Nicholas took a moment to study the curious wench. She had lovely features, despite the grimaces and vile oaths distorting them. One would never guess so much bloodlust lurked behind that pretty face. Her brows came together like dark slashes over fiery green eyes with impossibly long lashes. Her chestnut-colored hair, now loosened from its thick braid, hung in strands over beautifully sculpted cheekbones and a stubbornly jutting jaw. Her lips were full and supple and expressive. Indeed, for one brief moment he found himself idly wondering what such lips would taste like pressed against his...
Until the barbarous wench kicked him hard between the legs.
A shock of blinding pain made him sink reflexively to the floor. Sheer determination alone allowed him to keep a grip on the wicked woman’s throat.
He gasped, unable to speak as the dull ache spread inexorably through his loins. Meanwhile, the merciless shrew fought him tooth and nail, shrieking, snarling, pounding and scratching at his arm. But the pain of her attack was nothing compared to the misery afflicting his ballocks.
Finally able to talk, he bit out a weak threat. “You’ll regret that, wench.”
Incredibly, she spat back, “Not if it keeps you from spawning.”
Somehow he summoned the strength to stand again. Still holding her by the throat, he looped his free arm around her waist and hefted her sideways, settling her onto his hip, where she could do minimal damage. But he knew she wouldn’t be harmless for long. The little imp was as slippery and full of squirm as an eel out of water.
“Let me go, you arse-wisp! Bastard! Unhand me!”
Somewhere he had a pair of iron shackles. Maybe if he secured her somewhere, he could scare some sense into her. Then he’d release her, she’d run off, properly frightened, and he could nurse his hurts and go back to dozing by the fire.
Desirée screamed in wordless rage. Her voice was hoarse, partly because she was being throttled and partly because she’d worn it out, cursing the shire-reeve with every oath she knew.
He was a fool for not killing her with his bare hands while he had the chance, for now she didn’t dare leave his house until his blood drenched the floor and he was staring up at the rafters with glassy, dead eyes.
“Be still, wench!”
He clamped her against his side, so tightly she could scarcely draw breath. She fought him, to little avail, twisting against ribs that were as unyielding as iron bars, scratching ineffectual furrows down his arms with her bitten nails.
With an exasperated growl, he lurched forward, and she struggled even more fiercely as he headed through the passage into the next chamber.
When she glimpsed the huge pallet shoved against one wall, her heart congealed into a lump of ice. God’s blood! Did he mean to...
She heard him take something down from the wall, but she was too preoccupied with the implications of the bed to notice anything else.
“Nay!” she shrieked at him, bucking wildly back and forth in an attempt to loosen his grip on her as they neared the pallet.
Suddenly she was flung forcefully down onto the big bed, and before she could scramble away, his knee came down beside her, blocking her way. She would have rolled in the opposite direction, but he snatched her wrist and, before she could pull free, clamped a shackle around it.
Bloody hell! She was in trouble now.
With her free fist, she struck at him again and again, bruising her knuckles on his hard skull, swishing through air, connecting solidly once with his jaw.
“God’s eyes, wench!” He raised his arm to block another punch, meanwhile securing the adjoining shackle to the base of the bed’s support.
Panic streaked through Desirée’s brain, but she didn’t dare succumb to it. There was still a chance she could knock the man out with a well-placed kick.
She twisted, thrashing her feet until they were free of her cloak and heavy wool skirts, then propelled them with the force of a fulling hammer into the man’s belly.
To her satisfaction, he let out an “oof” and staggered backward, crashing hard into the wall. For one brief moment, her heart fluttered with hope.
But the cursed giant somehow managed to hold on to his wits and his footing.
Not so his temper. His eyes closed down to angry slits. His nostrils flared. His jaw clenched. He growled. His broad shoulders seemed to expand as he closed his massive hands into menacing fists.
But it wasn’t his threatening countenance that widened Desirée’s eyes and sent her heart plummeting to the bottom of her stomach.
Behind him, rattling from hooks on the wall, was a vast array of sinister iron implements—pincers, knives, thumbscrews, shackles, flails, brands, saws, shears—whose purposes were too gruesome and grisly to imagine.
She tried to scream, but fear had sucked all the spit from her mouth. Only a thin wisp of sound came out.
CHAPTER 3
Nicholas was hardly in a mood to allay the woman’s fears. The cursed wench had sliced his cheek, slashed his hand, bruised his ballocks, and ruthlessly kicked him in the gut. He was exhausted and half-drunk, and something sharp was sticking him in the back.
Suddenly, the wench blurted out, “The house is surrounded.”
He blinked. “What?”
“The house. It’s surrounded.” Her eyes glittered. “Did you think I’d come alone?”
He frowned. Surely she was bluffing. She’d seemed alone enough in the village square. If she’d had allies, they hadn’t bothered to defend her there.
“If I’m not outside in a quarter hour,” she assured him, “a half-dozen men will break down the door.”
Nicholas studied her face. Years of interrogating prisoners had taught him to spot a lie almost instantly. There were telltale signs—licking the lips, avoiding the eyes, stammering, blinking. The woman exhibited none of those signs. She was staring at him with a gaze as steady as a rock.
God’s blood! Was it possible? Could she be telling the truth? Had she brought others with her?
“Go on,” she urged. “See for yourself.”
His captive was secure enough. He pushed away from the wall and ducked through the doorway. Shite, he was in no shape to deal with an irate mob. The last time, he’d come away with two broken ribs.
Azrael brushed past his leg, and he scooped the cat up, not wanting him to dart out the door if there were angry men outside.
Slowly, he opened the door a crack, peering out into the yard. The snow had stopped, and the world seemed as still as death. No one appeared to be awaiting the woman’s screams.
He cautiously opened the door wider. The only breaks in the white landscape were the gray stones of the wall surrounding his demesne and the black underbones of the snow-laden tree branches.
More confident now, he stepped outside, stroking Azrael’s bristled fur as he scanned his property.
The wench was lying. No one lay in wait. Or if they did, they’d long ago frozen over and been covered by snow.
“Come on, Azrael,” he whispered, suddenly feeling the cold of the ground beneath his bootless feet. “Maybe we’ll find a scold’s bridle to curb the little liar’s tongue.”
The cat jumped from his arms the moment he reentered the cottage, trotting over to the hearth, obviously wanting no part of whatever dire punishment his master intended.
Nicholas closed the door behind him and headed back to his bedchamber, calling out to the woman. “It appears your friends have gone a-“
Coming through the doorway, he saw the lass draped halfway off the bed, frantically scrabbling at the shackle lock with her cloak pin.
“What the devil...?” He strode toward her.
She glanced up, gave a little squeak of fright, then resumed wiggling the pin back and forth. The little whelp was trying to pick the lock. Nay, he decided, she was picking the lock.
With a metallic click, the shackle sprang open. If he hadn’t dived forward, snapping it shut again, she would have freed herself. As it was, he earned himself a stab of the cloak pin in his
shoulder.
With a yowl of pain worthy of Azrael, he knocked the pin from her grasp and dodged back out of range in case she had any more weapons on her person.
The woman screamed in thwarted fury, rattling the shackles as if she might break them open by pure force of will.
Who was this she-devil?
Hubert Kabayn had claimed to know no one in Canterbury, so Nicholas had assumed the woman shrieking in the square was simply one of those females who couldn’t abide bloodshed of any kind.
His bleeding shoulder proved otherwise.
But if she didn’t know the victim, and she wasn’t averse to blood...
“Who are you?”
She whipped her head around, spitting a strand of hair from her mouth. “I’m not your whore! That’s for certain!”
Sex was the last thing on Nicholas’s mind. His ballocks still ached from the kick she’d given him. The woman might be as beautiful as an angel, but she clearly had the devil’s temperament. He preferred his lovers gentle. And willing.
“Nor do I intend to be your prisoner for long!” she added, straining at the shackle until her fingers blanched white. “You may have held Hubert, but you’ll not hold me!”
He frowned. “Hubert? How do you know Hubert?”
She didn’t reply, only struggled all the harder with the shackles.
A sudden and unpleasant possibility occurred to him then, a possibility that sent a frisson of terror up his spine as he slid slowly down the wall onto his hindquarters.
“You aren’t...his granddaughter, are you?”
The woman froze midstruggle, confirming his suspicions.
His breath escaped him in a thin, long-suffering sigh. “Shite.” He wasn’t going to get any more sleep this day, he could see. He rested an elbow on his upraised knee and rubbed hard at the spot between his brows that was beginning to ache. “I thought you’d be... The way the old man talked... I expected a child.” He perused her from head to toe from beneath his hand.
She was no child. Hubert Kabayn had omitted the fact that his granddaughter, whom he’d portrayed as a helpless, homeless waif who’d be without a friend in the world after he was dead, was indeed a full-grown wench with a definite will of her own.
Nicholas shook his head. He should have known better than to trust the word of a felon. “Ballocks!”
He’d made Hubert a promise. He was honor-bound to keep it, no matter how it grated on him to do a good deed, not for an innocent child, but for a foul-tongued lass who was obviously poured from the same mold as her outlaw grandfather.
“Let me go, you pox-riddled son of a whoremonger!”
He stared at her, wondering what to do.
“Teat-sucking spawn of the devil!” she spat.
Now that he knew who she was, he couldn’t very well toss her out in the snow.
“You hound-swiving,” she said, banging the shackle on the bedpost, “nun-beating, shite-eating scourge of the earth!”
He raised his brows. He thought he’d heard every curse known to man. Because of his despised profession, which included collecting taxes, he was constantly barraged by vile oaths. Apparently, there was no sport more gratifying than swearing at a lawman.
For the most part, such words rolled off his back like water off a swan. But this maid showered him with oaths he’d never even thought of, much less heard from the sweet mouth of a woman. Her foolish grandfather must have spared the rod with the child, for she swore like a fishwife.
At last, catching her breath, she snapped, “What are you staring at, murderer? What’s churning in that diseased brain of yours?”
“I’m wondering when you’re going to run out of curses.”
She jerked hard on the shackle, and he saw a bloody scrape where the iron met her wrist. “As soon as you let me go, you overgrown minion of Lucifer!”
He sighed and came to his feet. The wench was obviously not going to listen to reason anytime soon. She was scared, like a wolf caught in a trap, willing to bite off her paw to gain her freedom.
He couldn’t give her that freedom yet. If he let her go and something happened to her—if she was attacked by miscreants, or she froze to death, or grief caught up with her and she tried to kill herself—it would be on his head. Whether she liked it or not, her grandfather had made Nicholas responsible for her.
The damsel probably had no place to stay for the night, anyway. He’d be doing her a favor by letting her take shelter in his home.
“If you don’t let me go,” she bit out, “I swear I’ll break off this bedpost and shove it so far up your—“
“Cease!”
He had no intention of using a scold’s bridle on her—the horrible spiked thing had hung unused on his wall for as long as he could remember—but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t take other measures to ensure himself a peaceful night’s sleep.
He delved into the chest at the foot of his bed and drew out a scrap of linen for a gag. It would serve two purposes. Her cries would be muffled, and he could rest assured she wouldn’t be chewing off her paw in the middle of the night.
The moment Desirée saw the gag, she prepared to fight. The secret to overcoming formidable foes, she’d learned from Hubert, was unrelenting aggression.
It worked for cats. She’d once seen a kitten fend off a pack of dogs with nothing more than fierce hisses and threatening swipes of its paws.
And it had always worked for Desirée. Men who mistook her for a frail flower, theirs for the plucking, were treated to a spate of flying fists and loud curses that would curdle cream. They couldn’t flee fast enough.
But this damned shire-reeve, unmoved and undaunted, came for her as if she were but a kitten, a troublesome creature to be subdued.
Even with one hand shackled, she might have been able to fight him off. But the brute sat on her. While she was gasping from the indignity and sheer weight of his bulk atop her writhing legs, he managed to shove the wad of linen into her mouth. Not even pounding his back with her free hand could prevent him from tying the gag around her head. Then he grabbed that wrist, too, completely immobilizing her.
Incensed, she tried to scream, but the cloth muffled the sound to a pathetic whimper. He nodded in satisfaction, infuriating her more.
She might not be able to curse him, but there was more than one way to get her message across. Summoning up all the pain and rage and frustration she felt, she skewered him with a smoldering glare full of hatred.
It had little effect, but then, she supposed a lawman was accustomed to glares of hatred.
Her legs began to tingle from lack of blood, but he only continued to sit there, staring at her as if she were some curious sort of beetle he’d never seen before.
Every instinct told her to look away. But she’d survived on the streets by temerity, not timidity. If there was any hope of enduring this ordeal, it would be by fearlessness. So she met him, stare for stare, and tried to think of something, anything other than the rack of gruesome instruments on the wall.
Green. The knave’s eyes were green. She tried to convince herself they were the color of pond slime and frog warts and snake scales. But in fact, the hue reminded her of fresh summer meadows.
His mouth she expected to be cruel, but there was a surprising softness to it that ill befit a man accustomed to violence. His brows were dark and expressive, and his nose was unbroken, a miracle considering the scars of past injuries to his face. His unruly black hair looked as if he seldom bothered to cut or tend to it. Why, she didn’t know. He certainly owned enough sharp blades to do the task.
She gulped against her will. From the edge of her vision, she could still make out the grisly silhouettes of his tools.
“Go to sleep,” he said wearily, releasing her wrist and easing off of her legs. “There’s a chamberpot beside the bed. We’ll talk on the morrow.”
As the blood flowed back into her legs, relief coursed through her veins. He didn’t intend to torture her, then. At least not this eve.
&
nbsp; But she’d seen the vicious way he’d killed Hubert. He was capable of great violence. She dared not forget that.
She watched him walk away, his hand dripping blood where she’d sliced it, his linen shirt askew from the struggle, flecked with crimson at the shoulder where she’d stabbed him with the pin. When he reached the doorway, he hesitated but didn’t turn around.
“He didn’t suffer long,” he muttered. “You should know that. ‘Twas a merciful end.”
Then he left.
Alone in the dim chamber, Desirée felt tears prickling at the corners of her eyes. She silently cursed them. Damn it all! She wasn’t going to cry. Crying was for the weak-hearted. Tears were something Desirée only feigned to loosen men’s purses so Hubert could pick them. Hubert would have given her a tongue-lashing for weeping over him.
Was it true, what the lawman said? Had Hubert been shown mercy? She’d never witnessed such a horrible spectacle. Still, she had to admit the old thief’s suffering had been brief.
She glanced at the wall. Surely the lawman was lying. How could someone who owned such a gruesome array of torturous devices feel a shred of mercy? What would someone capable of inflicting pain without batting an eye know of suffering?
With that whole armory of malicious instruments looming over her, waiting to taste her flesh, and a brute willing to use them only a chamber away, she thought she’d never get to sleep. But she’d had an exhausting day.
Over the last several days, she’d sold everything she owned to pay for Hubert’s upkeep in gaol, starving herself so he might eat. All morn she’d waited in the freezing snow for a man Hubert had invented, only to discover he’d betrayed her. Between the trauma of watching her old mentor hang from the gallows and her fevered battle with a lawman as strong as an ox, she was overwhelmed with fatigue. Before she’d taken a dozen breaths, the heavy fog of slumber fell over her eyes.
Nicholas woke early, not because he was eager to rise, but because there was a cat licking his chin. He brushed the beast aside, groaning as his backbone popped. Lord, he felt like he’d slept on the rack. A man his size shouldn’t have to spend the night perched on a bench. Especially when there was a mite of a wench taking up his whole bed.
Danger's Kiss Page 3
