At that Zared sat down on the window seat, her face a study in dejection. The potion was indeed a powerful one if it would make him agree to such a thing. "I have done a dishonorable thing," she said.
Tearle sat up straight on the bed. "If it is another man, I will kill him. No man will have what is mine."
"Will you stop talking?" she half shouted. "Do you not understand that what you are saying is not what you mean? It is the witch's brew that is talking."
Tearle's concentration was on her body, so he had difficulty understanding what she was saying. "You are a witch," he murmured, and he got off the bed to go to her.
Zared jumped off the window seat and ran to the other side of the room. On
the floor in an untidy heap were his clothes, and on top was his thin-bladed, jeweled-handled knife. She picked it up and held it as though to protect herself. "Do not come closer to me," she said.
There were times when a man could cry, he thought. Her red hair was hanging down her back and falling across one shoulder. The knife somehow added to her beauty. "Zared, I will give you anything. Tell me what it is you desire. Jewels? Estates? What do you want?"
Zared looked at him. He wore not a stitch, and he looked even better without clothes than in them. She wanted him to hold her, to touch her, but she did not want him to do so only under a spell. She tossed the knife on top of his clothes. Even when he was driven by the uncontrollable lust of a witch's spell he was not a violent man. He still was not forcing her to lie with him.
Going to the witch had not been an honorable action on her part, but she would save her honor by fulfilling her part of the spell. She walked past him, not touching him, and climbed onto the bed. She lay rigid, her hands at her side, her legs held closely together. She looked up at the underside of the canopy. "I am yours to do with as you will," she said regally.
Tearle wouldn't have thought that his passion could have been killed, but it was. Some men found unwilling women desirable, but he did not. He stood by the side of the bed and glared down at her. "You are the most infuriating woman. You desire me so much that you are willing to risk poisoning me with some filthy witch's potion, yet when I touch you you draw a knife on me. How am I to understand this?" He raised his hands in a gesture of helplessness. "Would that someone would explain women to me. Or is it just my wife I am unable to understand?"
Zared turned to look at him. "You know of the potion?"
He grimaced, then bent and fumbled among his clothes and withdrew a small bag, which he tossed on the bed. "There is your potion."
Zared turned on her side and picked up the bag. "I put the potion in the mug of ale. This cannot be it."
"I was not going to drink that filth. For all I knew it contained roasted frogs' eyes. Or worse."
Zared opened the little bag, looked inside, and sniffed. The contents smelled as awful as she remembered. She looked back up at Tearle. "If this is the potion I paid the witch for, then what did you drink?"
"Mint, I think. I would not recommend it. It does not go with ale, but I daresay it tastes better than that mess you would have given me."
Zared held the bag. "If you did not drink the potion, then what has inspired this… this newfound lust of yours?"
At that Tearle did not know whether to laugh or yell at her. He did neither. He sat down on the edge of the bed and talked very slowly. "I do not know how you came to the conclusion that I have not been eaten alive with desire for you from the moment I first saw you. Why else would I have made myself your brother's lackey? Do you think that I enjoy slogging in mud up to my knees to carry lances to him? Did I remain with him because I enjoyed his company? Or yours? At the tournament, did you so much as say a kind word to me?"
She sat up on the bed, oblivious to the way Tearle was looking at her. "But I thought you disliked me. I thought you wanted to… to…"
"Get my hands on the Peregrine wealth?" He leaned toward her, his nose almost touching hers. "I have always had one objective: to get my hands on the body of the Peregrine daughter."
Zared blinked at him. "Really? You do not think I look like a boy?"
He looked down at her bare body, then back up at her face. "I am the only man who has known from the beginning that you were not a boy."
Zared looked back down at the pouch. "But if you did not drink the potion, then why did you react so?" Her head came up. "And why have you not come to me on your own before now?"
He had to control himself to keep from yelling. "Do you not realize that I have been courting you?"
"Courting me?"
"Aye, courting you. I realize, after having spent some time with your brother, that the Peregrine idea of courting consists of turning a woman over one's knee, but in other households going with a girl to a fair is a much more acceptable method of courtship."
"But what of the annulment? What of the message to the king?"
He gave a bit of a smile. "What message? What annulment?"
"The one we—" She smiled back at him. "You did not send the message? I called you some awful names."
"I felt that they were temporary. I hoped that if I could get you away from your brother, you might see that I was not the monster you had been told of." He picked up her hand and kissed it. "I have wanted you since I saw you struggling against my brother's men. And I have cared for you since you came back to see if I were dead, even though I was a Howard and you had been taught to hate me."