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“You are paying me for protection and I will give it.”
She waved a hand dismissively at his calm reply, as if she didn’t care one way or another.
“You do not trust me, lady?”
Her gaze sharpened, she licked her lips. He watched the movement, could not help it. He wanted her to lick his lips. In a moment he would be beyond control—there was a fine sheen of sweat on his skin beneath his chain mail, and it wasn’t because of the warmth of the sun.
The lady seemed to have been considering her words, for now she spoke in a blunt manner that signified absolute honesty. “Aye, Captain, I trust you. I think I must. I think I have no choice.”
He searched her eyes. He had drawn his own answers from the morning’s events, and added them to the various things he had seen and heard since he arrived at Somerford. There was a tale of deceit and treachery to be told there, and Gunnar was almost ready to tell it. Maybe Rose had found answers of her own, but were they the same as his? It was time, Gunnar decided, to find out.
“Sir Arno knows Fitzmorton,” he said carefully. “He has had dealings with him. He knew Miles de Vessey just now—that he hadn’t even bothered to ask his name was a careless mistake, but Miles is always arrogant.”
Rose turned her face away, her hair falling over her cheek and shielding her from his gaze.
“Fitzmorton’s man, Gilbert, was in the village the night of the attack,” Gunnar continued. “I think it is Fitzmorton who is behind the attacks, not the merefolk. It has been made to look like it was the merefolk, but no one has ever seen them. Your villagers are already so full of suspicion that they just assumed. Sir Arno and Fitzmorton are in league. They thought to frighten you so much that you would be easily persuaded to hand over Somerford Manor to Arno, and then Arno would allow Fitzmorton to step in. He covets Lord Ra
dulf’s Crevitch estates, and if he had Somerford, he would have an advantage when it came to making war on Radulf.”
“You are stabbing in the dark,” she said weakly, and pushed her hair irritably back from her face. She looked flushed, angry, but her eyes slid nervously from his. “You don’t know whether any of this is truth, Captain. You are spinning a tale.”
Gunnar ignored her protests, she would naturally be angry and resentful to discover she had been duped. “When your husband died, you were expected to rely more heavily upon your knight—to give up your power to Arno, lady. Instead you held on to it. All this time he has waited and you have remained strong, and now he has given up trying to persuade you with words. Now he has begun to take action.”
She was watching him like a rabbit watched a wolf, as if she expected him to draw his sword and strike her. He understood. He had just torn down her safe little world and left her bewildered and bereft. She must be feeling as if he were her destroyer, not Arno.
“Arno wouldn’t hurt me,” she insisted, her voice soft and breathless, her dark eyes wide. “I know he wouldn’t hurt me.”
He narrowed his gaze. “Why? Because he lusts after you? Have you given him what he wants, lady?”
Angry color flared in her pale cheeks, fire burned in her eyes. “You forget yourself, Captain,” she said.
Jubilation swelled inside him. She and Arno were not lovers; they never had been. She was an innocent when it came to need, to desire, to the hot ache that drew men and women together. The widow of an old man, she had much to learn, and Gunnar exulted that he alone would teach her.
But now he smiled without any trace of humor, his feelings hidden. “If you have denied him in the bedchamber, too, then he will have grown to hate you. The black and bitter hatred men ache with when they want a woman who does not want them. Has he asked to wed you?”
She glared back at him, but unlike Arno or Miles he was unmoved. Abruptly Rose lost the will to fight him. Was he right? She was heartsick at the thought of it. He had been there for such a short time and already he was turning her safe, comfortable world upside down.
But Arno was Edric’s trusted friend!
“Lady, does he want to wed you?”
She couldn’t meet his eyes. “He may have done. He has been…strange. I think, just now in the village, before you came, he meant to do so. That was why he was so angry when you interrupted him. I fear he thinks you…he believes you…I…”
She did not want to finish the words, but after all it was not necessary. He understood, she realized, casting him a quick glance. He was grinning at her in a way that set her heart bumping about in her chest like a landed fish. How was it possible for a man to be so mesmerizingly handsome? Aye, his mouth was curved up at the corners, his blue eyes gleamed, but it was just a smile. Jesu, just a smile! Was she as weak and foolish as her mother, to allow herself to be so affected by a man’s smile?
“Please yourself, Captain,” Rose said petulantly, tossing her head, disguising her reaction as best she could. “Come with me or stay here, but I am returning to Somerford Keep.” And she turned her horse and galloped off, as if she were intent on outrunning him. Did she hope he’d stay or follow? Rose didn’t know, but she needed the sanctuary of her keep and the mindless familiarity of the tasks that awaited her.
Gunnar grinned and kicked his gray horse into pursuit, being sure to remain just behind her. Now was not the time for pressure or argument. She was suffering, and she was afraid. She had no one to trust but him, and he was a stranger, a mercenary who did as he was paid. He could not blame her for being suspicious. So he rode behind her all the way to the keep, watching her straight back and the sway of her hips beneath all that dark hair, and pretending not to mind what her innocence of treason would mean to him.
He would lose the chance to have Somerford Manor.
Gunnar looked about him, at the countryside he had begun to consider his own. The golden harvest was ripening swiftly now, almost bursting from the fields, and the soil was well cherished and rich. This was Lady Rose’s doing, he knew that now. She was one of those rare women who understood the earth. Who was willing to be still and silent long enough to hear its soft murmur. She grasped the importance of allowing her people enough time to tend their own crops and beasts, instead of working them to death in the service of her own wealth and glory. And they loved her for it.
She even worked alongside them, when it was necessary.
He pictured her, dark hair bound up on her head, her hem kilted about her smooth legs, bending her straight back as she tilled the soil. A smile tugged at his stern mouth, but he held it back. If he was master here, she would not need to do the work of a peasant. He would do it for her, gladly.
The amusement died, and now he had no urge to smile. Aye, he would be willing to work like a beast in the fields for her, if she would take him to her bed for a single night.
