by Lynn Kurland
“I only need an escort there,” she added. “I don’t expect you to remain there with me.”
Of course she wouldn’t. He hadn’t expected anything else and he was too damned old to have his feelings smart because a titled woman completely out of his reach wanted him only for his ability to protect her. She needed help and he was conveniently there to give it to her.
Damn it anyway.
He turned and started walking. No, he wasn’t going to take her with him and he suspected he’d be lucky to make it where he was going himself once her father figured out she wasn’t hiding in her chamber or whatever other excuse she’d used for giving herself a head start.
“Zachary?”
He closed his eyes briefly. She said his name with a soft sort of ch, as if she were a sweet French girl who’d taken just enough German to manage it properly.
It about killed him.
“I’m taking you to Wyckham,” he said shortly, “where we will beg a pair of horses, and then nay, I am not taking you south, I’m taking you home to Artane. And then I’m going home—assuming your father, or your cousins, or your father’s entire garrison doesn’t kill me because they probably think I brought you along with me in the first place!”
He shut his mouth before he said anything else. He supposed he wouldn’t have blamed her if she’d slugged him. He’d never in his life spoken that rudely to a woman, not even his sister.
Well, he might have gotten into it with Elizabeth a time or two, but he was sure she’d given back better than he’d dished out.
That Mary only walked next to him silently said something. He wasn’t sure what, but it definitely said something. Maybe she was waiting for a good time to remove one of his dirks from her father’s worn boots and stab him with it. He didn’t feel slender hands groping his calves, though, so perhaps she didn’t plan murder.
They hadn’t walked far before his temper had disappeared the way it had come, to be replaced by other things. First was regret for his behavior, followed quickly by curiosity over her motives. Whatever else she might have been, Mary de Piaget wasn’t a fool. She must have wanted something very badly to have risked rescuing him, a complete stranger, from her father’s dungeon. If she had been willing to sneak out of her father’s keep, alone, trusting that he would help her, then she must still want that thing very badly. He wasn’t sure he was ready to speculate yet on what that thing might be.
He wanted even less to face the realization that his usefulness to her began and ended with that as-yet-unexamined thing.
It took another quarter mile before he’d ingested enough of a robust serving of guilt to face the uncomfortable fact that he was reacting to more than just Mary’s having tailed him with more skill than he ever would have suspected her capable of. It wasn’t her fault that she was intelligent and courageous and so damned beautiful that he couldn’t seem to catch his breath when he looked at her.
It also wasn’t her fault that he was an untitled Yank with no claim to fame or fortune except what he was related to by marriage. He wasn’t one to engage in speculation about the damages to his inner child, or gaze at his navel for long stretches of time, or indulge in all sorts of other self-examinations that made him want to find a sword and do damage to someone with it, but he thought his reaction might have a bit too much to do with being reduced to guardsman by a woman he wished would see him as something else.
He should have given the whole paranormal thing up a month earlier. Obviously, he’d gone through one too many time gates and ruined whatever common sense he might have once possessed.
“Zachary?”
He took a deep breath, then stopped and looked at her. He attempted a smile. “Forgive me. I was ill-mannered.”
“Nay, I have inconvenienced you. I meant to, of course,” she added. “I just hoped it wouldn’t be too much of an inconvenience.”
He sighed. “Did you leave any sort of missive behind?”
“Aye. I said that I was going to spend the next pair of days in prayer. It will occur to my sire sometime today that I’m resigning myself to my fate too easily.” She paused. “I was hoping to be farther from Artane by tonight.”
He looked at the determination in her eyes and revisited his earlier opinion. Whatever had driven her from home was serious. And it wasn’t a stretch to guess exactly what had sent her off on a journey she couldn’t have been all that eager to take.
Damn that Geoffrey of Styrr to hell and back.
He was so busy thinking about all the ways that might happen that he didn’t see trouble until he realized it had come to stand on the road in front of him.
There were four of them. Four dirty, ragged, sinewy thugs whose sunken eyes and hollow cheeks told the story of their recent years. Zachary pulled Mary behind him and backed up, keeping all the ruffians in plain sight in front of him.
“Yer gold an’ yer wench,” the leader suggested.
Zachary knew Jamie would have been impressed by his ability to understand that so well. Obviously paying that Cam-bridge tutor to walk him through excessive amounts of Anglo-Saxon poetry had been more useful than he’d dared hope it would be at the time. He continued to step backward, keeping Mary behind him.
“Nay,” he said politely, “but thank you just the same.”
He could see what they intended before they began it and he countered the attack without mercy. To hell with leaving no trace of his passing. If he didn’t get himself and Mary free, she would be hurt and then he’d have to tell Robin de Piaget why. He jerked his knives free and threw himself into the fray.
The men were no match for a combination of Patrick MacLeod’s Advanced Studies in Honorless Street Fighting and the strength of a man who’d never gone hungry in his life. Well, he’d gone hungry during college now and then, but the deprivation had been limited to junk food, so he supposed that didn’t count.
He rendered two of the four immediately unconscious with a pair of roundhouse kicks, then sent the third into oblivion with the heel of his hand under the man’s chin. The last man was more desperate than his fellows and Zachary had to fight him off with knives for a moment or two before he could do more modern damage to him. He wasn’t entirely sure he hadn’t snapped the man’s neck as a result.
He spun around to look for Mary only to realize there had been five bad guys, not just four. Number five was trying to drag Mary off into the forest with one hand over her mouth and the other in her hair. She was fighting him fiercely, but without success. The man had apparently tired of it because he stopped long enough to backhand her across the face.
Zachary didn’t think; he flipped his dagger so he held it by the tip of the blade, then flung it with all his strength into the man’s chest. The ruffian released Mary to clutch the knife, looked up in surprise, then slowly fell backward until he was prone.
Mary looked at the man, then turned and threw up.
Zachary couldn’t blame her in the slightest. He retrieved his knife, cleaned it, then shoved it back into its sheath. He knew life and death was a part of the bargain in medieval England, but he didn’t like being a part of the situation. Guardsman, indeed. Well, he’d played his part and would continue to do so until Mary was safely behind her father’s walls. Then he would go home and make sure he was never again faced with the choice he’d just made. He took Mary by the arm and pulled her back onto the road.
“How far to Wyckham?” he asked.
“We’re near Ledenham Abbey,” she said faintly, “not a place to linger. We’ve another hour before us if we make haste. Longer if we walk.”
“Can you run?”
“Of course,” she said, putting her shoulders back. “Can you?”
He would have smiled if he’d had it in him. “I’ll try to keep up.”
She only nodded, her face ashen, and started into a stumbling run with him.
He was actually quite grateful she’d spent the whole of her life on horseback. He wasn’t sure he could have carried a delicate lady-in-
waiting all the way to safety. Then again, if she’d been a delicate lady-in-waiting, she probably wouldn’t have been following him in the first place.
He looked behind them periodically, but saw nothing. He wasn’t going to press his luck, though, so he continued to run. He also decided that he might want to beg a sword from Robin before he attempted his next trip south. Getting killed while doing something noble was one thing; getting killed because he wasn’t prepared was something else entirely.
Though he thought he’d had just about enough of death to last him a lifetime.
He ran with Mary for quite some time before he chanced a look at her. She was still white as a sheet, but he suspected by the look of concentration on her face that she was already working on plan B. It was no wonder Robin always looked a little nervous when he couldn’t immediately lay his finger on his daughter’s whereabouts. Obviously Mary was even less eager than he’d realized to marry Styrr.
Why Robin would have even considered forcing her to bind herself to a man she obviously didn’t care for was something he probably would never understand. He felt equal parts angry that Styrr was such a jerk and devastated that Mary would probably find herself shackled to someone who couldn’t possibly appreciate her.
He concentrated on the anger. It made it easier to run.
He realized suddenly that the forest had disappeared only because the road had taken a sharp turn and he found himself facing Wyckham. A perfect, functional, spectacular Wyckham. He skidded to a halt and gaped.
“Have you never been here before?” Mary asked, panting.
He considered the answers he could give, then discarded them all one by one. How could he tell her that the last time he’d seen the place, it had been missing most of its defenses and all of its roof? And that he’d parked his beater Ford just about where they were currently standing? No, he couldn’t tell her any of that. He could only stare at the castle in front of him and try to come up with something intelligible to say.
“I’ve never seen it on such a perfect day,” he managed.
And then he made the fatal mistake of looking at her. Yes, the keep was perfect, but then again, so was she. Perfect and courageous and currently looking at him as if he were the only thing able to save her.
“Please,” she whispered. “Please take me with you.”
Zachary took a deep breath. “Ah—”
“I wouldn’t be any trouble,” she said quickly. She paused. “I could tend your horses for you at your home, if it pleased you.”
He felt as if he’d been kicked by one of those horses he didn’t own. He wasn’t one to weep, but he was dumbfounded to find that he was tempted to. The thought of that fierce, proud, bewitching woman reduced to begging was almost more than he could take. First she wanted him as her guardsman, now she was willing to be his servant?
He had to take many, many deep, even breaths before he trusted himself to speak.
“I can’t,” he said. “I can’t take you where you need to go, and where I’m going you can’t come.”
Damn it all to hell.
She looked at him again, searchingly, then she sighed. “As you will,” she said quietly. She gestured toward the fully functional gates. “They will give us shelter. And something to eat, with any luck. We’ll have peace to rest before we start back.”
Zachary nodded, though he was far less interested in a place to rest than he was in spending the remainder of the day convincing Mary of Artane that while he might have been a decent guardsman, he had suddenly realized that he would have preferred to be quite a bit more.
No footprint, no footprint, no footprint.
The words were like an annoying, incessant chant in his head. He could hardly think straight because of them. He’d already left a footprint back there in the forest; he couldn’t leave another at Artane.
“Wyckham boasts a well-stocked larder,” Mary continued as they walked toward the gates, “and handsomely appointed stables full of very fast horses. My uncle is particular about his steeds.”
Zachary imagined he was. He supposed, based on the tone of her voice, that the only question he had now was how long it would be before she made use of one of those particularly fast horses to go where he wouldn’t take her.
It took her two hours to ditch him, which was about an hour longer than he’d expected. She’d gotten them inside the gates, charmed the cook into providing them with a meal, then convinced the steward that Zachary needed a tour of the keep. Zachary had agreed to the last without hesitation because it wasn’t often he had a chance to commit to memory all the details of a keep he wanted desperately to restore seven hundred and fifty years in the future.
It wasn’t until he was ogling a spectacularly fashioned Norman arch spanning the great hall that he realized he was admiring stonework all on his own. He left the steward talking to thin air and bolted from the great hall in time to catch Mary as she was trotting what looked to be a very speedy stallion toward the front gates. He managed to stop her only because she apparently didn’t have the stomach to either run him over or kick him in the face to escape.
“Don’t,” he said seriously.
“I must,” she insisted. “And I am more than capable of going alone.”
He wasn’t going to argue that point with her. She was certainly capable of riding to wherever she chose to go. It was what would happen when she had to stop to sleep that worried him.
“Other than the fact that Styrr’s an arse,” he said, “what do you have against him?”
He, of course, had a very long list, beginning and ending with the fact that the man would have the pleasure of looking at Mary de Piaget’s lovely face every day while Zachary wouldn’t, but he wasn’t sure saying that would add anything to the conversation—even if Mary had been amenable to that kind of thing.
“You won’t believe what I believe of him,” she said grimly.
“I will.” He held up his hands for her. “You can tell me all about it inside.”
She scowled down at him. “Nay.”
He paused, considered, then looked up at her seriously. “Please.”
“I cannot go home.”
He reached up and very carefully removed her reins from her hands. He hooked them over his arm, then held up his hands again for her. “You cannot go south, either,” he said quietly. “I promise I will listen to you, believe you, and help you if I can.”
He wasn’t sure where the last part had come from, but now it was out there, he couldn’t take it back.
She looked at him in surprise. “You will?”
He nodded solemnly.
She considered his hands, still held up toward her.
“I can get down by myself.”
“I imagine you can. Let me help you anyway.”
She had trouble getting her feet out of her stirrups, then even more trouble getting herself in a position where she could lean over and put her hands on his shoulders. Zachary wondered if no one had ever bothered to help her down from a horse before.
He handed her reins off to a stable boy, then clasped his hands behind his back where they wouldn’t get him into any trouble. He nodded toward the hall.
“After you, my lady.”
She glanced at the conspicuous collection of guardsmen clustered at the front gates, then muttered something under her breath. Zachary only nodded in the direction of the great hall. She capitulated, but she didn’t look happy about it. He followed her up the steps, then found himself coming to a stop. He put his hand on the plastered and whitewashed wall to steady himself as something occurred to him that hadn’t before.
What if he had been destined to walk through a doorway, run into Mary de Piaget, then help her get out of a marriage that she couldn’t avoid on her own?
He thought about that for another moment or two. It was possible. It made more sense than thinking Fate had sent him back in time so he could do a free fall into something he couldn’t have with a woman he shouldn’t even have been looking at,
a woman who apparently only thought of him as nothing but a sturdy, potential guardsman.
“Zachary?”
He shook aside his thoughts, productive and unproductive, then smiled at her gravely. “Nothing. Shall we go?”
She frowned at him, then turned and walked into the hall. Zachary ignored the feeling of déjà vu that washed over him again as he crossed the threshold behind her. He had no doubt been sent back in time to help her as he could, then be on his way.
Nothing more, nothing less.
Chapter 10
Mary leaned against the wall in her uncle’s great hall, well away from any torchlight, and wondered how she was now going to carry on with her usual life after she had touched a man who made her entire world shudder to a halt.
She stood in the shadows and watched him, certain she wouldn’t be noticed. For one thing, he was completely engrossed in turning very slowly in a circle and looking at Wyckham’s great hall as if he sought to memorize every detail. She supposed she could understand why. Wyckham was a lovely place full of the most modern of conveniences and comforts. And it was, as she had noted before, home to a handful of very fast steeds.
Another reason Zachary wouldn’t have been looking for her was that he’d sent her upstairs for a rest and instructed her to sleep away the better part of the day, which he likely assumed she was still doing. She had insisted that he rest as well, though she doubted he’d done so given that he had threatened to sit at the base of the stairs lest she decide to sneak off and filch another of her uncle’s horses.
She hadn’t had the stomach for that. She’d given thought to the morning’s events and reconsidered her plan to escape on her own. If Zachary hadn’t been there and so perfectly able to protect her ...
She turned her mind to other things before she embarrassed herself again by any untoward physical expressions of terror. Nay, she wouldn’t go alone, even if she’d been riding one of Wyckham’s fastest stallions. Not now.
She watched Zachary as he continued to look around him as if he’d never seen the inside of a great hall before and wondered about him. He had killed a man to save her life without hesitation and without undue hand-wringing, just as her cousins or father would have done. He had led her on an exhausting journey away from her home, had the strength to dispatch that handful of ruffians, then continue on all the way to Wyckham. He had to have been weary, yet he had made no complaint. The more she saw of him, the more he puzzled her.