldn’t take a child who wasn’t his. I think, I think my mother didn’t die in childhood. I suspect that I was taken, too. That I was stolen and kept hidden until I was old enough to be who he wanted me to be. To be what you know. The mercenaries that come to train me—’
‘Train you! That message said something else.’
He knew nothing and, if she had her way, he’d never know the pain she’d endured since last autumn. ‘For months, my father sent his men to surprise me, to keep me ever ready. That time at the inn wasn’t the only time. The messages before that were...different.’
He clenched his jaw. ‘Orders to kill others.’
‘Not kill. I haven’t killed since—’ She hadn’t killed anyone since she accidentally killed Thomas. But she wouldn’t tell him that. ‘If you keep interrupting, you will know nothing.’
He gave a mutinous nod, so she continued. ‘He wanted me to spy, but I suspect he was simply keeping me occupied while he attended to other matters. When the first mercenaries came, they told me my father had taken a child, one who was his, and I was no longer needed.’
Eldric lowered his eyes to the floor between his feet. His reaction didn’t ease the pain inside her which just became tighter and tighter.
‘You should be gloating, Eldric,’ she pointed out. ‘I’m sharing with you my greatest fear and agony.’
He put both his hands on his face and rubbed, but he didn’t look up. ‘You have to know, most of this tale makes little sense... I understand none of this.’
Words that she said to him when she felt at her most exposed. She took the step back to sit in the chair opposite him. The stitches in her back pinched as she adjusted herself, as she stared at the man she’d admired first as a child and now as a woman. Despite his hatred of her, despite his treatment, she found she cared for him.
She couldn’t hold back with him even if she tried. She might realise her father meant her ill will, but Eldric was her secret. For years, she’d watched the goodness within him.
She harboured no illusion he could ever care for her, let alone love her. Even if they shared no past, she wasn’t beautiful. Her father, via his training and by his hand, had seen to that.
If Eldric was any other man, she wouldn’t care about her looks. She’d be pleased that she could blend in with the crowd because it made her a better weapon. But the moment she’d first observed this man, she’d yearned to be someone else. Someone good and worthy of him.
That feeling became more acute as the years went by and she observed Eldric in one English camp, then another. Watched his very ease with laughter. Listened to the beauty of his whistling.
He was freedom to her. Like that moment when she released an arrow and it was out of her control. Anything could happen. The arrow could be anything it wanted to be.
Unlike her own controlled life. She was an arrow never released from the quiver. No, Eldric would never understand her life. Though she couldn’t change it, she told him anyway.
‘I was raised and he has made me this. That is all you need to know.’
‘Yet you won’t tell me who he is?’
‘It’s not safe for you. Your fate would be different if you let me go. By keeping me you’ve brought yourself only danger.’
‘Even if he has abandoned you?’
She wanted to fight the truth, but the pain of the last message rang true. ‘Especially because he’s abandoned me.’
‘You may have watched me, but you can’t know everything.’ At her shrug, he continued, ‘Let me worry about me.’
Until she died, she’d always worry about him, even if he thought she’d failed in killing him. ‘Dover port is where his trail ended when you—’
‘Captured you in a tree.’
* * *
Eldric slowly exhaled his held breath. He felt as though he hadn’t breathed properly since that moment he’d grasped this woman’s ankle. That was so short a time ago, yet nothing was as it had been last night. Cressida was the enemy. He hadn’t forgotten this. His vows wouldn’t let him forget. Her father was to blame as well for every action she had done in his name, the man who had raised her, fathered her and now abandoned her.
Because that was what her pain was about, what she tried to hide at first. Her pain because she loved a man who hadn’t any honour at all.
His life had been easy. His parents had cherished him as he did them. Even when he’d spied for the King, it had all gone without effort. But when his life crossed with this woman’s, even before he knew who she was, he’d been on a perilous path. He just didn’t know it.
He had several choices and only one made sense: to hide on the ship and, when it returned to Dover, take this enemy to the King. Any questions or concerns he’d chalk up to mere curiosity.
Except by turning a blind eye to it all, there was the potential to risk Robert’s and Hugh’s lives with their wives and families. He didn’t fully understand the King’s demand to have the Archer brought to him. And he still didn’t have all the answers needed from Cressida.
What motivated a man to have such a daughter? He needed to know the identity and motivation of the man she called father, but to whom he could never apply the honour.
Then there was the other matter. The bone-deep certainty he was tied up with her somehow. But how? She had been raised by a madman who was bent on some vengeance Eldric couldn’t guess.
Taking a child to replace a woman who was trained in deadly skills? Her father wasn’t sane, yet she mourned him. It was clear in every tear she’d shed. Everything in him, absolutely everything, wanted her in his arms, to hold her, to not let go. To show her that the world wasn’t her father.
He saw all of that now, yet the trajectory they were on could not change. Even if he abandoned the vow to his lost friends, there was an English king who would come and remind him. He needed to stay loyal to King Edward to protect his friends who still lived.
To do that, he needed to capture her father and perhaps rescue the child, Maisie. Because that was who the mercenary meant when he had said a half-Scottish bastard. Maisie o
f Clan Colquhoun. He had sent the message to Colquhoun land on a guess. But as time went on, as he discovered more, he was certain this girl was the missing child.
He needed to send a message to Hugh in Spain! Hugh, whom he hadn’t seen since last autumn when they made a pact to exchange any information that could help Robert at Clan Colquhoun. Hugh’s last message since then was to report what had befallen Robert and his wife, Gaira, that their youngest adopted child was stolen and they’d been searching for her ever since.
A child who couldn’t possibly be Cressida’s half-sister. The child was born from Gaira’s murdered sister, Irvette, and her husband. Not from Cressida’s father. Never him. Although...the timeline of their marriage... No, it was too unfathomable to be true.
Until he was certain, he wouldn’t tell Cressida that he suspected he knew the family.
He stared at the woman, who stared back. Secluded in the dark room under the decks of a bustling ship, they’d already talked for hours, the morning gone. They’d be setting sail soon. It was a short trip to France, but he hadn’t told Cressida that they must stay hidden until they were cleared by the Commander. He imagined that wouldn’t go over well with his Archer, a woman who didn’t seem to ever stop fighting him. Fighting everything.
To know this about her, to know anything about her, seemed impossible. So little time spent, but so much had changed since the tree. They’d fought, been injured, bloodstained their clothing. Hers were torn. Insignificant concerns compared to what was revealed today.
What she had revealed of herself. He had been beset with conflicting emotions as she told him of her childhood. So many questions he had, so much he didn’t want, but needed, to know. Restraining himself from asking too much, because the little she did say revealed a wealth of pain and pride.
These months of pursuing the Archer, the vengeance that he seethed to exact upon his enemy, morphed to something darker, sinister. All aimed at a man she protected.
