Charming the Prince (39 page)

 
Trembling with more than just the cold, Willow knocked his hand away. "You'll be the only one bleeding when Bannor finds us."

 
Stefan snorted. "He'll probably be glad to be rid of you. With you out of the way, he'll be free to marry Beatrix as he should have done in the beginning."

Willow drew herself up, refusing to let that old taunt draw blood. "I doubt that he'll be so glad to be rid of the mother of his child."

 
As Stefan's gaze darted to the hand she'd curved possessively over her abdomen, a gratifying shadow of fear and distaste darkened his eyes. "Do you mean to tell me you've already got that wretch's brat in your belly?"

She tilted her chin to a proud angle. "Aye, I do, and I can promise you that Bannor will hunt you down to the ends of the earth if you harm his babe."

 
Stefan cocked his head to the side, eyeing her thoughtfully. "He probably would at that."

 
As her stepbrother slowly uncoiled a length of rope from his belt, Willow took a step backward, realizing too late that she might have misjudged the depths of his depravity. "What do you think you're doing?"

 
Stefan shrugged his broad shoulders. "It seems that if I'm to have any hope of escaping your husband's wrath, I shall have to disappear." He lunged toward her. "And so shall you."

 
Before Willow could coax her numb limbs into motion, Stefan had lashed out, snaking the rope around her wrists. He jerked it tight and knotted it off before casting a second rope around her ankles.

 
Willow tugged against him, striving to keep the panic from her voice. "You can't do this, Stefan. If I don't keep moving, I'll freeze to death."

"Don't worry, sister, dear," he said, giving the rope a last vicious jerk before shoving her down in the snow. "I'm sure your devoted husband will find you.
After
the spring thaw."

 
"Stefan!" she shouted as her stepbrother went loping away, without so much as a backward glance.

 
Willow screamed until her throat was raw. She thrashed about in the snow like a turtle on its back, praying her fury and frustration would keep the blood pumping through her veins.

When her strength began to desert her, she glared up at the impassive face of the moon, cursing the unfairness of it all. She'd fought so hard to stay on her feet, to keep moving, to keep believing that Bannor would find her, no matter what. But it had all been for naught. He would never know how brave she had tried to be, or how hard she had fought for their child. As she struggled against the ropes, bitter tears began to course down her cheeks, freezing before they could fall.

 
She curled into a ball, trying to shelter the babe in her belly from the bite of the wind. As the snow began to fall harder, enveloping her in a downy white blanket, a delicious lethargy began to steal over her. She was tired, so very tired. Pearls of frost weighted her lashes, making her eyes ache with the effort it took to keep them open. Perhaps if she just closed them for a little while, she might be able to sleep. She might be able to dream once more of her prince and his magical kisses.

 
Willow no longer had to imagine his face. She had traced every inch of its rugged beauty with her fingertips and her lips. Those lips curved into a wistful half-smile, as she closed her eyes, snuggled her cheek into a pillow of snow, and waited for her prince to come.

Thirty Two

 
As Bannor and the children started up a rolling hill, he kicked his stallion into a gallop. Ever since they had discovered the rambling set of tracks in the snow, his urgency had been mounting along with his hopes. It had hardly surprised him that Willow's idiot of a stepbrother had managed to lose his horse somewhere along the way. The beast had probably cantered straight back to Elsinore and was even now munching oats in the toasty warmth of the stables.

 
One set of tracks was too erratic to even be called footprints. But they still made Bannor's heart surge with joy. Their shambling awkwardness could mean only one thing: Willow was alive.

 
He drove his horse up the hill, desperate to follow the tracks across the shallow valley before the rising wind could obliterate them. The snow was coming down harder now, and as he crested the hill, a bank of clouds shrouded the moon, throwing the valley into darkness.

 
Bannor reined in his horse, swearing beneath his breath. The children followed suit, flanking him on both sides.

 
They waited, each impatient breath a silvery puff of fog, until the moon shook off its veil, flooding the valley with an almost supernatural brilliance.

 
Bannor's worst fears were realized. The wind gust-ing through the valley had swept the tracks away, leaving behind a pristine carpet of snow undefiled by human feet.

 
"Look, Papa!" Mary Margaret cried, pointing toward the bottom of the hill.

 
Bannor was forced to blink the snowflakes from his lashes before he could focus. There was something peeping out of a deep drift—a splash of color billowing against the virgin snow.

 
His hands tightened on the reins. Although it shivered him to the bone to imagine Willow out there without her cloak, Bannor prayed the garment had simply slipped off her shoulders, and Stefan had been either too viciously stupid or too savagely cruel to allow her to retrieve it.

 
"Wait here," he commanded his children, slipping off the horse.

For once, they obeyed him without questioning.

Bannor scrambled down the hill, but his steps began to slow as he reached the floor of the valley.

 
As the moon ducked behind another cloud, he stretched a hand toward that billowing scrap of fabric, already anticipating the moment when he could unearth it from its grave of snow, laugh, and hold it aloft to show his children that it was nothing they should be afraid of.

 
The moon reappeared, bringing each detail into focus with an almost deliberate cruelty.

 
A single dark curl, frosted with ice; a glimpse of marble flesh; a slender foot that should have been safely encased in the doeskin slipper he carried in a pouch next to his heart.

 
Bannor staggered to his knees and began to claw at the snow. As he gathered Willow into his arms, a cry that mirrored his own anguish wafted down from the hillside above. Through a haze of agony, he saw Beatrix start down the hill, saw Desmond snatch her back and cradle her face to his chest.

Bannor tore the rope from Willow's wrists and struggled to brush the snow from her face and hair, a low keening rising from deep within his throat. Time seemed to roll backward until he was no longer Bannor the Bold, Lord of Elsinore, but simply a frightened six-year-old boy who couldn't understand why his mama wouldn't wake up. As he gazed down upon Willow's face, frozen forever in sweet repose, he finally understood that it was not love that had killed his mother, but the lack of it.

 
"Oh, God in heaven, forgive me!" he cried, snatching her to his breast. He buried his face in her cold, stiff curls, rocking back and forth. "I love you, Willow," he whispered, tears beginning to course down his cheeks. "I loved you from the first moment I laid eyes on you, and I'll love you until the day I die."

 
Bannor pressed a fierce kiss to her icy lips, his tears pattering against her skin like a warm spring rain. He was so dazed with grief that it took him a moment to realize she was kissing him back.

 
A sharp cry escaped his lips as he scrambled backward, nearly dropping her. "Sweet holy Christ, I thought you were—"

"Dead?" Willow smothered a yawn in the cup of her hand, her eyelids drooping. "Don't be silly. I was only sleeping." She shivered. "I was so cold, then the snow covered me up and made me warm. I knew if I went to sleep that you'd come to me." She gave him an endearingly silly grin. "You always came to me in my dreams. Ever since I was a little girl."

 
Bannor smoothed the frozen curls away from her face, still unsettled by her abrupt resurrection. "And who do you think I am?"

 
She beamed up at him. "You're my prince. And my husband. And the man I love." Her smile softened as she captured his hand and brought it to bear against the curve of her belly. "And the father of my child."

 
Bannor's breath caught at the wonder of it all. Life growing beneath his hand like the most rare and precious of blooms. Life warming Willow's skin, flushing her cheeks with rose, pulsing like the sweetest of saps through her veins.

 
As Bannor drew her into his arms, raining kisses upon every inch of her beautiful face, his children's jubilant cries rang like music in his ears. He had been both right and wrong about Willow from the very beginning. Her name did suit her. But not because she was so fragile as to snap in the slightest breeze. On the contrary, she was strong and supple enough to bend with the wind instead of breaking. Her arms were generous enough to provide shelter and respite from every storm. Her grace and her courage had shot tender, yet unbreakable, roots deep into his heart.

 
He could not have said if it was his words, his tears, or his kiss that had awoken Willow from her enchanted slumber. He only knew that in the end, love hadn't been his destruction, but his salvation.

 
"I love you," he whispered, pressing a fierce kiss to her brow.

 
Willow cupped his cheek in her hand, her own eyes brimming with tenderness. "I know."

Epilogue

 
Bannor's trembling hand was hovering between his rook and his queen when a woman's shrill scream tore through the castle.

 
"God's blood!" he swore, slamming his mighty fist down on the table. Both chessboard and pieces went flying.

 
Hollis surveyed his fallen men with a dour expression. "I do believe I might have actually won that game."

 
Bannor rose from his chair, raking both hands through his already disheveled hair. "How can you expect me to concentrate on some ridiculous game, when my wife is being subjected to the most monstrous of tortures?"

 
Hollis shrugged. "It never seemed to bother you when Mary or Margaret was giving birth."

 
"I was in France, you idiot. And besides," he added, prowling the tower like some great wounded animal,"I had no idea 'twas such an ordeal. I thought the babes just sort of shot out"—he waved his hand—"like missiles from a catapult."

Hollis rolled his eyes. "Perhaps if we spoke of something else." He fished about for a cheerier topic. "So how is that stepbrother of Willow's doing?"

It was Bannor's turn to roll his eyes. "He still refuses to leave the dungeon. He's terrified I'll throw him to the children again."

 
Hollis chuckled. "I'll never forget the night they dragged him back to the castle. He had all of those tiny little arrows poking out of his back."

 
Bannor grinned. "When he punched Hammish in the nose, he never expected the lad to laugh in his face, then butt him in the stomach. Of course, 'twouldn't have been so painful if Hammish hadn't been wearing an iron kettle on his head at the time."

 
"Ah, but it was seeing Edward all wrapped up in that mangy pelt that finally broke his spirit. Stefan thought he was a real bear!"

 
Both of the men were roaring with laughter when another scream wafted through the window, this one even more heart-wrenching than the last.

 
Bannor hesitated for the briefest second, then went racing for the door. Hollis beat him there. It took the steward three tries, but he finally managed to slide the bench in front of the door and throw himself in front of the bench. "Fiona threatened to have my head if I let you walk out of here. You heard what she said. The birthing chamber is no place for a man."

 
"From the sound of it," Bannor growled, " 'tis no place for a woman either."

 
"Weren't you the one born with an almost inhuman tolerance for pain?"

"
My
pain, not hers." Snatching a sword down from the wall, Bannor planted its tip against Hollis's bobbing Adam's apple. "I wouldn't let one of my men march into battle alone, would I? Especially not if I was the one who gave the order that sent him there."

 
Hollis sighed and lifted his hands in surrender, wise enough to know when he'd been bested. Bannor heaved the bench out of the way and dragged open the door.

 
"I told Fiona we should have chained you up in the dungeon," Hollis muttered as he fell into step behind him.

******

 
"Oh, no, you don't!" Netta cried, flinging her arms across the doorway of the south tower as Bannor came storming up the stairs. "You can't go in there, my lord. 'Tis not seemly."

Since Bannor couldn't very well hold a sword to the throat of a woman who was over six months pregnant, he whirled around, seeking his steward's assistance. "She's
your
wife. Appeal to her reason."