by Violet
Julian watched as she stood poised above the water. The back view was every bit as arousing as the front, he reflected dreamily. Then she rose on her toes, raised her arms, and dived cleanly into the swift-running river.
He walked to the edge of the bank, waiting for the bright fair head to surface. The water flowed strongly, and the rippling undertow was a wide band about five feet from the bank. A kingfisher flashed deepest blue as it dived into the swift surface and emerged with a fish sparking silver in the rays of the rising sun. But there was no sign of La Violette. It was as if she’d dived and disappeared.
His throat tightened in alarm. Could she have become entangled in the treacherous weeds he could see waving in thick dark-green fronds just below the surface?
Could she be swimming underwater to the far bank? His eyes darted to the neat pile of clothes. They were still there on the ground by the rock. He’d taken care of that escape route. His eyes raked the surface of the water. There was nothing. Not a sign. How long since she’d dived? Minutes.
He was pulling off his boots, tearing at the buttons of his tunic without conscious decision. He flung his sword belt to the grass, yanked off his britches and his shirt, and dived into the river as close as possible to where he believed his prisoner had gone in.
He surfaced, teeth chattering in the icy waters that poured down from the snow-covered Sierra. No one could survive in this temperature for more than a couple of minutes. He stared at the smooth, unbroken surface of the river, shaking the water from his hair. Nothing. She’d disappeared as completely as if she’d never existed.
Again he dived, pushing through the forest of reeds, his eyes open, looking for a pale limb, a flutter of hair that would show where she was trapped.
Tamsyn surfaced on the far side of the rocks as soon as she heard the splash as he entered the water. She too was shivering with cold, her hair a dark, wet cap plastered to her head. But there was a triumphant gleam in her eyes, and a grin curved her blue lips. It had been a gamble that he’d go in after her without a moment’s consideration, but her mother had told her many laughing tales of the so-called and frequently misplaced chivalry of English gentlemen. This English colonel was clearly no exception to the rule.
She leaped onto the bank, hidden by the rocks from the swimmer on the other side, and shook the water from her body with the vigor of a small dog. The sun struck warmly on her icy flesh as she darted sideways to grab up the neat pile of clothes.
Julian came up for air, numbed with cold, knowing that he shouldn’t stay in the water another minute, yet forcing himself to go down for one more look. As he prepared to dive, he glanced toward the bank and saw a pale shadow against the rock, and then it was gone. It was no more than a formless flicker, but he knew what it was without even thinking.
His bellow of fury roared through the peaceful early morning on the banks of the Guadiana. A curlew screamed in imitation, and a flock of wild ducks rose from their nesting place in the reeds, wings beating in alarm as he waded through the water to the bank.
Tamsyn swore to herself and picked up her heels, racing across the flat mossy ground toward the small brush-covered hill. She didn’t attempt to put on her clothes, simply clutched them to her wet bosom. It was sheer bad luck that he’d seen her, but she calculated she had enough of a start. He still had to scramble onto the bank, and she had to be fleeter of foot than a lumbering large-framed soldier.
Julian, however, had been a sprinter in his school days, and his long legs ate up the distance between them. He was running in blind fury, at himself for being so gullible, and at his quarry for making such a fool of him. He never failed at anything he set out to accomplish, and he wasn’t going to be defeated in this instance by some flowerlike, diminutive, tricky, plundering, pillaging, mercenary bandit.
He was gaining on her, the icy river water turned to sweat on his bare skin, but she had almost reached the hill, and he knew that if she could attain the undergrowth, his chances of finding her were small. He and his men could beat the brush for hours, but he knew from experience how the guerrillas could disappear into this land without trace.
Tamsyn’s breath was coming in gasping sobs now as she neared the rising ground. She could sense rather than hear her pursuer, his footfalls, like her own, were lost in the soft wet moss of the riverbank. But she knew he was closing on her. With a last effort she hurled herself up the slope, and then her foot caught in a sinewy tangle of thin roots creeping over the surface of the earth.
She fell to her knees with a cry of annoyance that changed to a shriek of alarmed fury as Julian hurled himself forward and his fingers closed over her ankle. She hadn’t realized he was that close. Desperately, she kicked back with her free foot, but he hung on grimly, even when her foot bashed his chin. Her hands scrabbled at the sinewy roots, trying to get sufficient purchase to pull herself free, but he’d caught her other foot now and was hauling her backward, down to the flat ground. Her fingers slipped on the roots and she lost her hold, tumbling down as he pulled her, the bare skin of her belly and breasts rasping over the ground, pricked by twigs and tiny stones.
“Espadachín!” she raged, twisting onto her back, her fingers curled into claws, reaching for his face. “You’re hurting me!”
“You’d make a fool of me, would you?” Lord St. Simon said furiously. “Diablillo! Crafty, tricky goddamned little monkey!” He grabbed her hands as they lunged for his face, wrenching her arms above her head, grabbing her chin with his other hand, holding her head steady on the moss. “You’d serve me such a trick, would you? Let me tell you, mi muchacha, that it’ll take more than a devious bandit to get the better of me.”
Tamsyn twisted her body sideways, trying to bring her legs up to lever against him, but he swung himself over her, straddling her, sitting on her thighs with his full weight so she felt hammered into the ground, arms and head pinioned, her body flattened.
“Espadachín!” she threw at him again. “I may be a bandit, but you’re a brute and a bully, Colonel. Let me up.”
“No.”
The simple negative stunned her. She stared up into his face that was now as calm and equable as if they were sitting in some drawing room. He looked positively comfortable. She could feel the wet wool of his drawers prickling the skin of her thighs. He hadn’t gone into the water stark naked.
Her astonished silence lasted barely a second; then she launched a verbal assault of such richness and variety that the colonel’s jaw dropped. She moved seamlessly within three languages, and the insults and oaths would have done an infantryman proud.
“Cease your ranting, girl!” He recovered from his surprise and did the only thing he could think of, bringing his mouth to hers to silence the stream of invective. His grip on her wrists tightened with his fingers on her chin, and his body was heavy on hers as he leaned over her supine figure.
Tamsyn choked on her words beneath the pressure of his mouth. She heaved and jerked beneath him like a landed fish waiting for the gaff. Her skin was hot, her blood was boiling, there was a crimson mist behind her closed eyes, and his tongue was in her mouth, a living presence within her, probing and darting, and her own tongue wouldn’t keep still but began to play in its turn.
Everything became confused. There was rage—wild rage—but it was mixed with a different passion, every bit as savage. There was fear and there was a sudden spiraling need. Her body was liquid fire, her mind a molten muddle. Her arms were still held above her head, his mouth still held hers captive, but the hand left her chin, moved down between their bodies, caressed her breast, reached down over the damp, hot skin of her belly. Her loins of their own accord lifted, her thighs parting for the heated probe, sliding within her so that she cried out against his mouth.
His fingers played upon her and his flesh moved within her, deep, smooth thrusts that carried her upward onto some plane where the air crackled, and fire and flame swirled around them. And then she was consumed in a roaring conflagration in which her body no longer
had form or limits, when she flowed into the body that possessed hers with such unfaltering, unerring completeness that the boundaries of her self no longer existed, and amid the blazing glory of this extinction was the terror of annihilation.
Julian came to his senses slowly, aware first of the warmth of the sun on his back, then the breathing, living softness beneath him. He gazed down into her face. Her eyes were closed, her skin flushed, lips slightly parted. He still held her wrists above her head; his other hand was braced beside her body. He gazed at her as if he could make sense of what had just happened … and then the warmth of the sun on his back became cold steel.
He couldn’t see it, but he knew the feel of a sword against his skin, the press of the rapier tip along his backbone. He couldn’t see the man behind him without turning his head, but he could feel the warmth of a stranger’s flesh, the rustle of breath that brought the fine hairs upright on the nape of his neck.
“Say your prayers, man. You have thirty seconds to make your peace with your Maker.” The voice had the soft lilt of the Scottish Highlands, but it carried the chill of the grave. The rapier tip moved against his ribs, pressing into the taut skin, ready for the home thrust that would pierce his back and then his heart.
Julian experienced pure terror for the first time in his life. Facing death on a battlefield was nothing like this. That was a hot and hasty matter of luck and fate. This was execution, cold and slow. And for some reason he knew there was nothing he could say or do to alter the fact of this approaching death. Although he had no idea why it should have come out at him from the warm early morning on the heels of a glorious passion.
“No!” The girl beneath him spoke with sudden urgency, coming out of her trance, her eyes shooting open, awareness flooding back into their dark-purple depths.
“Gabriel. Gabriel, no!” She tugged at her still-captive hands, and Julian released them. She pushed against him, struggling to sit up, but he couldn’t make another move without the deadly tip of the rapier sliding into his body, so he stayed between her thighs, thinking amid his terror of how ludicrous he must look, of how it was the stuff of farce to face death in such a position.
“Gabriel, it’s all right.” Tamsyn was speaking with desperate intensity, knowing the speed and the deadly fury of the giant standing over the colonel. He believed she’d been hurt, and it was his life’s work to protect her and avenge her hurts. She owed the English colonel some grief for the way he’d treated her since he’d rescued her, but not for what had just happened between them. It was an act of insanity for which they were both responsible, and he didn’t deserve the death Gabriel was waiting to hand out with the detachment of a man who’d lived all his adult life by the sword.
“Gabriel, nothing happened that I didn’t wish for.” She spoke now slowly and carefully, but the urgency of her message was still clearly to be heard.
Julian’s blood ran cold, hearing it. She knew his executioner, and she was as afraid as he was of what the man would do. He remembered how she’d flung herself from his horse when he’d rescued her from Cornichet, saying she had to find Gabriel. It seemed that Gabriel, whoever he was, had found her.
“You were running mighty fast for someone who wanted to be caught, little girl,” the voice at the end of the sword said slowly and full of doubt. The cold steel tip remained pressed against Julian’s bare back.
Tamsyn thought rapidly. How to explain something she didn’t understand herself. “It’s very confusing, Gabriel.” She fixed the man’s gaze with her own. “I can’t explain it, but truly nothing happened that I didn’t wish for.”
A silence that seemed to Julian to last an eternity was abruptly broken by a roar of laughter. The cold tip of steel left his back.
“Och, little girl! And what would El Baron say to see you rolling in the grass like a wanton milkmaid?”
“ ‘Things happen, hija,’ ” Tamsyn said, her voice slightly shaky as she tried to sound humorous. She thought the danger was over, but you could never be absolutely certain with Gabriel.
The colonel inched away from her, easing himself from between her thighs and away from the sword, whose tip now rested lightly on the ground beside his hip.
Tamsyn sat up. “You know that’s what he would have said, Gabriel. He would have given one of his shrugs and smiled at Cecile as he said it.”
The laugh boomed again. “Och, aye, lassie. I reckon y’are right, at that.” He stared at Colonel, Lord St. Simon with a curiosity that was not exactly friendly, but neither was it threatening. “So who’s your gallant, little girl?”
“Good question.” Tamsyn regarded the colonel quizzically. His immediate danger was over, but with Gabriel’s arrival she herself now had the upper hand, and the thought of a little revenge was very tempting. “We haven’t been formally introduced as yet. But he’s a colonel in Wellington’s army.”
Julian said nothing until he’d managed to pull on his sodden undergarments, discarded somehow in that crazy conflagration. He felt a little less vulnerable with them on, but not much. The new arrival was a giant oak of a man with massive limbs, bulging muscles beneath his jerkin, graying hair caught in a queue at the nape of his neck. His complexion bore the blossoming veins of a man fond of his drink; his washed-out gray eyes were sharp, however. Crooked teeth gleamed in a wide, full-lipped mouth, and he handled a two-bladed broadsword as easily as if it were a kitchen knife.
“If you wish a formal introduction, Violette, I’d prefer to make it in my clothes,” St. Simon said dryly.
“Make yourself decent, little girl,” the giant instructed, keeping his eyes on Julian. “The colonel and I will discuss a few matters while he dresses.” He gestured with his sword along the bank to where Julian’s clothes lay.
Julian shrugged acceptingly. The ball was no longer in his court, but he had twenty men a quarter of a mile away, and the situation would change as soon as he was in a position to do something about it. With the appearance of nonchalance he strolled back to his clothes, La Violette’s defender walking beside him, his great sword still unsheathed but his expression bland, his pale eyes mild.
Julian was not, however, disposed to relax. He had the unshakable conviction that the giant’s mood could change in the beat of a bird’s wing.
Tamsyn scrambled into her clothes, casting half an eye along the bank where the English colonel was dressing, Gabriel leaning against the rocks, idly tracing patterns in the grass with the tip of his sword as they talked.
It had been many months since she’d succumbed to such an impulsive fit of passion. She knew, because she’d been told often enough, that she shared her mother’s devil-may-care impulses, and the passion that ran deep in the veins of both her parents had flowed undiluted into their only child. She had been taught to regard such bodily hungers without prudery. They were perfectly normal among adults and should be satisfied without guilt. But she didn’t think El Baron or Cecile would have regarded that wild encounter with approval. One didn’t fraternize with the enemy.
And soldiers were the enemy … a personal enemy. The images flooded in again, the screams, the steaming reek of blood. Her father standing in the midst of a yelling circle of men in the tattered uniforms of many nations, their faces twisted with the rapacious vicious-ness of greed, their senses drunk with blood. His great sword slashed from side to side but they kept on coming; shot after shot pierced his body, and it seemed to the two powerless watchers on the heights that he couldn’t still stand there alive with the blood spurting from the holes in his body—and yet still he stayed on his feet and bodies fell beneath his sword.
Cecile lay in the shadows, dead by her husband’s hand, a small black smudge on her forehead, where his merciful bullet had entered. El Baron’s wife wouldn’t fall victim to the rapine hungers of a vile mob of deserting soldiers. And his daughter too would have joined her mother in death if she’d been in the Puebla de St. Pedro that dreadful day, instead of hunting with Gabriel in the hills.
Slowly, she bli
nked away the images, put the anger and grief behind her. She’d led her own small band since that day. Those who’d escaped the massacre and others who’d joined them, all were prepared to follow El Baron’s daughter as they aided the partisans, tormented the French, avoided direct contact with the English, and took what payment came their way.
Until that double-dyed bastard, Cornichet, had set his ambush. Tamsyn had no idea how many of La Violette’s band had escaped the French in the pass, but she had been their target. The baron had long ago entrusted his daughter’s safety in his own absence to his most trusted comrade, and Gabriel had fought beside her and for her. But one man, even a giant, was no match for fifty. They’d both been swept up like spiders before the broom.
But what was done was done, and bewailing the past was pointless. It was now a question of making the most of their present situation. There must be some advantage to be gained from it. There was always an advantage if one looked for it.
She tucked her shirt into the waist of her britches and walked toward the two men, carrying her shoes and stockings, enjoying the feel of the cool, mossy turf beneath her feet.
The colonel’s bright-blue eyes rested on her as she approached, and Tamsyn’s scalp lifted, her heart quickening. What was done was done, she told herself firmly. That moment of madness was in the past. It had nothing to do with the present situation.
Chapter Three
JULIAN FASTENED HIS SWORD BELT AT HIS WAIST. ARMED, HE felt immeasurably more secure, although the giant’s sword was unsheathed, and the colonel was certain the man would be as fast and deadly with his weapon as any soldier he’d encountered.
The girl was walking toward them along the bank, carrying her shoes and stockings for all the world as if she were on a picnic by the river. He still couldn’t get his mind around what had happened between them. His anger and injured pride at the ease with which she’d outsmarted him had turned into something else. Something darker and more powerful than simple lust, so that he’d lost all sense of reality, of duty, of purpose in a scrambling tangle of limbs and the heated furrow of her lithe body.
