The Conqueror

“Him.”

Gwyn let the tangled curls, grimed and weighted with dirt and smoke, drop to her shoulders. She looked at Duncan bleakly. “Who?”

“Sau-vage!” Duncan said, elongating the ’vage’ into one long, lazy syllable.

“Pagan?” She plopped down on the bed. Oh St. Jude, even the sound of his name brought back a bluster of heated churning. She stared at Duncan wretchedly. “Aye. I’ve seen him.”

“So did I,” Duncan whispered back. “He’s enormous.”

“Aye,” she agreed, looking away.

“As big as a mountain.” Duncan paused. “Are we to be safe?”

Gwyn exhaled slowly. Safe? That all depended on what you meant by safe. Safe from death, aye. She recalled too clearly how she’d found a gentle pagan saviour on a deserted highway, a warrior who pulled back the hair from her eyes as she vomited, a man who made her laugh when she’d rather have cried and who laid a healing poultice on her skin when she was unconscious in his bed.

Aye, Duncan and all the children would be safe. But Guinevere? Ah well, that was another matter entirely.

No, she would never be safe from the man who had set her body on fire and stilled the maddening Ache by drumming another one even deeper in her heart, a man who now stood between her and raising the battered body of the king’s son to the crown of England.

She smiled into Duncan’s earnest, worried face. “Everyt

hing will be fine, Duncan. Trust me.”

“I do!” he burst out happily.

A few moments later, she opened the door, looked both ways, then gestured to him. Down the stairs he hurried, and was gone.

Gwyn walked to the window and peered down to the bailey. She could see no violence. No loyal servants were being dragged to the gates or the cellars. No de l’Ami knights were being lined up in the field or marched across the draw. In fact, she realised, craning her neck, there was no line of soldiers marching out of the castle at all, a trail that would mark those who were unwilling to swear allegiance to the new lord.

How odd.

“Guinevere.”

She spun. There he stood, his tall figure outlined in the doorway. Gwyn was alone with him and the sound of her wildly thundering heart.

Chapter Five

Despite anger, fear, fury and hate, she couldn’t deny the ripple that danced through her body when she saw his leather-clad body on the landing. Sunlight filtering through the slitted windows glinted off his dark hair and the stubble of his chin. The shadows angled his face into long, lean lines of raw sensuality.

Please God, she prayed, not again.

He pushed the door closed behind him. “You’ve run my castle well,” he said in his deep, masculine rumble. Taunting her.

She composed her face into the most noxious glare she knew. “Your castle?”

“’Tis most certainly not yours anymore.”

She dug her nails into her palms, fisted by her thighs. “You ensured that.”

“Aye. Much as you ensured forty lashes on my back and weeks of a rat-infested prison I wouldn’t wish on my father.”

His father?

Gwyn’s skirts whispered over the rushes as she walked to the edge of the room. She ran her hand across the window ledge.

“Prison?” she asked with airy nonchalance, her back to him. She even managed an unconcerned sniff. “You were captured, then, were you? They never said directly, but I am glad to hear the king’s men were successful.”

“They weren’t.” Pagan’s grim voice blew across the room. “I have his castle. And his vassal.”