Lords of Conquest Boxed Set

by Patricia Ryan

  “Has Milo finished his stew already?” Having been caught snooping in her things, Alex decided he’d rather brazen it out than slink away with his tail dragging.

  “He dumped it in the rushes.” She lifted her chin, but her smile wobbled slightly. “I’m not sure how to get food into him anymore, short of tying him down.”

  Alex’s chest ached. “Nicki...” he said softly, taking a step toward her.

  Footsteps shuffled up the stairs. “Edith!” Sprinting to the turret, she called down, “I won’t need you tonight, Edith. I’ll undress myself.”

  A pause, and then came the reedy voice of her elderly maid. “As you wish, milady,” and the footsteps receded.

  Nicki shut the door and slumped bonelessly against it. “How did you get in here?”

  Alex nodded toward the small door in the corner. “That stairway leads to my chamber. I was exploring, and I ended up here.”

  She frowned. “Milo put you in that little corner chamber?”

  “I don’t mind.” The lie came all too easily to his lips—or perhaps, now that he knew of the secret passageway, he really didn’t mind.

  “Nonsense,” she said. “There’s a much larger chamber down there, with a fireplace.”

  “It’s July. What need have I of a fireplace?”

  “Perhaps, but it’s twice the size of the one you’re in.” Turning toward the door, she said, “I’ll have your things moved right away.”

  “Nay!” Leaping across the room—at considerable expense to his hip—Alex seized her arm. “I don’t mind.” He gentled his voice, rubbed her arm soothingly where he’d grabbed it. “Truly. Don’t trouble yourself.”

  “‘Tisn’t any trouble.” She eyed him guardedly, almost suspiciously. She was an intelligent woman, he reminded himself, very intelligent. He must tread carefully, lest the purpose of his visit become all too obvious.

  “Aye, but you’ve got enough on your hands just dealing with Milo.”

  At the mention of her husband’s name, she backed away, disengaging his touch. “I hate to think of you pitying me.”

  “I don’t pity you, Nicki. I might if you seemed overwhelmed, or hopeless. But you handle him as best you can. I admire you for it.” That just came out, but it was no more than the truth.

  “You’re different than you were...at the boat that morning,” she said, studying him in that intent way of hers.

  He laughed sheepishly. “I don’t have a head full of wine now. Some of the things I said...and did...that morning...” He shook his head.

  “Me, too,” she offered quietly.

  For a moment their gazes connected, and he knew that the spell that had bound them together nine years ago had not completely lost its power. “I said some things,” he said, “about what happened between us that summer that I wish I hadn’t—”

  “Perhaps it’s best if we don’t talk about that summer.”

  She was right. They were getting along, and if they tried to analyze what had passed between them before, they would surely start arguing again. His point in being at Peverell, he reminded himself, was to entice her into his bed, and he could hardly do that if she had her defenses up, waiting for him to accuse her of past wrongs.

  “All right,” he said, taking a step toward her. “Let’s pretend it never happened.”

  “Good.” Turning abruptly away, she crossed to her writing desk and tidied up the row of quills he’d disturbed. Alex didn’t know whether her nervousness in his presence boded well or ill for the success of his mission. She took the little locked chest of poems and knelt gracefully next to the bed, sliding it underneath.

  “You wrote all those poems?” Alex asked, just for something to say; he didn’t want to leave yet.

  “Aye—over the years. Some are from when I was a child.” She braced a hand on the bed to rise. Alex crossed to her in two strides and offered his hand, which she hesitantly accepted. He helped her to her feet, but kept her hand, rubbing his thumb on her palm.

  “You have the smoothest skin I’ve ever touched,” he said.

  She tugged her hand from his and hugged herself. “You should go. You shouldn’t be here.”

  There had been a time when she would let him hold her hand for hours. Perhaps he’d erred in remarking that hers was the smoothest skin he’d ever touched—a reminder of all the other women he’d touched over the years. Yet what he’d said was true—none of them had felt as enticingly soft as Nicki, or smelled like her, or been her. Had he thought, somewhere deep inside, that if he sampled enough women’s favors, he would eventually find a replacement for the lost love of his youth?

  From outside the door came the scrape of feet on stone, and old Edith’s voice. “Milady? I’ve come to help you get ready for bed.”

  Nicki closed her eyes briefly. “It’s all right, Edith. I can undress myself.”

  A pause. “Oh. Aye. Very well.” She shuffled away.

  Alex cast a puzzled look at Nicki, who sighed. “Edith is getting old. She forgets things. I’d replace her, but ‘twould break her heart.”

  “Then, even if she had seen me here,” he said with a smile, “she might not remember.”

  Nicki didn’t smile. “Someone else would. You should never come up here again. Please don’t.”

  Stalling, for he was loath to leave, he said, “What was that poem about? The one with the two hands drawn on it?”

  Spots of color bloomed on her cheeks; she averted her gaze. “It’s just something I wrote a long time ago—The Thorny Rose. I...don’t care for it.”

  “Then why do you keep it?”

  “‘Twouldn’t do any good to discard it at this point. Milo came upon it while I was finishing it. We’d just gotten married, and I was...he thought ‘twould cheer me up if...” She sighed. “He took it and had it put to music by one of the knights, a fellow named Marlon, who’s something of a trouvére—he sings beautifully. He still sings it from time to time. It makes me cringe.”

  “Why?”

  Her back still to him, she shook her head. “You should leave, Alex,” she said quietly.

  “Nicki, I’d really like to know—”

  “Please leave.” She turned to face him, melancholy darkening her eyes. “Leave.”

  Alex crossed grudgingly to the small doorway in the corner. This was not going as well as he had hoped. “Come for a ride with me tomorrow, if the rain lets up,” he said as he reached for the door handle.

  She stilled. “I...I don’t...”

  “You can give me a tour of Peverell,” he suggested.

  “I’ll ask Gaspar to show you around.”

  “I want you to do it.”

  She folded her arms. “Gaspar could show you the barracks, introduce you to the men.”

  “Nicki...”

  “No, Alex. Please—you should go.”

  He raked a hand through his hair. “I thought we were going to put that summer behind us.”

  “This has naught to do with that summer. I just don’t think it would look right, me going off alone with you for a ride.”

  Alex gritted his teeth. Damn her sense of propriety—and the memories that lingered stubbornly, defying banishment. This was going to be more of a challenge than he’d anticipated.

  An idea occurred to him. “If it’s all right with Milo, will you come riding with me?”

  “Milo’s judgment isn’t what it should be. Nay. I won’t go riding with you.”

  “Nicki...”

  “Good night, Alex.”

  “Nicki, can’t we just—”

  “Go, Alex.” She held his gaze for a moment, looking very sad and very determined. “Go. Please.”

  He opened the door. “Good night, Nicki.”

  “Good night.”

  He muttered a string of raw oaths as he limped back down the twisting little stairwell, berating himself for his ineptitude. He couldn’t even talk her into a ride. How the devil was he supposed to seduce her?

  Alex the Conqueror, indeed.

&nbs
p; Chapter 10

  “Why did you invite Alex here?” Nicki asked her husband the next morning as she sat on the edge of his bed, coaxing spoonfuls of porridge into him.

  “What do you mean?”

  Nicki scanned the great hall. Servants were breaking down the breakfast tables, and a few soldiers were laughing in the corner, but no one was within earshot. “You know what I mean.”

  Milo stared at her. “I’m afraid I don’t.” He seemed so guileless, but then he had the gift for displays of mock sincerity. Lying didn’t trouble him, as long as he could justify it to himself.

  Nicki sighed in irritation and spooned some more porridge into his mouth. As eager as she was to question him, she also wanted to take advantage of his good mood and relative sobriety—he was his most clear-headed upon awakening, his worst at night—to get him to eat.

  Milo watched her as he swallowed his porridge, something half-amused, almost sly, in his eyes. “I’m sorry if my inviting him has troubled you, my dear. I know you and Alex don’t care for each other, and perhaps I should have taken that into consideration before asking him to stay. But he’s my cousin, and we were always close.”

  “‘Tis he who doesn’t care for me,” she said. “My feelings for him are...” Careful. “He’s my cousin by marriage, and I’m endeavoring to be hospitable. But that’s not what I meant. I want to know why you invited him.”

  “Must there have been some reason, other than merely wanting his company?”

  She stirred the porridge thoughtfully. “There might have been.”

  “Such as?”

  She tried to feed him another spoonful, but he swatted her hand away. The porridge plopped onto her apron, which she’d taken to wearing while attempting to feed him. Even her most utilitarian wool tunics, such as the one she had on, were troublesome for Edith to clean.

  “I need some wine to wash the taste of that sewage out of my mouth,” he growled.

  Nicki wiped off her apron with a napkin. “Not yet, Milo. Can’t you wait a bit till you start—”

  “If I could ‘wait a bit’ for my wine, do you think I’d have turned into this?” he snarled, holding out his arms—as frail as sticks in his too-big shirt. A few faces glanced in their direction, then turned away. Everyone at Peverell was used to Milo’s sporadic outbursts by now.

  Nicki studied him, discouraged by what she saw. He’d grown even more gaunt and jaundiced since the Rouen trip. She never should have allowed him to go. “Milo.” She laid a careful hand on his shoulder, heartsick at the feel of sharp bone through the linen. “Please. I know you hate it when I talk about your drinking, but—”

  “Then don’t,” he said wearily. “Just bring me the wine jug and a goblet.”

  She shook her head resolutely. “I told you a long time ago, I won’t give you any more wine. I’ll bring you juice, water, fresh buttermilk—”

  “Buttermilk, for pity’s sake.” He grimaced. “I’d rather drink fresh piss.”

  “But don’t ask me to help you kill yourself with wine, because I won’t.”

  “Thank God Gaspar is more accommodating than you. He’ll be in soon. I’ll get it from him.”

  Nicki had tried to forbid Gaspar and the rest of their staff from giving her husband wine, but Milo had overruled her, his prerogative as castellan—if only in name.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” he said, his good humor returning as precipitously as it had fled. “Why do you think I invited Alex here?”

  “I don’t know.” She evaded his shrewd gaze, unsure enough of her suspicions to feel embarrassed about voicing them. “I was thinking about...what you proposed.”

  He cocked his head slightly, as if puzzled as to her meaning.

  She took a deep breath and glanced around to make sure no one was near. “About my...having another man’s child.”

  His eyebrows shot up. “You think that’s why I brought Alex here?”

  “Nay! I...I don’t know. I thought perhaps—”

  “But you rejected the idea outright.”

  “Aye, but—”

  “I took you at your word,” he said, his look of mild indignation transforming to interest. “Why? Have you changed your mind?”

  She slammed the porridge bowl on the little table. “You know I haven’t changed my mind. The idea disgusts me.” To open her legs for a man, any man, for the coldblooded purpose of getting with child...it made Nicki shudder.

  “Well, then.” Milo shrugged his skeletal shoulders. “I took you at your word, and that was the end of that.”

  “Aye, but...but I thought perhaps you had hopes of...changing my mind, or...I don’t know. You might have come up with some scheme—”

  “Would it do me any good? After all, you’d have to consent for...anything of that sort to happen, would you not? And you’ve already made it clear that you won’t.”

  “I most certainly won’t!”

  Chuckling, Milo took the napkin from her and wiped his mouth with it. “My dear, I do hope you don’t fly to such conclusions every time one of my relatives comes for a visit.”

  She swore at him, but the novelty of hearing such words from her lips only made him laugh harder. “Milo, have you given any more thought to my idea?”

  “Your idea?”

  “Our staying on here as stewards.”

  Now it was his turn to swear, which he did far more colorfully than she had. “I told you, Father Octavian would never allow it. He mistrusts women, and he despises me. And, as abbot of St. Clair, he’d have to appoint us himself—”

  “But I’ve thought of a way—”

  “I ordered you to abandon this idea, did I not? ‘Twill only shame us, to have you begging favors of that malicious bastard.”

  “Will it be any less shameful to be tossed out of here on our ears?”

  He smiled inscrutably. “It won’t necessarily come to that.”

  “It most certainly will come to that, unless we take measures to prevent it—something you seem curiously unwilling to do.”

  “I did come up with a solution.”

  “Ah, yes. I’m to save Peverell by playing the whore. Do you honestly think that’s less shameful than asking to remain here as stewards?”

  “Your outrage at my proposal strikes me as a bit much, my dear. After all, ‘twouldn’t be the first time you’ve bestowed your favors on a man to whom you weren’t wed.”

  Nicki stared at her husband in shock, heat scalding her face. This was the first time in nine years of marriage that Milo had taunted her with her youthful indiscretion. The hurt she felt took her breath away.

  Leaping to her feet, she grabbed the bowl of porridge and thrust it into Milo’s hands. “Here!” She whipped the bed curtains closed around him, turned and strode out of the hall. “Feed yourself! I’m going to go dump all the wine into the moat!”

  * * *

  Alex, astride Milo’s sorrel gelding, found Nicki’s mare exactly where her husband had said it would be—on the bank of the stream that meandered through the woods to the north of the castle, at the top of a rugged declivity that produced a waterfall. She always fled to the same little refuge in the woods when they had words, Milo had assured him. Alex would be certain to find her there—alone.

  The day was clear and sunny—a relief for his hip after yesterday’s downpour—but little of that sun filtered through the dense canopy of foliage overhead, producing the effect of twilight in mid-morning. It was pleasantly cool here, the air still redolent with the wet, green scent of rain. Most of the forest floor was thickly carpeted with ferns, but the rest had turned to mud. His mount’s legs were coated with it by the time he found the stream.

  Dismounting, he tethered his horse next to Nicki’s and went in search of her. He spied her about a hundred yards downstream, leaning over a patch of mud with her back to him—although at first he didn’t believe it could be her.

  She had on a humble gray tunic—nothing like the gleaming silks she’d worn at William’s court—and her
hair was bound up in a white scarf twisted around her head rather like a Moorish turban. Her skirts were gathered up in one hand, exposing her bare, mud-splattered feet and ankles. In the other hand she held a twig, which she scraped purposefully on the ground. She was writing, he realized, etching words into the mud as if it were a tablet. So absorbed was she in this activity that she didn’t hear him approach. Of course, with his instinct for stealth, only those with the keenest hearing ever detected his presence from behind.

  “What are you writing?”

  She spun around, dropping her twig. “Nothing.” Turning back around, she dragged a foot across the mud, obliterating the carefully scratched words.

  “I can’t read it, remember?” Alex said quietly.

  She paused with her back to him; her shoulders slumped. “I forgot.”

  He stepped closer to her. “What was it?”

  “A...a poem. The beginnings of one. The words came to me, and I had no tablet with me.”

  “What was it about?”

  She hesitated. “Nothing. ‘Twas just a poem.” Yet she picked up the twig and began scratching in the mud again, her brow furrowed. “Oh, blast it, I can’t remember.” She hurled the twig into the stream. “What are you doing here, anyway?”

  He cleared his throat and tried for a nonchalant tone. “I was bored, and—”

  “How did you find me?”

  “Milo told me where you’d be. He said this is where you always come after...that is...”

  “Did he tell you what we quarreled about?”

  Damn. Sometimes he wished he had Milo’s gift for easy deception. He wanted to shrug carelessly and say, “Nay, was it anything of consequence?” but in fact, Milo had warned him about her suspicions and cautioned him to deny everything if she voiced them...Learn to lie! You’re a grown man, for pity’s sake.

  So preoccupied was Nicki with her stewing that she paid no heed to Alex’s tell-tale hesitation. “Nay, he wouldn’t have told you,” she muttered. “Even he knows better than to air such matters openly.”