Shana Abe (5 page)

“Who indeed,” said Roland, cutting him off. “Forgive me if I do not stay, Hindrige. I find myself rather fatigued after the journey.”

“Yes, yes. Miserable Highland weather. Miserable place. Can’t understand why anyone would want to live there.”

“Indeed. Good eve to you, Minister.” Roland strode to the door.

“Strathmore,” called Hindrige, just before he could make it.

He looked back, his hand on the door handle, the impatience to escape burning in him.

“She is no longer your betrothed, even if she has survived the winter,” Hindrige said. “You will do well to remember that.”

“Aye,” said Roland, and left the room.

U
nlike most people, Roland thought Conner Warwick dead and his children alive. He had been on their trail almost from the beginning, almost from the very night they had fled into the anonymity of the countryside.

He alone had believed the reports he had gotten back from his scouts of the two younger Warwicks traveling north. As incognito as they might have wished to be, Lady Kyla was said to be a great beauty, and accounts of a young woman matching her looks had been steadily leaking back to him through his own private network of spies.

There was never mention of anyone but the two of them. Roland could not believe that Conner had abandoned his children to the merciless winter by choice. No, they were trying to survive alone because they thought they had to.

Not that he didn’t trust the reports from the king’s men,
which had placed the trio of Warwicks anywhere from Kent to Ireland to Wales. Actually, it was more a matter of not trusting their zeal for their work.

The king had promised a great reward for the capture of the man who had ruthlessly murdered his cousin, Lord Gloushire. And since Lord Gloushire had been discovered in bed with Baroness Rosemead, both of them quite dead, there had really seemed to be no reason not to think the lady’s husband had done them both in.

Roland frankly did not know, nor did he care, who killed Gloushire. He had never liked the man anyway, had always found him to be an annoying peacock who used his connection to the king shamelessly to curry favor in court and abroad. Roland didn’t think even Henry had liked his cousin, but of course now that he was dead, the king could not allow the slight to go unattended.

So Henry had sent Roland to apprehend Baron Rosemead, because that was what Henry depended upon him to do—to clean up loose ends. He was not known as the Hound of Hell for naught, as those who crossed the king soon discovered.

The fact that the daughter of the murdered woman and fugitive man was to be his wife was something the king had dismissed out of hand.

“Find them,” Henry had ordered him. “Bring them to me. I shall decide what to do about the children then. Bring them back to me alive, Strathmore.”

And that was what Roland intended to do.

The betrothal had been the king’s invention, anyway, something arranged without his—nor the young woman’s, he assumed—consent. It wasn’t unusual for Henry to match up his nobles, especially those who had avoided matrimony for what the king considered far too long a time.

In fact, Roland had been rather surprised it had taken Henry this long to try to wed him off. He supposed it was sort of a compliment, that the king had chosen the daughter of one of his favorite advisers, and a reportedly beautiful one as well.

Roland could only remember seeing the Lady Kyla Warwick of Rosemead once before, and she had been a child then, a lanky ten-year-old with large eyes and very white skin. She had been at court with her parents, and was busy tending to her little brother, as he recalled. Someone had pointed the mother out to him, and he did remember being struck by
her
unusual beauty. If Kyla did indeed resemble Helaine, he thought he could have done worse for a bride.

It had taken a good month for that memory to surface after he had been informed of the betrothal, and then he had immediately dismissed both the girl and the wedding from his thoughts.

Henry had picked his bride for him; no doubt Henry would arrange the ceremony, as well. He enjoyed things like that. Roland had decided he would wait for the king to tell him when the wedding was, then he would show up, endure the ceremony, and take his new wife back to Lorlreau.

She could fend for herself from there.

But fate had taken the good king’s plans and tossed them recklessly into the air to fall where they would, leaving Roland with the rather bizarre task of tracking not only the father of his ex-betrothed but also the lady herself, and her younger brother, across the kingdom.

It hadn’t bothered him. Not really. At least, not until now.

For although the evidence against the baron had seemed insurmountable, Roland had been left with nagging doubts about the neatness of the crime, the way all guilt pointed to a man who had seemed genuinely frozen in grief over the death of his wife.

It had taken days for him to gather up his children and leave. Days, when it seemed to Roland that a guilty man would have run away immediately, and most likely alone.

Roland had arrived in London just after the murders took place, and thus he had a chance to witness for himself the dazed bewilderment of the great hulk of Baron Rosemead, there to claim the body of his wife and transport it back to his estate.

He had seen only the shadow of a man, not the personable,
outgoing adviser he had met many times before. But this was not the calculated demeanor of a murderer, nor even the panic of a man who had killed in the heat of passion.

Yet still, he had taken the body to Rosemead and then fled.

It didn’t sit well with Roland. For the first time ever he felt a vague distaste for his job, pursuing this man who had fallen steep and hard from such a lofty place.

And there was the matter of Lady Kyla. There was another mystery for him, the fact that the father would take the two children, especially when one was said to so closely favor her mother. Very strange, indeed.

Either way, it was an unpleasant task. He was stalking either an innocent man and what was left of his family, or else a ruthless killer who nevertheless had not abandoned his children.

And both ways, he was in the awkward position of hunting down his would-have-been bride.

A curious sort of guilt folded and doubled inside of Roland, enveloped his sharper senses with the soft notion of saving the Warwicks somehow, of proving Conner’s innocence, mad as the notion was.

At least he might save the children. He could save Kyla. Surely he owed her that much, that ten-year-old waif who had grown up into a woman he could not envision.

Roland walked out of the inn, blended in with the crowd in the square. The peasant woman with the children was gone, but in her place were a hundred more such women, all of them nameless, faceless, struggling to survive another day.

A ragged herd of sheep clattered across the cobblestones in front of him, driven on by a brown dog and a shepherd boy in a tartan.

He wondered what Kyla and Alister were doing right now.

As it turned out, he wouldn’t have to wait that long to find out.

Chapter Three

ENGLAND MAY 1117

S
he had thought the whole thing was rather too easy.

First there was the serendipitous coincidence that the very lord Kyla sought had not bothered to leave the rustic English border town since the massacre at Glencarson five weeks ago.

But she had explained that away as a commonsense move on his part, to keep his base entrenched on his own English soil while hunting for her up north. She would have done the same thing.

And how quickly she had been able to pinpoint the inn where the soldiers were staying. Of course, the town only had two inns. It had to be one or the other. The soldiers constantly milling about The Hound’s Taile had resolved that issue.

But perhaps she should have taken a longer look at the arrangements before leaping forward with her plan. She had given herself only a day to scout the area. It had seemed simple enough. A small inn, a courtyard with easy access to the stables and the main road.…

Oh, it had been so sweetly arranged. That tiny twinge of warning had been all but vanquished once she had seen the man she sought, strolling so casually across the courtyard.

And it had to be him. It had to be.

No other man in this remote little town could have walked with such confidence, seeming to part the very air in front of him with a wealth of power and grace.

The day had been cloudy, so when she first spied him what she had noticed was the presence of him more than anything, an overall impression of complete and absolute command.

Then the woolly clouds blocking the sun had passed. With breathtaking abruptness clear sunlight spilled all around him, and she almost gasped out loud.

What twisted fate had left the man who had the soul of the devil with a person so blessed? It was bitterly unfair, watching such perfection move across the yard without any apparent awareness of his own beauty.

Honeyed hair fell in waves around a firm jaw, to wide shoulders, and she could swear a crooked smile curved those sculpted lips, a smile given to no one but the birds in the trees, it seemed. She could even make out the color of his eyes, a vivid greenish blue, bright against the tan of his face.

They were the exact match to the color of a small stone she had seen once at court, set in the ring of a Moorish prince.
Turkeis
, the prince had called it, with a knowing smile at her, and then translated the strange word: “turquoise.”

She hated Strathmore with sudden force, hated that he lived and Alister had died. Hated that the man who would have had her in marriage would now have her in chains, yet still walked like a man who had not a care to trouble him.

But mostly she hated him for who he was: the man who had hunted what was left of her family to death.

Kyla, crouching in an alley behind some empty ale barrels, had closed her eyes then, willing him to go away.

When she opened them again, he was gone.

She had faded back into the shadows of the building to wait until nightfall. After that, she had merely chosen the most auspicious room—the largest one, of course, the only one with its own balcony—and had no trouble at all scaling the stripped branches of a summer vine that had buried its roots into the walls of the inn. It had taken less than a minute.

Yes, it had been so easy.

And that was what she got for using her heart and not her head, for now he had caught her, and she would die without
the revenge she had been nursing since Glencarson. He had trapped her here in this little room with him, and in an instant he would hand her over to Henry’s men. Hound of Hell, indeed.

Her hand ached from the punch she had delivered to his jaw. She sincerely wished she could do it again.

He was standing there, almost grinning at her after having made that ridiculous, formal introduction, as if they were at a ball, and not toe-to-toe in the darkness of the inn where she had come with half a mind to kill him.

“Give me the letter,” she said in a low voice, rubbing her knuckles.

Roland took a careful step away from her before replying. “Sorry,” he said. “Don’t have it.”

He watched with interest the despair that flickered across her face and was gone. Her eyes narrowed in the half-light. What color were they? Something light. Green, he would guess, or robin’s-egg blue, perhaps, to go with that cherry hair …

“You lie,” she hissed.

“I’m afraid not, my lady. The letter is not here.”

She hesitated; he watched her fight the urge to look at the wooden box on the table, the revealing corner of paper sticking out.

“Its blank,” he said gently.

She shifted on her feet, allowing a thick fall of hair to cover half her face. With abrupt intensity Roland found himself wanting to touch it, wanting to feel for himself the fire of its color. It almost made him miss the forward leap she made for the window.

He caught her, but not without a struggle, and he was desperately afraid they were making too much noise. For lack of a better idea he forced her over to the thin pallet and made her sit still while he lowered himself beside her, holding her against him.