Levelling a doubtful gaze at her would-be leech, she tilted back her head and drank. The liquid ran hot through her throat, raking its way down in a fiery blast.
Griffyn watched as she tipped sideways, her hair flying as she sputtered and slipped halfway off the saddle. His hands flashed out and closed around her hips. The flat bones shifted under his thumbs. One long, slender thigh dangled beside his ribs. His fingers pressed into curving, soft roundness and for a heartbeat, all his world contracted to become womanly flesh and desire. He watched her heart-shaped face as she lifted it, wiping her dripping chin as she moved, rasping and astonished. A waterfall of black hair swung behind, fluttering over her face before settling around her shoulders. He let her slide to the ground.
Her neck was arched back the slightest bit, her eyes wide. Unsteady came her breath, he could feel it on his cheek, his jaw. Erotic. Her bodice lifted and fell, revealing tempting curves and satiny skin with each unsteady inhalation. He drew in a slow breath and removed his hand.
Bedraggled she was, but Griffyn knew women as well as he knew war, and beneath the dirt staining her skin was the face of a goddess. Her body, an expanse of silk and rose he’d seen full well before covering her in his cape, proved the splendor went on, over rounded breasts and down a curving spine.
“What was that?” she sputtered, her voice still raspy from the fiery drink.
He grinned slowly. “You tell me.”
She glanced at the bottle, back at him, and a smile spread over her face, turning the delicate features into a breathtaking vision of loveliness. “Good.”
Dirt-stained, disheveled, homeless lass, she was. She was also the funniest, most surprising female he’d happened upon in many a year.
And he was in danger of losing himself underneath the vision of himself as saviour to the homeless lass.
“I’m glad you liked it,” he said, then lifted her into the saddle again, this time ignoring the way her hips felt under his hands (perfect). He remounted behind her.
“So, are you in orders?” he enquired, more from a desire to focus his mind away from her body than from any true curiosity, “or was there some other reason for going to the Abbey?”
She laughed. “It was just…a way out. A way out of the city…away from Marcus…” She trailed off.
“Just away, is it then?” he said in a low, comforting rumble.
“Aye,” she admitted in a small voice. His
thigh shifted under hers.
“Umm.”
She was relaxing further. Aside from the clues provided by reasonable, tear-free conversation, he could feel the weight of her increase against his arm as she leaned back. He flexed his arm the smallest bit to support her.
She chatted on, her words becoming a tinkling, background music. He was surprised it did not aggravate him. Reaching up, he unclasped the pin holding his cape and slung the heavy woollen material around her shoulders, covering her bedraggled dress, which was beginning to tempt his mind in directions he had no desire to go. Her cape he slid off and threw over Noir’s rump, a tattered, bloody mess.
“…which is why,” she was saying, her forehead wrinkling, “for me to cry in the face of brewing storm clouds tonight is such a plaguesome mystery. I mean, I do not cry. And so, ’tis most odd.”
“Perhaps you were not crying about the storm.”
Those impossibly green eyes turned slowly up to him. Rolling in fat tears that did not, as she had predicted, overflow, the emotion brimming in them was anguished enough to speak. So it was not necessary for her to say what she said next, because he knew it already.
“No, I believe I was crying about something else altogether.”
Good God, he could lose himself right here, on the back of his horse.
And that was unacceptable.
Recall your mission, he counseled himself grimly.
And not the one for Henri fitzEmpress. A more private, well-simmered vengeance, seventeen years in the making: Destroy the House of de l’Ami.
Chapter Seven
They sat at the edge of a small clearing. Lurking around its edges was the deep, dark forest, with its sharp-edged black trees and small scurryings in the undereaves. In the middle of the clearing squatted five or six daub-and-wattle huts. And in front of the ragged half-circle they created roared an enormous bonfire.
Gwyn sighed in relief, then considered it more closely. That was a great deal of wood and peat to be burning so wastefully. Some dim recollection coalesced in her mind. She looked to Pagan.
“What is the bonfire for?”