“Talked! You must tell me—. No, do not. I would never need to know how to talk a man from making love to me. Whatever you did was good. Can you keep him from you, though?”
“I don’t know. He thinks I’m a cowering simpleton, and I don’t know how long I can keep up the deception. I hate myself when I lie like that!” Judith turned to her maid. “Is everything prepared for tonight?”
“Yes, though it wasn’t easy.”
“You will be well rewarded when we leave here, if we do. Now find some other women and prepare me a bath. I must scrub wherever that man has touched me.”
John Bassett paced the floor of the room, his footsteps heavy. The toe of his soft slippers caught at something buried in the rushes, and he kicked at it in wrath. A beef bone, old and dry, went flying against the far wall. “A lady’s maid.” he cursed. Locked inside a room, allowed no freedom, his only company a woman who cowered from him.
Truthfully, it wasn’t her fault that he was there. He turned and looked at her, huddled under a coverlet before the brazier. He knew her long skirts hid a badly sprained ankle which she had not allowed her daughter to see.
Suddenly his anger left him. It did him no good to let it eat at him. “I am poor company,” he said as he moved a stool to the far side of the brazier and sat down. Helen looked at him with frightened eyes. He knew of her husband, and he was ashamed that he also had scared her. “It’s not you who angers me, but that daughter of yours. How could a quiet and sensible woman such as yourself breed such a stubborn wench? She sought to rescue two prisoners, but now she has three to save—and with no more help than that hot-blooded maid of hers.”
He turned and saw Helen was smiling, a smile of pure pride. “You take pride in such a daughter?” he asked, astonished.
“Yes, I do. She is afraid of nothing. And she always thinks of others first.”
“She should have been taught to fear,” John said fiercely. “Fear is good at times.”
“If she were yours, how would you have taught her?”
“I would have—” John began. Obviously, beating was not the answer; he was sure Robert Revedoune had caused her a great deal of pain. He turned to Helen and smiled. “I don’t believe she could have been taught. But if she were mine…” He smiled more broadly. “I would be proud of her, if she were mine. Though I doubt such beauty could have come from something as ugly as me.”
“Oh, but you are not the least ugly,” Helen said, her cheeks turning pink.
John stared at her, not having really looked at her before. The first time he’d seen her, at the wedding, he’d dismissed her as being haggard and plain, but now he could see she was neither. A month away from Robert Revedoune had done her much good. She didn’t seem so nervous as before, and her hollow cheeks were filling out. Except for the widow’s peak, her hair was covered, but he could see it was auburn, darker than her daughter’s. And her eyes seemed to have tiny gold flecks in them.
“You stare at me, sir?”
With his usual bluntness, John said what he thought. “You are not old.”
“I will be thirty-three years old this year,” she answered. “That is an old woman.”
“Bah! I remember a forty-year-old woman who—” He stopped and smiled. “Perhaps I shouldn’t tell a lady that story. But thirty-three years is far from being old.?
? He had an idea. “Do you know you are a rich woman now? You are a widow with great estates. Soon you will have men pounding at your door.”
“No,” she laughed, her cheeks flaming. “You jest.”
“A rich as well as a beautiful widow,” he teased. “Lord Gavin will have to cut through them to find you a husband.”
“Husband?” Helen suddenly sobered.
“Here!” John commanded. “Don’t look like that. Few are like that villain you married.”
She blinked at what she should have considered rudeness; but coming from John, it was a statement of fact.
“Lord Gavin will find a good man for you.”
She stared at him as if in speculation. “Were you ever married, John?”
He waited a moment before answering. “Yes, once when I was very young. She died of the plague.”
“No children?”
“No. None.”
“Did you…love her?” Helen asked timidly.