“Have my horse saddled,” Liana said, and damn the steward, she thought. She wanted a good long run, with the horse pounding beneath her. Perhaps enough exercise would help her forget what awaited her.
Rogan, the oldest of what was left of the Peregrine family, squatted on his heels and stared at the castle on the horizon. His dark eyes were full of his thoughts—and his fears. He would rather face a battle than what he faced today.
“Putting it off won’t make it any easier,” his brother Severn said from behind him. Both men were tall and broad-shouldered like their father, but Rogan had inherited a sheen of red to his dark hair from their father, while Severn, who had a different mother, had more delicate facial features and hair streaked with gold. Severn was also quicker to be impatient, and now he was impatient with his older brother’s immobility.
“She won’t be like Jeanne,” Severn said, and behind him the twenty knights stopped moving and held their breath. Even Severn stopped breathing for a moment, fearing that he’d overstepped himself.
Rogan heard his brother, but he didn’t betray the emotion that went through him at the mention of Jeanne’s name. He did not fear war; he did not fear charging animals; he did not fear death, but the thought of marriage made him hesitate.
Below them ran a deep stream, and Rogan could almost feel the cold water on his body. He stood and went to his horse. “I will return,” he said to his brother.
“Wait a minute!” Severn said, grabbing the reins. “Are we to just sit here and wait for you while you decide whether or not you have courage enough to visit a slip of a girl?”
Rogan didn’t bother to answer but looked at his brother with hard eyes.
Severn released the reins. Sometimes Severn thought Rogan could tumble stone walls with those eyes of his. Even though he’d lived all his life with this older brother, Severn felt he knew very little about him; Rogan was not a man to reveal much about himself. As a boy, when that bitch Jeanne had betrayed him so publicly, Rogan had withdrawn into himself, and in the ten years since, no one had penetrated his outer shell of hardness.
“We will wait,” Severn said, stepping out of the way and allowing Rogan to pass.
When Rogan was gone, one of the knights behind Severn grunted. “Sometimes a woman changes a man,” he said.
“Not my brother,” Severn answered quickly. “No woman anywhere is strong enough to change my brother.” There was pride in his voice. The world around them might change from day to day, but Rogan knew what he wanted and how to go about getting it. “A woman alter my brother?” he said derisively.
The men smiled at the impossibility of such an idea.
Rogan rode down the hill, then along the stream for a while. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do, just put off the time when he had to go to the Neville heiress. What a man had to do for money disgusted him. When he had heard the heiress was being put up for sale, so to speak, he had told Severn to go and get her and bring her back with her wagonloads of portable wealth and the deeds to some of her father’s estates. Or, better yet, return with the gold and papers alone and leave the woman behind. Severn had said that a man as rich as Gilbert Neville would want only the oldest Peregrine, the man who would become duke as soon as the Peregrines wiped the Howards off the face of the earth.
As usual, Rogan’s body tightened with hatred when he thought of the Howards. The Howards were the cause of everything bad that had happened to the Peregrines for three generations. They were the reason he was now having to marry some old-maid heiress, the reason he wasn’t at home now—in the real Peregrine home, the place the Howards had stolen. They had stolen his birthright, his home, and even his wife.
And marrying this heiress, he reminded himself, would bring him one step closer to regaining what was rightfully his.
There was a clearing in the trees and the stream spread out to catch in a beautiful rock-edged pool. On impulse, Rogan dismounted, then began to shed his clothes, undressing down to the loincloth tied about his waist. He stepped into the icy pool and began to swim as hard and as fast as he could. What he needed was a good long hunt to expend the pent-up energy in his body, but swimming might do as well.
He swam for nearly an hour, then stepped out of the pool, his sides heaving with exertion. Stretching out on a patch of sweet green grass in the sun, he was soon sound asleep.
He slept so soundly that he did not hear the quiet gasp of the woman as she came to the pool for water. Nor was he aware that the young woman stepped back into the trees and watched him.
Liana rode hard and fast, outdistancing her father’s knight who tried to keep up with her. Her father’s men ate rather than trained and she knew the trails of the land better than they did; it was easy to escape them. Once she was alone, she headed for the pool north of the castle. She’d be alone there and she’d be able to think about her forthcoming marriage.
She was still some distance away from the pool when she saw a bit of faded red through the trees. Someone was there. She cursed her luck, then cursed her foolishness at having left her guard behind. She halted her horse, tied him to a tree, then crept quietly toward the pool.
The red was the dress of one of the farmers’ wives who lived in town and had three small fields outside the walls. Liana saw that the woman was standing absolutely still and was so absorbed in what she was looking at that she didn’t hear Liana approach. Curious, Liana started to move softly forward.
“My lady!” the young woman gasped. “I…I came to get some w-water.”
Her nervousness
increased Liana’s curiosity. “What were you looking at?”
“Nothing of any importance. I must go. My children will need me.”
“You’re leaving the pool with an empty water jug?” Liana pushed past her and looked through the bushes and immediately saw what had held the woman’s attention. Lying on the grass in a patch of sunlight was a splendid-looking man: tall, broad-shouldered, slim-hipped, heavily muscled, with a strong-jawed face shadowed with dark whiskers and long, dark hair that glinted red in the sunlight. Liana looked from his feet to the top of his head, wide-eyed with interest as she gazed at the honey-colored skin of his nearly nude body. She’d had no idea a man could be so beautiful.
“Who is he?” she whispered to the farm wife.
“He’s a stranger,” the woman whispered back.
Near the man was a pile of clothes of coarse wool. With the sumptuary laws, it was often possible to guess a person’s income and station in life by his clothes. This man wore no fur of any kind, not even the lowly rabbit allowed the lower classes. He had no musical instrument nearby, so he was no traveling musician.