Nicholas started to take her to task for making fun when he blinked and suddenly, there was the prick of something very sharp at the soft flesh under his chin. It was cold, it hadn't been there a moment before, and he had barely felt her move.
“What's that?” he asked, his voice still level.
“That's carelessness,” she said. “That's you thinking that I can't take care of myself.”
“It might be,” Nicholas said when the prick of cold didn't move at all. “You're armed?”
“Who wouldn't be, traveling through the Highlands now, man or woman?”
Nicholas would have nodded in agreement if it wouldn't have cut him rather badly.
“Take it away,” he said. “Your point's been well made.”
She took another moment, looking deep into his eyes. Nicholas was just beginning to wonder what in the world she saw there when she sighed a little, and the blade disappeared. From her quick motions, he realized that it must have been tucked down into her boot, where a mercenary or an assassin might keep a spare blade.
“Don't make the mistake of treating me as if I were helpless,” she said.
“What's wrong with that?'
This time, her glare was hard.
“I'm not some little maid that you can have your way with, nor am I easy pickings for you to rob.”
“Great Heaven, what in the blazes do you think I am? I'm the... I'm a knight. We are sworn to defend the helpless and the lost.”
Ava actually snorted at that.
“Plenty of knights came north to fight for Longshanks. I've seen what they did to girls they found alone and what they left behind them. I think I have a better idea of what an English knight is capable of than you do.”
Nicholas winced, because there was certainly more than a grain of truth in her words. When he earned his knighthood, he had sworn to do his duty by his church and his country, and also to defend those who could not defend themselves. He took his vows seriously, but there were plenty of men in his position who saw the defenseless as victims and the privilege carried by their rank as a license to do as they pleased.
“You likely do,” he said, and she blinked at him. Nicholas laughed.
“Do you think I'm going to rail at you and force you see my way?”
“It wouldn't have surprised me. But then I don't think you could do anything to surprise me.”
There was such a dismissive tone to her voice that Nicholas felt as if she were waving a red flag in front of him. It had been such a long time since he had felt anything but grief, since he had done anything but fight to survive and drive at his quest. The surge of defiant mischief that went through him just then felt cleansing, and he thought he might have stood on his head if it would surprise her.
However, he thought that there perhaps might be an easier way to surprise Ava.
Nicholas leaned down and kissed her.
It was meant to be a joke. It was supposed to be a taunt, a tease, a reminder to the Highland girl that she was not as all-knowing as she made herself out to be. He thought that she would shriek and leap away, or perhaps hit him.
Nicholas was the one who was surprised when something else entirely happened.
The moment his lips touched Ava's, it was as if the gates to his heart slammed open, letting loose something hot and powerful to fill his body. It made his breath catch in his throat, and he knew without a shadow of a doubt that he had never tasted anything as good as Ava that early spring morning.
Her lips were dry but soft, and when she moved underneath him in shock, he knew that she was feeling exactly what he was feeling. Her hands came up, but instead of pushing him away, she tangled her fingers in his clothes, keeping him close, demanding and needy.
There was something clumsy in her kiss, as if she were overwhelmed by what they were doing, and Nicholas, letting his instinct guide him, deepened it. He nipped lightly at her lower lip, making her open her mouth, and he pressed his tongue into her warmth.
Ava made a soft noise, surprise and pleasure mixed, and then it was Nicholas's turn to groan when she closed her lips around his tongue, drawing on it gently.
It had been years since he had had a woman. Some men had what they called marriages with the wild women who followed the army, and some actually brought their wives along in the caravans, but Nicholas had never held with either. War was no place for a woman, and the war was always waiting.
He might have assumed that it was long deprivation that allowed Ava to set his body on fire, but somewhere deep in his heart, where he had thought that there was only one person allowed any longer, he knew that was not true. Ava's innocent kiss was more drugging than Spanish wine, more enticing than the dancing girls he had seen in Angevin.
What fired through his veins when he leaned down to deepen the kiss was a need he had never felt before, and he knew that if he allowed it to do so, it would obliterate everything. In that moment, he was willing to allow it.
Then her fist came up, and a bright pain exploded on the left side of his face.
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chapter 5
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Ava had thought that she was ready for anything. She was already a strange thing in a world that could never tolerate strange things so well. She’d had people shout at her, attack her, chase her, and just recently, try to burn her. She had thought she was ready for anything but apparently, anything did not include Nicholas Whitfield.
She had been ready to stand up, to bid him good day and to start making her way north and west, but then he had leaned over her and kissed her. There was a moment of pure and perfect shock, but instead of the anger that she might have expected afterward, something different filled her instead.
It was as if he had given her something that she had wanted all her life and never known. Her mind refused to understand what was going on, but it felt as if her heart and her body had been waiting for Nicholas for years.
His kiss felt like a bonfire sending sparks high into the sky. The warmth of his body against hers made something in her break with longing.
Ava had been kissed before. She had played the kissing games that the children played on the mountain, and when she had started to venture out on her own, there had always been men who thought that they could take whatever liberties with her they liked because they could not see a man nearby who had laid a claim on her.
She had never been impressed. The unwelcome kisses ranged from enraging to disgusting, and Ava had been scrapping since she was a little girl. Without a mother to stop him, Patrick Blair had raised her to punch and to kick, and Ava had never hesitated.
Now, though.
Now, she hesitated, and everything changed.
Nicholas's kiss had been quick, but there was nothing domineering about it. He wasn't a man who wanted to show off for his fellows or to see what he could get. He didn't want to take from her until she was a hollow shell. Instead, his kiss was swift and strong like the man himself, and it felt as if he was just as stunned by the pleasure that came up between them as she was.
She wasn't sure she had ever felt as fully in her body. She was entirely concentrated on her mouth, so perfectly aware of Nicholas and how he was kissing her. When she felt his tongue trace the seam of her lips, felt the brush of his teeth, she closed her eyes, and then he was tasting her and allowing her to taste him in return.
Oh, but he tastes so good, she thought in surprise.
There was no telling how far she would have allowed him to go if he hadn't come closer, started to rise above her, and she knew what that meant.
Suddenly, Ava was aware of where she was and who she was, and what happened to girls who were charmed with a kiss that seemed too sweet to be real. Her fist came up, and though it was nowhere near as hard a blow as she could strike, it made Nicholas pull back with a cry.
"What in the blazes?"
"That's what I should be asking," Ava cried, leaping to her feet.
&nb
sp; She was glad she had kept her clothes and her boots on from the night before. She scooped up the pouch that currently contained all of her worldly belongings, shaking her head as she did so.
"I was a fool to trust an Englishman, let alone an English knight," she said, shaking her head.
She was ready to stomp away, wearing her humiliation out by leaving Nicholas far behind, but then he was on his feet as well, his hand coming out to grab her wrist.
She might have struck him again, and harder this time, if not for his words.
"I'm sorry."
She looked at him suspiciously, but he seemed sincere.
"Are you? Because I struck you?"
He touched his jaw, where she could see a slight redness come up that would be a bruise sooner rather than later.
"Well, you didn't tap me, that’s for sure, and I'm sorry that it'll be sore all day, but no. I'm sorry because I kissed you as if I had a right to do so, and I'm sorry I—"
She glared, and she could almost see him swallow the words, “I'm sorry I scared you.” If he had said them, she didn't know what she would have done, but he didn't.
"I'm sorry I did something you didn't want," he concluded, and Ava decided to think about her instant denial about how much she wanted it later.
"Apology accepted," she said shortly. "Now, if you'll excuse me..."
"Stay," he said, his voice soft. "I... I think I need your help."
There was a saying in the Highlands that the wise man saw to his herds before he helped with his neighbors. Ava knew that the last thing she should be doing right now was allowing this man to weigh her down, but for some reason, she hesitated.
"What?"
Nicholas only looked relieved that she was not simply storming off.
"If I give you breakfast, will you stay long enough to hear me out?"
Ava started to respond, but then her belly growled, making her half-laugh in surprise.
"Well, I suppose that answers that. All right."
There was no fresh food to be scavenged, but Nicholas pulled out a pair of thick hard disks of bread, baked until all the water was gone. They were sturdy, if uninspiring fare, and they would keep on a long journey.
Ava ate hers slowly, taking an odd slice of sausage from the tip of Nicholas's knife as she did so.
"I'm only promising I'll stay while there's still food," she said warningly, but instead of being offended, he smiled.
"All right. I should talk fast then."
Even so, he paused, and somehow, Ava realized that whatever he was going to say next, he had not told anyone before. She felt oddly touched by that, and then she got angry because there was no reason to be touched by anything this stranger had to say to her.
"I spent some time fighting here in the North with Edward," he said. "That cannot be a surprise to you. I fought for a few years, did my duty, and did it as humanely as I could. Five years ago, my diligence caught the eye of the king himself, and he sent me, along with a few of his trusted generals, to France to fight his war there."
Ava tilted her head curiously. The whole world knew that England and France would never stop their quarreling, but the last thing she had heard was that France was getting the better of it.
"Of course, I went. It was a great opportunity to advance myself and my family. We are noble, but ours is only a small house. Any rank and wealth I could bring home would only be a credit to my family, and the heirs I hoped to have one day."
"Hoped?"
Nicholas's laugh was harsh enough that Ava winced a little.
“Things changed, things I never thought would change. France was a disaster, at least for the men I served under and the men I led. I was there less than four months, and I ended up a prisoner for more than a year.”
Ava cringed in sympathy. Without seemingly aware he was doing so, Nicholas rubbed his wrists, and now she could see the scarring there, chains that went on and would not come off until they were struck off with a blacksmith's hammer.
“Eventually, I was ransomed back with some other captives. I was lucky. I might have been left in France until the French tired of keeping me, and then it would have been a grave somewhere far from home. Instead, I came home to find that everything was gone.”
Ava's home, high in the mountains, was as eternal a thing as she could imagine. Clan Blair traced their ancestry back to men who had fought the Romans at Hadrian's Wall. She couldn't imagine it being gone.
“What do you mean?”
“In my absence, the land was seized. It was never much, but it gave my widowed sister Agatha and her daughter a safe place to stay.”
For a moment, a brief smile broke through Nicholas's darkness.
“Agatha was... well, I suppose a few years older than you are now. She married young to a knight, a good man. He died at Glasgow, and she returned home with her baby daughter. As far as I knew, she and my niece were safe at our home in Amherst.”
“But... they weren't?”
“No.” Nicholas drew a deep breath as if the words pained him. “They had thought I was dead. The only reason I was ransomed at all was because I made up the right number of prisoners to be returned. My lands reverted back to the Crown, and my sister and my niece disappeared.”
“And you came home to...”
“To people I didn't know living in the house I grew up in and no sign of the only people left in the world who I cared about. They nearly threw me in the stocks for a madman when I first came back, filthy and furious and less a man than a beast. There's to be an inquiry into restoring my lands to me, but when I figured out what had happened, I went north, looking for my sister and my niece. We have some relations in Carlisle, and it was a logical place for her to go.”
“Was she there?”
“Her grave was,” Nicholas said, and Ava knew that the iron control in his voice was hard-won. Underneath was still something that wanted to rage and tear and howl, destroying anything that would hurt the only people left in the world that he cared about.
“There had been fighting at Carlisle,” Nicholas said, and now his voice was level, almost as if he were describing something that had happened to someone else. “Raiders from the North spilled south during the fighting, Carlisle was attacked, and many were killed, my sister Agatha among them. This was almost four years ago.”
Ava had heard many similar stories, crofts and towns raided by desperate soldiers or put to the torch to prevent them from supplying the enemy. She knew that the Highlanders could be just as brutal as the English. War was a brutal thing, and no one was spared when the drum called. Despite that, she felt her belly sink, and for some reason, she wanted to reach for Nicholas's hand, to somehow comfort him for something for which there could be no comfort.
“But there was no grave for Catherine.”
“Catherine?”
“My niece. I remember her mostly as a baby. She was a beautiful little thing, with milky blue eyes and a sweet smile. Agatha said that she was too young to smile properly, but I knew. She'd be eight now, almost nine. And when I went looking in Carlisle, there was no grave for her. I sent out word of a reward, as much as I could gather or promise, but there were no leads. Finally, I knew I had to come north myself if I was to find her. Or at least, what happened to her.”
Ava bit her lip. She had seen this, too, and she knew only heartbreak was waiting for him. Some people didn't get graves. Some were thrown into rivers and gorges, and those who mourned them might spend the rest of their lives looking.
“Nicholas...”
“I finally found an old woman, one who remembered the raid. She said that she had seen Catherine kidnapped. She said that she was taken by a raider. I am going to find her, and I'm going to make the men who took her pay.”
“She was barely more than a baby when you left. How could you—”
“She had a birthmark, a round red spot on the bottom of her right foot. She would have it still.”
Nicholas paused.
“I know how i
t sounds. I know what the odds are. But if I let her go...”
“It will mean that your family truly is dead and gone.”
“Yes. And that I cannot bear.”
For a moment, Ava wanted to tell him that he would have to learn to bear it. So many other people had. War came, and the casualties weren't just soldiers. The specter of war between England and Scotland took its toll on women, the elderly, even the children sometimes. People starved, people were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and it was simply a fact of life. Nicholas had killed on a battlefield, and he should know better than most that death came without rhyme or reason sometimes.
Then he looked into her eyes, and his next words shocked her.
“Help me.”
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chapter 6
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As he talked, Nicholas knew how desperate he sounded. He had known that he was looking for a needle in a haystack when he left Carlisle, and he had known that the odds were stacked against him. However, it was only when he came north that he realized how very desperate his situation was.
No one wanted to speak with him, not with his English accent. People would barely trade with him for food or supplies, and when he started to ask about Catherine, some people turned away from him pointedly.
“I blundered into a raiding party, I think,” Nicholas said with a flinch. “I surprised them, and they surprised me, and as it turned out, they liked to show their surprise with arrows.”
Ava made a sound that was suspiciously like a laugh before she composed herself.
“Is that the wound you were telling me about, the one that caused your fever?”
Wordlessly, Nicholas tugged down the collar of his tunic, revealing the narrow but deep wound the arrow had left. To his surprise, Ava came closer, peering at it curiously. She was tall and lean; she didn't have to lean up much to get a good look.
“You were lucky,” she said with professional approval. “I've seen men killed from arrows so close to their throat.”
“I was lucky. A woman on the road dug it out, and she and her man got me to the abbey where they saw to the stitching of the wound.”
The Highlander’s Promise (The Highlands Warring Scottish Romance) (A Medieval Historical Romance Book) Page 3
