King's Warrior (Renegade Lords)

Tadhg and Magdalena looked at each other and smiled.

Gustave also had recommendations about sea captains who would be amendable to private transactions down on the quay, men who could be trusted to honor agreements made with cold hard cash. He was derisive when Captain Piper’s name came up.

“He’s lives in the gutter,” Gustave said with a snort of disgust. “He is a pig. Do not have any dealings with him. You will have all your dealings with my man, Didier. Go, tell him I sent you. And for you, Dame Thread,” he added with a gallant bow, “I shall halve my referral fee.”

She hesitated. “Gustave, old friend, I have a bit of coin, but surely Master Didier will wish for some of it.” Gustave blinked. “And so, in the matter of your referral fee—halved of course—” she smiled kindly, “I wonder…would a dozen sealed writs of safe passage settle the debt?”

Gustave’s face slowly expanded into a smile.

“Dame Thread,” he said warmly. “It is always the greatest of pleasures doing business with you.”

THEY HURRIED THROUGH the moonlit, snow-clad streets, Tadhg tracking behind Maggie like a wolf, scanning alleyways and shadows as they moved between the packs of revelers, until they reached Baselard the blacksmith, whose face lighted when he saw Maggie, and hardened when he saw Tadhg.

My, he was a large one.

He glared at Tadhg as Maggie explained what they

needed, but nonetheless, left the festivities of his home to open up his workshop. Maggie sat softly chatting with him while Tadhg sharpened his blades to a diamond-sharp finish that hand-held stones could never do.

Then they left, swift and silent, hurrying to her shop. They snuck down the alley and Tadhg put his spine to the wall beside the back door, pressing Maggie flat beside him, listening. Then taking her key, he unlocked it and swung it wide. Cold air and pale moonlight rushed in, then they stepped inside.

Tadhg prepared himself for wreckage, but it had all been cleaned up. “Your apprentice?” he asked softly.

“Yes, and she took the pouch of money,” Maggie whispered, running her hand across the mantle before spinning to him. “We can go get it—”

“No time.”

She hesitated, then nodded. “I will visit her in the morning.”

The knowledge that her life would go on without him, that she would make deliveries and visit people, mayhap Baselard again, too, one day soon, sliced through him like a knife. But he had no way to staunch the wound, nothing to offer in place of those paltry things.

“The money is for you,” he said savagely, inadequately. “All of it. Every penny.”

She nodded, then her cool hand slid into his, and she pressed the bag of coin Edwin had given her into his hand.

He pushed it back. “All of it.”

“You must buy passage on that boat,” she said in a fierce whisper. “Take it.” She forced his fingers to close around it.

They stared at each other, not speaking. Packs of street revelers passed by as the two of them stood in the dark interior of Maggie’s shop, each with a thousand things to say, neither of them saying a word.

Then, not at all gently, he hauled her up against his body so hard and high her feet left the floor, and he kissed her. Fiercely, roughly, taking everything he could from her, giving everything he could to her, pouring everything of himself that could be poured into a kiss, trying somehow to complete every exchange of the heart that he wished to spend the next fifty years exchanging with her. But there was only tonight.

Magdalena met every lash of his tongue, took his rampant, angry, bruising kisses and returned all the angry, rampant, bruised things inside of her, giving over her lifetime of kisses. She touched him everywhere he could be touched, lifted her knees around his hips, wrapped her arms around his shoulders, pressed her body up to his, asking wordlessly for everything hard and deep and endlessly taking in him, hoping, somehow, to be taken herself.

Then, abruptly, he tore away. He felt as if he’d been broken. The shop was filled with their pants as they each backed up a step, then another. He raked a shaky hand through his hair. “Maggie—”

Her eyes were bright with tears. “Go,” she whispered. “Just go.”

He didn’t move.

“Go.”

He spun on his heel and walked out. He did not look back.

“LUCKY OF YOU to be talking to me, sir,” boomed Didier, Gustave’s friend, a huge, burly sea pilot, well over six feet tall, with arms like tree limbs, a face like a smashed gourd, and a huge grin. He pocketed the bag of coin Tadhg had handed him. “You’re just in time.”

“Aye, just in time, the tide’s going out,” Tadhg muttered, his hand throbbing from Didier’s excessively firm grip. He did not feel at all lucky. Nor as if he was in time for anything. He felt bleak. And cold. As he looked across the silky black water, and thought about putting that between himself and Maggie, his heart felt as if a frozen net had passed over it, turning it grey and icy.