Linda Needham (16 page)

“Fine, then. What’s this about needing more lime?” She fluttered her gaze down the length of his hauberk, then raised it to his face, the picture of innocence. “You seem to have plenty.”

Ignoring the jibe, he nodded at the girls’ messy industry. “Not at this rate. Have you more anywhere?”

“Tending to the state of the walls has never been very high in my recent guardians’ priorities. Father always kept a plentiful store of it at the lime kilns, just beyond the orchards. I’m sure it’s still there. Shall I have Quigley show you?”

“We’ve three days left, Talia. You’ll show me this afternoon. The carts can come later.”

“You don’t need me, Alex.”

Oh, madam, I do indeed.
“We’ll conference as we walk. Bring a sack of dinner.”

“Alone, Alex?”

He wondered at her coyness, delighted in it. “We’ve been quite alone before, madam.”

“If I didn’t know your plans better, Alex, I would think you were courting me.”

Talia didn’t know what to make of his crooked smile—to be wary of it or flattered or just plain faint away. But he wound her plait in his fist and pulled her close.

“Believe me, Talia, if I were courting you, you’d have no doubt of it. None at all.”

“T
his a lime kiln, madam?” Alex stalked imperiously around the deserted site, frowning at everything, obviously thoroughly disgusted with the state of it.

“It was, back when my father was alive, and Carrisford was kept at its best. Now, I’m afraid—”

“What’s all this?” He picked up a small chunk of limestone off a tumbled pile.

“Where it all begins. The bare rock is crushed nearly to a powder, then heated in one of the ovens, using peat or charcoal. Eventually all that’s left of the original stone is the lime. The same kind that is used in mortar.”

“Do you mean to tell me we have to go through all that in order to finish the limewash?”

“No, we have some stored.” Though she
couldn’t take him too far afield; the limestone caves nearby were filled with contraband that would save so many lives.

The powdered lime was kept in two long buildings, lead-roofed and constructed of limestone blocks. “See, Alex,” she said, leading him into the dimness, “all the cribs are full of lime and ready to be carted away.”

He grabbed a handful of the powder and let it sift through his fingers, then raised his eyes to hers. “Is there anything you don’t know, Talia?”

It was a difficult question, made almost morose here in the near dark. She started out the door, needing fresher air. “I don’t know how it’ll end.”

“How what will end?” She heard him brush off his hands, felt him behind her as they came out into the fading afternoon light.

“All of this. I wish I did. Waiting is the worst thing. Waiting for the king. For a husband. For this war to end. Does he snore, do you think?”

“Does who snore? The king?”

“Conrad, of course. I don’t know that I could take much of that, unless we had separate bed-chambers. Will he insist that we share one, Alex?”

“Good God, madam, I have no idea what Conrad prefers regarding his bedchamber.”

“What if I don’t like him?”

“We’ll see.”

“How old is he?”

She felt a purely devilish delight in his redden
ing face, in pulling that frown out of him and making him nearly growl. “Conrad is my age.”

“Ah. Which is what…?”

“Nearly thirty.”

“Is he as good with children as you are?” She stopped beside the stack of limestone and made a point of staring up at him. “Patient, encouraging? With Lissa and Gemma underfoot, and our own children who will come along quickly, I must insist on a patient man.”

“Great Heavens!” There. He actually growled and gnashed his teeth. “I know the man on the battlefield, not as a nursemaid.”

“Then please find out for me before you actually offer me to him.” She started away, heading back into the woods before it got too much darker.

“Talia—”

“Do women flock to him? Is he that handsome, do you think?” She threw her questions at him over her shoulder, satisfied that his long stride followed, strong and steady, making her heart leap. “Does he play indiscriminately at court and when he’s waiting out a siege?”

“I’m not going to answer any more of your bloody questions, Talia. I want to know about—”

“Because I want a faithful man to husband me and be a father to our children, Alex. Not a man who makes a hobby of spreading his seed. Will he be faithful, do you think?”

“Dammit all, Talia, I don’t know.”

“Will you be faithful to your heiress when you find her, Alex? I do hope so. But you’re such a fine-looking man; you must have women falling all over—”

“Talia—”

“So very much to learn about him, Alex. Conrad will be here in three days, and I don’t even know if he has a family. You said he has brothers, but does he have sisters, too? Older or younger? Does his mother still live?”

“Enough, woman!” She knew she was baiting the man, but she couldn’t stop herself, even when he captured her shoulders and made her sit down on a stump.

“Now you’ll sit, with your mouth miraculously closed, and you will listen to me.”

“I always listen—”

He put a finger to her lips. “I won’t have the king’s visit disrupted by your distractions. I’ll do all the talking to Conrad.”

She grabbed his wrist and pulled his hand away from her mouth. “How could my simply interviewing a prospective husband possibly be a distraction to the king?”

“You’re going to leave Conrad alone unless I’m there with you.”

“That’s not very private, Alex.”

“You’re not going to pin his ears back with your endless quizzing.”

“How else can I learn enough about him to make a decision? You’ve been no help at all.”

“You’re not the one making the decision in the matter, Talia. I am.”

She wagged a finger up at him. “But only if I approve of the man.”

“Not necessarily.”

“Yes,
absolutely
necessarily. You gave your solemn word that I will have a say in whom I marry. Do you now intend to break it?”

“Talia, you can’t just seize the situation without a thought to the consequences.”

“Believe me, Alex, I’m thinking only of the consequences. I’ve dealt with nothing
but
consequences for more than two years.”

“Then think carefully on these, madam: you will attend the king and his court on time, and in your best; you will smile pleasantly; you will not accuse His Majesty of crimes against your people; you will speak only when spoken to and answer politely, without your baiting, biting wit; you will adopt a position of deference in front of Conrad; and you will obey me without comment.”

Alex knew very well that the woman was dismissing each of his edicts as he pronounced them, already mounting her defense, blinking at him in that stubborn way of hers.

“Do you understand me, Talia?”

She harrumphed and reached into the woolen
sack she’d been carrying. “I understand more than you know. Here.” She handed him an apple.

He took it from her but shook it under her nose. “This visit means a great deal to me and my future.”

“So you’ve told me.” She pulled another apple from the sack and polished it on her kirtle.

He knelt a knee beside her on the stump and leaned down closer. “And to you.”

“Obviously, Alex.” She bit into the apple, leaving an enticing drop of juice sparkling on her lower lip. “But you hardly need my recommendation to the king; you seem favored enough.”

He didn’t trust a word of the woman’s wide-eyed flattery, but at least they were discussing the matter. “A man is only as favored as the memory of his most recent act of loyalty. I took Carrisford—”

“You stumbled on it.”

“Damn it, Talia.” He lifted her chin, gaining her clear-eyed attention, pools of crystal blue, long sable lashes, and beads of apple juice.

A foolish moment later he was touching his mouth to hers, the very end of his tongue to her lips, and that small, ripely surprised space between them.

“God, you taste good.” And felt good, and smelled marvelous; of the rowdy, skin-tightening scent of apples and autumn and longing. He
drew in another breath of her soft cheek, rousing him instantly, fully, filling him with a sultry yearning.

“Mmmmmmm…” God save his sorry soul, she was leaning into him, her head tilted, collecting his kiss a bit at a time.

Their last kiss had left a need for her roaring inside him like a fiery furnace, left traces of herself humming through his veins.

This kiss was even hotter, sweeter, needier. It made his fingers itch to tangle in the ends of her hair, to lose himself in the clear brightness of her eyes. To pull her hips against his erection, to carry her to the ground, to enfold her, weight her, to wrangle and writhe together, to fill her with himself, to hear his name come calling from her lips.

“I do like the way you taste, Alex. Right here.” Her lips were hot against the bridge of his nose, then brushed like an angel’s across his eyelids. “And here.” She touched her fingers to his mouth and it took every ounce of restraint not to take her against him.

“A dangerous thing to say, madam.” But he couldn’t stop this succulently restrained exploration of her perfectly bowed mouth, the teasing tip of her apple-sweet tongue, the sharp glance of lightning that dizzied him.

“Should I refrain from this, too, Alex?”

“Refrain?” No. Never. Christ. His heart stut
tered and reeled around inside his chest, his pulse raged in his ears, deafening him, filling his groin with a need far deeper than release, a need that could be satisfied only one way. That ought to last forever.

“Should I kiss him, Alex?”

“What?” He was breathing unsteadily, taking in her scent and savoring the soft brush of her words across his mouth, having the devil of a time keeping his hands off her.

“Or should I wait for Conrad to kiss me?”

Conrad? His head was spinning wildly, from the tracing of her tongue, this intimate dance between them.

“Which, Alex?”

Which? And then he realized and pulled away, fighting for balance.

Conrad! The bastard. He ought to punch the man the moment he crossed through the gatehouse.

This was jealousy. Hot and seething, and impossible.

Conrad was an utterly innocent man, who’d become his greatest rival for a woman he couldn’t allow himself to have.

“Or do I just play it as I feel it, Alex? Like this. Like us?”

As she felt it? Christ. “You wait for the man, Talia.”

For me.

No.

Bloody hell, where was the rightness of all this, the reason? Where was the fully formed sense of himself that he’d tempered in the fires of hell? Unrecognizable now, ill fitting, and he hadn’t a clue what to do about it.

“What if he doesn’t, Alex?”

“Doesn’t what?”

She stomped her foot and huffed. “You’re not paying attention, Alex. What if Conrad doesn’t kiss me? How will I know if he fits?”

Fits? Holy Christ, the woman was killing him, one question at a time, one staggering image after another.

“Then I will be the most astounded man in the entire kingdom.”

“Why do you say that?”

She had the nerve to ask that while the last of the sun gilded her hair, and her cheeks still glowed with the remains of their kiss. He could have offered a dozen reasons, cagey and confusing. But there was only one true answer.

“Because he won’t be able to resist, Talia. Because you are the most magnificent woman I’ve ever met. And I can only assume that Conrad will feel the same way.”

That widened her eyes. “Oh.”

“Come, madam. I want this lime in the bailey
by the morning. And the walls finished by tomorrow evening, ready when the first of the king’s caravan begins to arrive the next afternoon.”

She stood sharply and brushed off her skirts. “I thought he wouldn’t be here for three days?”

“He won’t be. But his caravan is leagues long, and precedes him by a half-day so that all is in place when he arrives.”

“Too soon, Alex.” She touched her fingers to her lips and shook her head. “Much too soon.”

Unable to disagree, to risk imagining what his life would be without her, Alex followed the woman’s determined stride through the oak-woods. The quickening fall of leaves was lit by the deeply setting sun, gilded ones and fiery orange, a path of gold beneath her feet.

He could taste her still as he marked the taunting sway of her hips. His hands would fit right nicely against them.

Hell, they had fit too nicely already. Was that but a few weeks ago when she’d thrown herself onto his back and pounded on his helm.

A lifetime ago. Forever.

She paused at the rise of the orchards, as though assessing the two rolling hills and the deep valley between, the branches heavy with apples and dark plums and walnuts.

An unsparing sight, sweeping in its beauty, the sort that seeps into the marrow and stays. So like
the woman who fought so audaciously to keep it all in place.

He stepped in behind her, fully mindful that he was crossing his own boundaries as he slipped his arm around the slender slope of her waist and rested his hand on her hip.

He felt her breathing catch and slow, and her weight shift slightly, familiarly against him. Aye, a flawless fit, her bottom tucked against the length of his arousal, the top of her head inches below his chin, her shoulder pressed against his chest.

“A good crop this year?” he asked, the question slipping from a surprising part of him, because he hadn’t the slightest idea what a good crop looked like, let alone a bad. And it seemed that he ought to know, for her sake.

She tilted her head back, her ear against his chest as she glanced up at him. “Modest, Alex, but it will have to do for the long winter. The picking will begin after the king leaves. No time before then.”

He waited for a sharp-edged comment about his using the value of the crops to flog her wardship. But she merely sighed and continued down the hill, through the rows of trees.

Feeling the loss of her warmth, and somehow changed, Alex followed her through the orchards and the village, bantering lightly with her, until they finally joined the parade of supply wagons
lumbering up the incline toward the castle gates in the last light of the sun.

And once again, he found himself looking for the boy among the figures he could see on the darkening quay.

The tide was in and lapping at the piers, bobbing the small boats. He hadn’t realized that he’d stopped to look until he felt Talia beside him.

“Do you see Kyle?” she asked.

He didn’t like the growing panic in his gut, focusing on one figure with a rope and then another hammering at a plank.

Too tall. Too bulky. Too old.

“There he is, Alex, just popping up out of the water. He’ll be cold when he comes home.”

“Where?” His heart raced ahead, as his search led from this pier to the next because she might be wrong.

She quietly slipped her hand around his, enfolding his fears, dissipating them. “There at the far end, Alex, the last pier.”

“Yes.” Alex let go a breath, laughed actually, startled at the relief as he recognized those lanky shoulders straining to pull all that gangling eagerness onto the dock, until the boy landed spread-eagled.

“There, he’s safe,” she said.

For now.
An odd thought. Made more odd because she held his hand firmly and he held hers right back.