Wild and Wicked (12 page)

“Where’s Father?”

Good question, lad.
Payton shrugged. “Lost, I presume.”

“Nay, not Father. He is never lost.” Yale pushed himself into a sitting position and winced. “Aye, my head. It feels as if a thousand horses are racing through it.”

“It’ll pass.” Payton strode to the supplies packed into a corner.

“When?”

“Soon.”

“Why am I here?”

Payton had expected this question. “All you needs know is that you are now our prisoner and you shall not attempt to escape.”

“This is a game? Because of the revels?” Yale’s young eyes brightened at the prospect of a challenge. A smile of anticipation pulled at the corners of his lips. Aye, he was much like the man who had sired him. “Aunt Miranda told Bronwyn there was to be a surprise game at the revels!” An excited grin stretched from one side of his mouth to the other, showing teeth too large for his face, as he quickly surveyed the dilapidated interior of the old inn.

“’Tis no game, I assure you,” Payton growled.

Yale ignored the answer. “Am I to escape? Is that it?”

“That would be a grave mistake,” Payton warned as the boy clambered to his feet and, still dizzy, leaned a shoulder against the wall. He winced and blinked and Payton watched the boy think as his gaze swept the walls and what was left of the ceiling, searching for ways out of the building other than the broken door.

But he was in no shape to escape yet. He still seemed woozy from the drug that had been added to his mazer and he winced at the dull rays of sunlight streaming through the rotting slats.

“Have you drink?” Yale asked. “I’m thirsty.”

“There is water at the creek.”

“I’m hungry as well.”

“Soon—when the others join us.”

“What others?”

“’Tis none of your concern.”

“But I’m hungry now.”

Payton hadn’t realized what trouble a boy could be.

“You’ll just have to be patient.”

“My aunt says I’m like my father, that patience eludes me.”

Smart woman.
“Hush now. I have work to do.”

“What?” The lad was struggling unsteadily to his feet. “What work?”

“Again, ’tis none of your concern, so just sit there and be quiet. When the others arrive we will eat. Until then you wait.”

The lad’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Are you robbers, then? Cutthroats and the like?”

“Aye, cutthroats,” Payton growled.

“Is there a bloody band, then? Am I part of it?” Yale perked up, his hunger and thirst quickly forgotten at the thought of adventure.

“You’re the captive,” Payton warned.

“Am I really?” Yale was impressed. “How must I act?”

“As I said. Quietly. You are to sit here and wait,” Payton snapped, obviously tired of the questions.

“For what?”

“To be rescued, of course.”

“Bloody hell, then it is a game, and a grand one!” Before Payton’s eyes Yale transformed from a dullwitted and drugged prisoner to an active, excited boy ready to set upon a great adventure. “And my father, is he to rescue me? And Uncle Collin and Aunt Miranda, are they playing, too? Though she be a woman, she is a marksman with a bow and arrow and I’ve seen her swing a mace. Is she on our side?”

Payton’s color rose. “Aye,” he said. “They are all part of our band.”

“But what of Bronwyn? She’s a girl and . . .” His nose wrinkled. “A crybaby, methinks. Can’t hardly ride or hold a weapon. She’s not like her mum but—”

“Enough!” Payton rubbed the back of his neck and wanted to cuff Devlynn’s son to shut the boy up. ’Twas better when he was drugged and slumped in the saddle. Quieter. And Payton needed time to think. To figure out what he was going to do with his sister, for surely she would appear any second. He’d known he’d left her behind and hadn’t worried about it; her mare was not nearly as fleet as the gray destrier he’d claimed as his own—Baron Devlynn’s steed.

“When is the game over?” the boy asked as Payton’s head began to ache.

“All you need to know is that you are my captive and you are to stay here. Quietly.”

“Until my father saves me, is that it?”

Payton’s lips thinned. “Aye. Until he tries to save you.”

“Then am I to not try and get away?” he asked, crestfallen, an edge of suspicion to his voice.

Payton latched onto this idea. “Aye. That would be best. You must do everything I tell you to do. Elsewise the game will be ruined.”

“Am I to stay prisoner?”

“A quiet, obedient prisoner.”

The freckled nose wrinkled. “’Tis no fun.”

“In the next go-round, you can be the kidnapper,” Payton offered, throwing the brat a bone.

Yale visibly brightened. “Can I? Yes. I would like that.” He narrowed his eyes and curled his lip. “I’d be a nasty one, too, I would.”

Payton believed him.

He glanced out the window to the clouds thickening in the sky and wondered what had happened to his sister. Even accounting for the difference in speed of the horses, she should be appearing soon.

At the very least within the hour.

Unless something happened to her.

Unless . . . He considered the man who was his enemy. Surely there was no way he could have caught up with Apryll. Not after her escape from the tower.

And yet . . .

Worry pricked at Payton’s conscience.

What if she’d been captured? What if, even now, she was prisoner to the beast of Black Thorn? Would he torture her? Find a way to loosen her tongue? Even now the soldiers loyal to him could be riding to this old inn, blades drawn, blood-lust running through their veins.

He glanced back at the boy who was now silent and staring hard at him with the same intensity Payton had witnessed in the Lord of Black Thorn’s eyes.

It crossed his mind that this boy, so like his father, was his nephew, for Devlynn, by the black blood of a rapist, was his half brother. Though, it seemed, few at Black Thorn knew. Probably because Morgan of Black Thorn had pillaged and raped many times, and his seed was scattered widely over Wales with bastards such as he too many to count.

Except that he was the son of a lady, not some country wench or tavern whore.

He looked at the boy. Devlynn of Black Thorn’s son. His only heir. Payton felt no kinship with the lad.

Yale was but a means to an end. Of no more value than the horse Payton had stolen . . . and in many ways worth much, much less.

Apryll shuddered as she entered the lord’s tent. On the floor, squarely in the middle of the makeshift room, was a pallet that had been covered with furs.

Her throat turned to sand. She heard the sound of hoofbeats, knew the other soldiers had ridden off and that she was now alone with the beast of Black Thorn.

“Sit,” he commanded and nudged her toward the bed.

“I would rather stand as I’ve been riding and—”

“Sit.”

She did as she was bid. ’Twould do no good to make him angry. Nay, she had to lure him into a feeling of security; she needed him to think that all thoughts of escape had left her head. Dropping onto the soft pallet she wondered how many women he’d bedded on this very mattress and if she’d be the next.

She’d heard gossip in the corridors of Serennog often enough. Once, when Apryll had been on the staircase, she’d paused to lace her boot and heard the silly, gap-toothed laundress, Daisy, complaining that her man fell asleep after laying with her.

“He be not the only man afflicted with the ailment,” Frannie, the head seamstress, had assured her. Cackling loudly, Frannie had confided in the younger woman, “’Tis a woman’s curse, you know, to want more, to hope that your husband is man enough to take care of yer needs as well as his. But it don’t happen much, Daisy, not at all. Most men make quick business of it, then just when you be ready to enjoy yerself, they roll off of ye and start snorin’. That’s the way it is, I tell ye,” Frannie said as they started down the stairs again. “Ye’d be wise to pleasure yourself afterwards.”

“But if I have a man—”

“You’ll not be satisfied.” Their voices were fading and Apryll had stolen after them, listening to the conversation as Frannie’s voluminous skirts had swept the floor.

“Oh, they talk a lot, about rutting and rutting until long in the night,” she was saying. “My man, he swears to his friends that he can make me howl all night long, when the truth of the matter is he barely rolls off me before he sleeps the sleep of the dead. What a man says he does in bed and what he does, well, they be not the same. Not at all. Me husband, Tim, he brags to me, tells me he’ll love me until I be spent, when we both know it’s a lie. The trouble is, Tim believes the lie hisself.”

Now a plan was hatching in Apryll’s head. Could she go through with it? Lie with this man and hope that he fell asleep? He had to be as weary as she, for he’d spent as many hours awake. She looked up at him, a big man, too tall to stand in the tent, hunched over a bit, arms folded over his broad chest, piercing gray eyes staring at her so hard she was certain he was reading her thoughts.

“Lie down.”

She stiffened. Her heart thundered as he took a step closer.

“Lie down.”

“I need not . . .”

“Oh, yes, you do. We both do. We will sleep and when my men return we will awaken. You will tell me then why you attacked my castle and took my boy and if I think you have not lied to me, I will let you eat, for you must be hungry.”

As if on cue her stomach rumbled.

“Lie down.”

“I be not tired,” she lied. Oh, it was one thing to consider lying with the man, feeling his body around hers, but now, when it was time, she had doubts that it would be wise.

“You do not take orders well.”

“Nor, I think, would you.”

“But I be not the captive. Now . . . lie back or I shall have to force you. Is that what you want?” There was a spark of fire in his eyes, a bright pinpoint of sexual light that caused a quiver deep inside.

She licked her lips and heard his swift intake of breath.

“You be a vixen woman,” he growled, the fire flaring and hissing.

She laid back upon his bed and could barely breathe as he slid into the pallet next to her. Grabbing both her wrists in one big hand, he stretched her arms over her head, then, with his free hand pulled up the furs so that they covered her body as well as his. Tense, every sense aware, she dared not breathe as he settled beneath the soft furs and, wrapping his free arm around her waist, snuggled up to her in much the same position as when they were riding. The front of his body folded tightly—possessively?—around the slope of her spine and buttocks.

She tried to pull her hands free, but the fingers surrounding her wrists were strong as steel—a flesh, bone and sinew manacle. “You cannot get away,” he said, stirring the hair at the back of her neck. “Do not even consider it.”

“But I cannot sleep with my hands above my head.”

“I can. And you’ll not escape. ’Tis all that matters.”

“You are a beast.”

“Aye.”

“Everything that has ever been said about you is true.”

“And more. Remember it.”

“But—”

“Shh.” His breath was hot against the back of her neck, the hand around her waist pulled her tight against him, his long fingers splayed across her abdomen creating heat through her itchy tunic. She felt every pad of his fingertips in hot pressure points upon her skin, the smallest of which skimmed the nest of curls where her legs met. Her breeches separated skin from skin but the coarse cloth was a thin barrier and Apryll wondered what it would be like to feel flesh upon flesh.

’Twas a simple plan. All she had to do was be patient and wait.

 

“The prisoner has escaped.” The soldier was nearly shivering in his boots as he faced Collin, who was seated in the lord’s chair warming the bottom of his boots at the fire in the great hall. The dogs were restless, their dark eyes never moving from the master’s chair.

“The prisoner?”

“Aye, the woman. She’s . . . she’s not in the tower.”

Slowly Collin rose to his full height. “Are you meaning to tell me that Apryll of Serennog is missing?”

“Aye, m’lord,” the guard said, nodding quickly, his brown eyes filled with shame.

“Were you not at your post?”

“I was. From the moment I heard that I was to be the guard I stood at the door. It never opened.”

Collin glared at the smaller man. “She could not have disappeared. Show me.” He didn’t wait for the soldier but threw on his mantel, grabbed his sword and shouldered open the door. Crossing the bailey he heard the sounds of hammers, as already the stables were under repair and the smell of smoldering, wet timbers laced the air. With the guard on his heels he made his way to the tower and climbed up the steep, curved steps to the small chamber, now unlocked, with the door flung wide.

Indeed, it was empty.

“Where is she?”

“I—I know not.”

“She is not a witch, could not have disappeared into thin air.”