Lord of a Thousand Nights (12 page)

Her bottom rebelled against sitting with only a wet shift between it and the rough bark. She looked down at her almost naked condition. The shift reached only to mid-thigh. She pulled the wet clinging fabric away from her body. If there truly were a God, he would never let Ian of Guilford discover her in this condition. Since she was quite sure that God existed, the thought gave her renewed confidence.

The horse sounds said that Ian had tied up his mount. Soon she heard thrashing near the river while he sought the spot where she had left the water. He walked into the space below her. She held her breath and didn't move a hair.

He searched around. When he moved away through the growth, she permitted herself a small exhale. Eventually he would decide that while he searched she had swum the river yet again. She rested against the tree trunk and tried to ignore her discomfort.

Movement in the brush snapped her alert. Ian came back. He looked all around. He leaned against her tree trunk while he contemplated.

What was wrong with the man? She could be halfway to Edinburgh before he continued his search. She glared down at him, feeling very uncomfortable now and blaming him for it.

Suddenly his hand went to his head. He brushed his
hair and looked at his hand. She swallowed a cry as she realized that a drop of water from her soaked shift had landed on him. Another one now worked its lazy way down her leg. She twisted her foot to try and catch it.

It didn't work. She practically heard the plop on his head.

Ian stepped away from the tree and looked up at her. When she saw his expression she was very glad that she was out of reach.

“Come down from there, my lady.” He spoke in the careful tone a person uses when struggling not to become a madman.

“I do not think that would be a good idea. You appear very annoyed.”

“Annoyed doesn't begin to describe it. Down. Now.”

“I think it would be best if you calmed yourself first.”

“I am quite calm. I will be even calmer after I get my hands on you.”

“You are most distressed. We will wait a while. Otherwise you may do something that you will regret.”

“I will not regret one whit what I will do, Reyna. King Alfred indulged and spoiled you and you think that you needn't obey anyone. I am going to give your rump the punishment that your husband should have dealt you years ago. After that I will be calmer than I have been in days. Get down here quickly and it may not go too badly for you.”

The discomfort of her perch suddenly didn't seem so bad. “You have no right or authority to abuse me thus.”

“My lady, you forget your situation. You are a war captive. I am the man who commands the army that captured you. I have all the rights and authority to do whatever I wish with you. Now, for the last time,
climb down that tree
.”

She glared at him. Her situation was ridiculous, but his threats were intolerable. “Fine. Turn away. I won't have you watching me and looking up my shift.”

With an expression of profound exasperation, he turned away. She waited a short while before saying, “I can not.”

He turned and narrowed his eyes dangerously. “What do you mean?”

“I am stuck. I can not get down.”

“Of course you can, you little witch. You got up there, you can get down.”

“Don't be stupid. It doesn't always work that way and you know it. Even animals get stuck. In fact, I can not even get myself off this branch.”

“Like hell. I've wasted enough time, you half-sized bitch. Climb out of that damn tree or I will come up and get you.”

“Really, Sir Ian. War captive or not, I am a gentle-born lady. Your language—”

“My language?”

“See? You are not the least bit calm. And you should not come up to help me, gallant though the offer is. Look at this tree. It is not very strong. It barely took my weight.”

He studied the limbs with grudging recognition that she was right. “I think that you should go and get help,” she suggested. “I might be able to manage if I had a rope to hold on to.”

“You insult me, Reyna. I do not have to be a philosopher to see what you are up to. When I leave here, it will be with you slung over my saddle, woman.”

“If you are going to be unreasonable and stubborn, we have a serious problem, Sir Ian. I suppose we are going to stay here until we starve? That is a very clever solution.”

He glared up at her. She half expected his fury to give him wings so that he could fly up and get her. He stomped over to a nearby tree and sank down to sit in its shade. He stretched out and made himself comfortable.

He planned to wait her out. Well, she had a very strong incentive to beat him at that game. They stayed thus a long, silent while, Reyna dangling on her high branch while her shift dried, Ian sitting below and glowering up at her.

“Who was going to help you?” he finally asked. He sounded a tiny bit less furious. “You came to meet someone. Who? Edmund?”

“Edmund is in Edinburgh. I planned to meet no one.”

“That is a lie. The last in a whole series. You are well practiced in deception. I will have to remember that in the future.”

She began to refute him, but stopped herself. For one thing, there was no point in arguing. For another, it
was
a lie, and in some ways she
was
well practiced in deception.

“You look quite lovely up there. Like some wood nymph. But it must be uncomfortable, since you are practically naked—.”

She really could do without his noticing that. “Aye, it is not pleasant. It is unkind of you not to get help or a rope.”

He didn't answer. He simply rested his head against the tree and closed his eyes.

Taking a nap was out of the question for Reyna, and she was left to wait out the long minutes shifting and trying to find some relief.

Every moment felt like an hour. The sun had moved quite a bit when he looked up at her again. His expression seemed calmer, even normal. “Are you ready to come down now?”

“If I could do it, I would have long ago. While you slept, if I sought to escape. I truly can not move from here.”

He rose and walked around, studying her predicament. “Perhaps you speak the truth. The closest branch is some distance away, and turning on that one could be treacherous.”

“That is what I have been trying to tell you.”

“You seem well treed. I don't think that you will be going anywhere. I will ride back and fetch some help and a rope.”

“I suggested that over an hour ago.”

“Don't move too much. That branch is bending in a dangerous way from your weight.”

“Your concern touches me.”

“I will be back shortly. Do not fall.”

She followed the sounds of his departure through the brush, and then the movements of his horse trotting away. She forced herself to count to one hundred before raising one stiff leg and swinging it over the perch. Just moving felt wonderful. She rolled carefully onto her stomach and lowered herself while her feet flailed to find the next branch. When she connected with it, she let out a little laugh of triumph and quickly eased her way back down the tree.

Except for some small game moving in the distant brush, silence greeted her. Quickly, she picked her way upriver to the spot where she had hid her hemp sack. She knelt beside the fallen tree and felt beneath it.

Nothing. She pushed her arm in farther, and then leaned low to look.

“Searching for this?”

She froze for one despairing moment, then straightened up on her knees. Ian stood twenty feet away holding her hemp sack in one hand and her sodden bundle of
gown and kerchief in the other. He let the sack drop to his feet and threw the wet lump toward her.

He leaned casually against a tree and folded his arms over his chest. He had seemed unfazed by her state of undress while she sat in the tree, but now his gaze blatantly drifted down her body, and her skin prickled in a hundred places.

“You said you were leaving,” she mumbled accusingly. She jumped up and picked up the tied kerchief and fussed nervously at the knot. The water had tightened it into a nub of stone.

He didn't respond. He just stood there watching her in that silent, dangerous way. There wasn't much anger in his expression, but she decided that she would prefer fury to what else she saw. Her fingers clawed desperately at the kerchief to get at the dress, and she blinked hard against the expectant fear suddenly pulsing through her.

“You are really very beautiful,” he said, as if he had just discovered something that explained a conundrum.

She sucked in her breath and kept her eyes safely on the knot. Her heart pounded a little harder. “For one so puny and scrawny, I am passable.”

“Not so scrawny, now that you've eaten for a few days. Diminutive and delicate, as the great lords prefer.” She glanced over and saw his vague smile as he threw her own words back at her, just as she had done to him.

The air between them was getting very heavy, and despite his relaxed and distant stance, something predatory emanated from him. That dark gaze did not move from her.

She turned her attention back to the knot and sought some distraction in her efforts with it. The silence pulsed with his awareness of her. She sensed that he knew that he was frightening her. It appalled her that the fear
possessed an exciting quality that hummed with a quiet thrill.

“I want you,” he said, calmly giving a name to the terrifying power invisibly reaching toward her.

“Am I supposed to be flattered? Am I supposed to swoon with delight that the handsome brigand favors me? Your attention has been spread so wide and thin that it has become much devalued to my mind, you devil's spawn.”

“Considering your situation, my lady, it would be unwise to provoke me right now.”

The threat stunned her. She became acutely aware of their isolation, of their distance from the keep and the motte, from everyone and everything. A silent, slow, primitive rhythm beat between them.

“You look perfect out here, with the flowers and grass around your legs,” he said. “Much more becoming than surrounded by books and parchments. For all of your learning and logic, this suits you. Your mind may have been trained into neat garden beds, but your core spirit is still as wild as the growth here.”

“You are wrong,” she said, as horrible, wonderful tremors screamed silently through her body. Her skin felt unnaturally alert to the sun, the breeze, his gaze. Strange and amazing that he could do this to her while he stood twenty feet away. Frightening that just his presence could be so confusing and make her helpless.

“I do not think I am wrong. After all, I have tasted your passion.” He tilted his head back a bit, examining her. It was a small movement, but it made the rhythm quicken.

“Take off your shift, Reyna.”

Her breathing stopped. She stood motionless, mesmerized.
She grasped the little bundle as though it were all that stood between her and perdition.

Mottled blotches of sunlight fell through the trees, picking out the dark lights of his hair. His face held a serious expression, and those eyes looked out from beneath their long lashes. He was so beautiful. This wasn't fair at all.

“Remove your shift,” he repeated. “Let down your hair and come here and kiss me.”

His command sent sharp, twisting sensations through her belly. She almost obeyed. “Do not do this,” she said.

“It is inevitable. You know that.”

“It is not. You do not even really want me. You are just annoyed that I deny you. We will go back to the keep and you will find someone else and all will be well.” She kept throwing more words at him. Wonderful, rational words.

He smiled in his devastating way. It softened his expression, but not the intensity of his attention. “It is not that simple. I do not know why I want you so much. It is rare. So is the restraint that I have shown with you. I believed that you still held your husband in your heart, but now that I have learned about Edmund—”He pushed off from the tree and took a step toward her.

“I did not lie about Edmund. Don't you dare use that as an excuse.”

He continued toward her. Lithe. Strong. Confident. Nothing really existed anymore but him and her and the aching pull between them. “Looking at you and feeling what is between us, I need no excuse. Do you? Then tell yourself later that you hate me and did not want this, even though neither will be true.”

Damn him. He had no conscience. No shame or
mercy. She turned away from him and his beauty, but mostly she tried to turn away from the horrible knowledge he had of her, and from the old, treacherous yearnings that he played with now.

It was a hopeless gesture. Even as her mind rejected him, her spirit waited, urged, savored the male power approaching. Her body tingled the way it did in her dreams and had from his touch. That yearning already pulsed deep inside her.

Run
, her mind yelled.
You are nothing to him.
But the voice was drowned out by that rhythmic beat, submerged in the scent of grass and flowers and river, overwhelmed by the hidden, buried something inside her that didn't care about anything but being released.

I
an looked at her standing with her back to him, trying to pretend that she didn't notice the invisible tie twisting tighter and tighter between them. Her erotically charged fear sharpened his desire. He let the tie wind tighter as he approached, enjoying its delicious tug.

He pictured her removing her shift, unveiling the body that he already half knew. Memories of that evening in her chamber flew at him. Her tremulous, frightened passion — Her helpless yielding — High, round breasts leaning into his touch and mouth — Her waist, so narrow that his hands almost met when he held it, curving down to the garments falling around her hips.

Violent desire ripped through him. A few paces away, standing in the wildflowers, Reyna startled as if his hunger had jumped through the air and struck her.

She quickly plied at the knot on her bundle. He walked over, drawing out his dagger, and she visibly shook as he neared. He stood behind her and reached
around and cut through the knot, his hands covering hers for a moment, the brief contact a tease to his senses. His surrounding arms dominated her small form, and he caught the faint scent of female arousal.