Do you think it too ostentatious?” Jocelyn asked, the honest worry in her voice vying with the pleasure lighting her eyes as she whirled about in her new gown.
The sunlight pouring through the solar windows glinted off the raven dark braids that swung out as she spun. The soft blue color of the gown brought out the apricot hue in her cheeks, the ripe, succulent tint of her lips. She fairly glowed with pleasure.
Nicholas struggled for a smile but had to settle for a nod before forcibly returning his attention to the heavy ornate staff the guild masters had presented him with that morning. As a tribute of appreciation, they’d said. As a token of their approval, Jocelyn had remarked under her breath.
“It’s fetching,” he said shortly, hoping she’d not take offense at his shortness, but unable to say more when she looked like that and stood so near and toyed so heedlessly with his heart. “Perfect.”
Irresistible. “Perfect? Perfection is not found this side of heaven.”
He looked up, catching her eye and holding her gaze. “Isn’t it? I could have sworn different.” She turned away, but not before he saw the blush sweep up her throat or her flattered smile.
There was a time when he would have felt a fool for speaking such flirtatious nonsense to a woman, but it was easy to say such things to Jocelyn. Perhaps because he believed them. Each day she grew more relaxed, seeming to shed years right before his eyes, turning from a severe, disapproving chatelaine into this pretty, lighthearted girl.
But such a boon did not come without its price. It took all of his self-control not to throw her over his shoulder and take her to his, nay their chambers, and be done with this torture.
With unseeing eyes, he stared down at the staff he held. He’d only himself to blame for the plight he found himself in. He’d been its architect. He’d wanted to calm Jocelyn’s fears, to reassure her that they would be together only when she willed it so.
Well, he’d succeeded in convincing her. He’d succeeded so well, in fact, that here it was nearly two weeks later and he’d still not tasted his wife’s charms. As for the lust he’d been at such pains to deny, it ate at him like acid.
Simply put, his wife’s friendliness was going to drive him mad. He looked up as she whirled once more, shyly preening as she smoothed the soft wool over her hips. It was like her. She valued things, from the alewife’s skills to the way the light fell on the budding rowan tree.
She’d given her life for this place, these people, and never asked anything back. How could he fail to admire her? And there, between admiration and lust, lay a fertile bed for love. Yes, he’d grown to love his wife and growing in love, grew even greater in desire.
It was a hell of a circle.
Now, if he could just trust her not to kill him—
“My lord!” Keveran burst into the chamber unannounced, fear breaking his voice. Nicholas stood up, and set down the staff, his hand reaching for the battered sword that was never far from his person.
At once, Jocelyn went to the lad, austerity and purpose falling like a curtain over her features, hiding the girl she’d been a moment before. “What is it, Keveran?” she asked.
“Sir Guy is coming!” the youngster blurted out.
“Aye?” asked Nicholas calmly. “What of it? He is welcome as our neighbor—”
“It isn’t neighborly what he’s coming to do. He’s coming to challenge you to another joust. This time to the death!”
Jocelyn turned her head quickly toward Nicholas, a question and an accusation clear in her expression.
“I haven’t seen the young dog since I unseated him,” Nicholas answered tersely. What did he have to do to make her believe that he wanted nothing but peace in his life?
“It’s true, Lady. Guy Moore has been in Glastonbury licking his wounds. But my father says he hasn’t healed them, he’s only kept them open.”
“This is ridiculous,” Jocelyn said, straightening up and looking about angrily. “What does he hope to accomplish with your death?”
“The land. The manor. The fields. The mill.” Nicholas looked at her. “You.”
“He couldn’t be such a fool to think I would accept him.”
“Of course, he’s a fool,” Nicholas said in a dangerous voice. He picked up his sword. “No one else but a fool would challenge me. Keveran, when he arrives, fetch him hither. Then I will—”
“No,” Jocelyn said.
Nicholas turned. His wife had moved away from the boy, and stood, tall and regal, in a pool of sunlight. “No.”
He struggled to keep his fury in check, knowing how she loathed violence. He glanced at Keveran. “Begone, Keveran. Do as I say.”
As soon as the boy had left he returned his attention to Jocelyn. She remained where she’d taken her stance, her face colorless and her eyes dark. “What say you nay to, my lady?”
“No joust. No fighting. It only begets more fighting.”
“If I refuse to fight, others will soon know of it. Such refusal amongst men, Jocelyn, is an invitation to take what another owns, abuse what they do not want of it, and use what they do.” He looked at her in telling silence.
She understood. She trembled but her gaze did not waver. He felt torn by conflicting desires, the one to comfort and deny what he knew must be done, the other to force her to concede that he was right, and see in his ability to protect her his worth, not his worthlessness.
“Do not meet with him, Nicholas,” Jocelyn asked between stiff lips. “If you do, it will be the beginning of an unending line of men waiting outside my door to challenge you. And each day they come, you will grow more accustomed to their challenges, more accustomed to spilling their blood and more accustomed to having your own spilt.”
Her lips quivered. Her eyes blazed behind a chrysalis of tears. “But I won’t become accustomed to it! I never did!”
“You are wrong—”
“I thought I was wrong!” she broke in, trembling where she stood, her body tense. “I thought you would prove to be more than a man with a sword. But give a man a sword and sooner or later he’ll wield it.” She spoke derisively, her dark eyes flashing with contempt.
“You are like all the rest, all the godly knights lusting after battle, not content lest you have marred something, brutalized someone, defeated, cowed or beat another.”
“Is that what you believe?” he asked, his voice dropping. The air between them crackled with the accumulated tension of the last weeks. All the desire, the hope, the longing seemed suddenly futile and wasted.
“What else can I think?” she countered fiercely. “With the first man to tip his sword in your direction, you rise like a dragon, all fire and fury, the promise of battle in your eyes and in your fisted hands. I’d rather—”
The remainder of her sentence was lost in the sound of clattering footsteps and shouts of warning from the outer hall. The door to the chamber crashed open and Guy Moore stood framed in the doorway.
Nicholas regarded him coldly. His golden hair streamed down upon his shoulders. A silver clasp glinted on his shoulder, pinning back the rich, dark red cloak and exposing the gold threads adorning his saffron-colored surcoat. His pale doeskin gloves were likewise enriched as were the cuffs of his leather boots.
The overweening pup had dressed the part of Saint George come to slay the dragon.
Well, he would not be disappointed. For Nicholas certainly felt the part of a beast watching the cave door, enraged at any challenge to the treasure he guarded. Why hadn’t his bride even named him “beast”?
He looked at Moore and laughed, sudden bitter realization returning him to his once vaunted recklessness. She would never come to him of her own free will. And he would never force her. They would be forever thus, he standing outside her chamber longing for entry, she guarding herself against his supposed nature.
Maybe she was right. Maybe, after all, he would never be more than a human destrier, a hulking dragon, making mayhem with fists and blade. But, by God, if that was all he was, it was something at which he excelled.
“What do you want, Moore?” he asked, stepping in front of Jocelyn.
The knight had the effrontery to let his gaze touch Jocelyn before bowing with bare civility. “And a good day to you, too,” he sneered. “I see no one has bothered to mention that a knight should have more to recommend him than brute strength and animal cunning. Which all of Trecombe knows, sir, is the only way in which you unseated me.”
If Moore thought to provoke him to a rage with such obvious taunts, he would be sorely disappointed. Nothing this pretty fribble called him could touch him. He’d already been pierced through by Jocelyn’s words and the knowledge that he would never win her wary heart. And since he could not have her love, why then…what mattered anything else?
Nicholas snorted. “You know nothing of war or battle, boy. Pray thee you never will.”
Guy flushed hotly. “I may not yet have been christened on a battlefield, but at least my honor did not die in some heathen’s cell.”
Nicholas regarded him flatly. “Go home to your mother’s hearth and return to me when you’ve grown a beard.”
“Like yours? Pah! You’ve come to England more heathen than native son. What other vileness did you learn from your captors—or were they your masters?” Moore stepped forward, his clean chin jutting belligerently. Nicholas stood silently. Behind him he heard Jocelyn hiss on a sharp indrawn breath.
“If you were worthy of being a knight, you would never have surrendered,” Moore continued. “Thus, I can only assume that you are no knight, sir, but a jumped-up villein who Richard, in battle blindness, mistook for a man.”
Nicholas turned his back on him. “Get out of here, Moore, before you have to be carried out.”
“Not before you and Jocelyn hear me out.”
At the sound of his wife’s name on another man’s lips, Nicholas’s head swung back around. “You speak with a familiarity to which I take exception, boy. Henceforth, refer to my wife as Lady Jocelyn.”
“Why?” the young knight asked. “I am far more familiar with the lady than you are, Sir No-Name.”
The suggestive tone sparked the embers Nicholas had been trying so hard to keep banked. In one long stride, he was at Moore’s side, his face inches from the lithe young knight’s. “Go, boy,” he said in a velvety rasp. “Now.”
Moore met his gaze, his eyes wild with injured pride and greed. “I challenge you to a joust, Sir Nicholas, the winner of which shall have Cabot Manor and its holding.” His gaze leapt to where Jocelyn stood, dutifully silent but trembling, her eyes hot and contemptuous. “And Jocelyn.”
He smirked at Nicholas, confident in his jousting skills. Nicholas could almost read the boy’s thought: Now that he knew the sort of tricks Nichols might employ, he considered he would easily overmatch him. He’d better weapons and finer steeds than Nicholas had ever seen, let alone owned. “Three days hence.”
But Nicholas had also seen the leer Moore cast upon his wife and it drove a spike of pain through an already open wound.
“A pox on your ‘three days hence!’” With a savage snarl, he backhanded Moore, the violence of the blow hurling the young knight across the room.
“You want my wife?” Nicholas thundered striding across the room after the fallen man. “You dare come in here and leer at my wife?”
He seized Moore’s embroidered surcoat and hauled him to his feet only to shove him away and stalk toward him again. Feverishly, Moore staggered back, barely able to keep his balance, hand groping at his side for his sword. When Nicholas was almost upon him, he found it and with a screech of steel wrenched it from its scabbard, bringing its tip to the center of Nicholas’s broad chest.
Nicholas looked down at the point denting his tunic and sneered.
“I should kill you!” Moore howled. “If I kill you I’ll be doing her a favor. She can’t want you. She can’t!”
A shadow crossed Nicholas’s thoughts. Something dark and foreboding, deeper still than pain, bloomed into a hideous resolve.
“Perhaps not,” he said, without looking at her, “but unless you release her with my death, she is mine and mine she’ll stay until my dying breath.”
He could not bring himself to see how Jocelyn received this timely reminder that with his death, she would be free. She need not even be party to it. She simply needed to stand by and witness his death. Then accuse the murderer and be free of both men.
With a sound of pain, he grabbed Moore’s blade in his bare hand and shoved it aside while cuffing the young knight across the face, as one would a presumptuous brat.
“Last chance, boy. Go home.” He struck him again. Moore staggered back under the seemingly casual smack. His lip broke, dribbling bright red blood down his chin. His brows lowered and his chest heaved. He started to bring the sword back up to Nicholas and, with a sound of contempt, Nicholas ripped it from his hand and tossed it aside.
“I warn you, sir,” Guy panted. “Don’t lay hand on me again or—”
Nicholas smote him across the face again. “Or what?”
“Please, Nicholas!” he heard Jocelyn cry.
Only her voice could have turned him aside. He looked toward the sound and as he did, a short dagger appeared in Moore’s hand from beneath his short cape. With a triumphant roar, he slashed at Nicholas. The blade cut across his tunic and sliced through his flesh.
With a gasp, Nicholas fell back but not before he’d seen the feral glint in Moore’s pale eyes and the spittle at the corner of his mouth.
Be damned if the boy wouldn’t do Jocelyn’s work for her yet! Nicholas laughed, holding his arms wide, backing up and circling the panting young knight. The sword had spun beneath the table on the other side of the room. If he could just get to it, he might end this farce.
“Stop laughing!” Moore shouted, slashing wildly.
“Why? That you might kill me with an all due sense of gravity? Never.” He sneered.
He’d humiliated the boy in front of his ladylove and now Moore was nearly frantic with the need to repay him for that humiliation. That frenzy of hate was the only thing Nicholas had on his side. The boy was young, quick, trained, and had a dagger. And he was spilling precious blood by the moment.
“Don’t you see the humor in it, boy?” he asked, backing toward the sword. “I survived a crusade, a spear in my side, a fetid Syrian dungeon, and a three thousand mile trek across hell, and here you are, a moment away from dispatching me with that little toad-sticker. Well, you’d best do it quickly, Moore, lest I die of laughter first.”
Moore plunged forth again, slashing Nicholas across the forearm before he could leap back. It was a shallow wound, but one which would soon grease his palm with blood, making it difficult to grip the sword. Should he get to it. He edged sideways, his gaze never leaving Moore’s.
Suddenly, Moore darted forward, his dagger flailing as he broke between where Nicholas stood and where the sword lay.
“What sort of fool do you take me for, Sir No-Name?” he spat contemptuously. “And who is now trapped? Why, ‘tis you! Ha!”
Moore sauntered forward and flipped the dagger over, holding it by its tip, preparatory to hurling it. Into his chest, Nicholas supposed.
“I should thank you,” Moore said before addressing Jocelyn who stood behind him. “You’d best leave now, Jocelyn. You wouldn’t want to see this—”
Crash! Out of the corner of his eye, Nicholas saw the guild master’s staff come careening out of nowhere and catch Guy Moore flush to the side of his head. Like a poleaxed beef, the young knight crumpled where he’d stood.
Nicholas turned. Jocelyn stood beside him, her lips pursed, her eyes dark as she stared down at the fallen knight. “Oh, yes, I do,” she said to the knight she knocked senseless.
Nicholas stared at her. She’d saved his life. She lifted her head. Tears spilled down her cheeks.
“Why?” he whispered, uncertain what he would do if he allowed himself to move.
The tears might flow unabated, but this was Jocelyn, not some tender, sentimental girl. Her lips tightened with exasperation.
“Why?” She threw down the staff in disgust. “Because I love you, you great hairy ox!”
And without awaiting his reply, she marched through the open door.