The Warrior

Payn laughed. “Come now, Ranulf. I know you too well. You would be bored to tears with a meek maid. You enjoy the

challenge of taming her, admit it.”

’Twas true. He did enjoy the challenge Ariane presented, enormously. In her company he was never, ever bored, and often he found himself relishing the sparks that flew between them, and eagerly anticipating more. With her, he needed to keep his wits about him, his reflexes keen and sharp. She was as tempestuous and unpredictable as a battle, and even more enjoyable.

“I have never had so difficult a time of bringing a wench to heel,” Ranulf muttered.

“Or so pleasurable.”

“Very well! Or so pleasurable.”

His lips pursing, Payn refilled their tankards and appeared to choose his words carefully. “There are advantages to wedding her, even if you already possess her castle and lands.”

“What advantages?”

“She could give you sons.”

She could give me sons now, Ranulf thought with a strange surge of delight. But they would be bastards.

“And if the past days are any indication, you will not find the marriage bed lacking.”

His groin stirring at the hot, sweet memories of those past days, Ranulf did not reply.

“It would not hurt to think on it, Ranulf. You have earned a respite after all these years of driving yourself. You could settle back on your estates, raise your heirs, enjoy the fruits of your labors for a change.”

“Settle back?”

“Aye. You would still owe Henry military service, but forty days is not much out of each year.”

“Good God, what would I do if I forsook soldiering?”

Payn grinned. “I told you, administer your estates.”

His lord’s mouth curled in disgust.

“Do you mean to say you have never considered another sort of life for your waning years?”

Never till of late. “Seldom.” Ranulf frowned. “Have you?”

“Aye. Sometimes . . . I confess there are times when I find myself weary of war and fighting and wenching.”

“Wenching?” Ranulf snorted in disbelief. “The day you tire of wenching, my friend, is when your body is buried half a rod beneath the earth.”

“True,” Payn said thoughtfully. “But whoring is not the same as having a wife. Of late I find myself yearning for . . . something more . . . for the softness of a warm and loving woman at my side.”

Softness. A warm and loving woman.Uncontrollably Ranulf thought of Ariane and flinched inwardly. There had never been any softness, any luxury or ease in his life. He wanted none. Ease led to weakness, weakness to defeat. His days were filled with fighting, just as he liked it. If sometimes he yearned for a settled life, for something more than conflict and combat to fill the long hours of each day, to ease the bleak solitude of the longer nights, he ruthlessly crushed the urge. He needed no woman’s softness. He needed no woman.

“I know what it is,” he observed cynically. “You are going soft in the head. Or mayhap the swordplay this morning addled your wits.”

Payn raised a penetrating gaze to his lord. “Have you never had a yearning for one special woman to share your dreams and sorrows?”

Unable to repress a sudden surge of bitterness, Ranulf looked away. He had too few dreams to offer a woman, and too much sorrow.

Payn’s quiet voice continued relentlessly. “Have you never felt the press of loneliness deep in your soul?”

Ranulf scowled into his ale. He had felt the ache of loneliness all his life, even if he never allowed himself to acknowledge it. The darkness that had claimed his soul had left him empty, hollow, cold as ice inside. No woman could warm him, or erase the bleakness from his soul. Especially not a grasping wench of noble blood.

He gave a short, hollow laugh. “You talk like a ballad singer.”