This from a man with a mother like his, and dear God what the hell was that smell? It scoured her nostrils and made her eyes water. What did they put in the moat water to make it stink so badly? She nearly asked Oliver but, as she had a strong feeling that she really didn’t want to know, she kept her question to herself.
Watching the flow of people, guards with big pikes stood at the gate.
Please don’t let them see the sword; please don’t let them see the sword. They passed within arm’s reach of the guard on their right. Laura held her breath, and didn’t breathe again until they passed inside the castle walls.
“Where to now?” Questing Castle was huge, and de Wolfe could be anywhere. Maybe they could spend the day wandering around and never find him. A girl could hope.
“It was his custom to spend this time with his family, in their private gardens.”
Well, shit. Laura trotted after Oliver.
Oliver seemed to know where he was going, because he led them through the people, around the side of the castle, and into the walls. Yup, into the walls. A small door opened onto a winding staircase that ascended onto the ramparts. From here, he strode forward passing more guards.
One guard glanced up and then went back to playing a game with his buddy.
“Ho!” A voice stopped them.
Heart in her throat, Laura turned.
A tall, broad helmeted guard approaching them.
Tension radiating through his hand into her, Oliver stopped.
“What are you doing here?” The guard looked Oliver and then her up and down.
Oliver shrugged. “I wanted to show my wife the view from the north wall. They say you can see Scotland from there.”
“Well, you cannot.” The guard palmed his sword. “Get along with you.”
Oliver’s hand tightened around hers.
“Please, sire.” Laura stepped forward and batted her lashes at the guard. “I only wish to glimpse it for the merest of moments and then we shall be on our way.” She leaned closer and giggled. “I am newly come to this region, and I have heard tell great stories of the legendary William de Wolfe. Methinks I sought only to catch the veriest glimpse of such a man’s view.”
The guard frowned at Oliver. “Your wife speaks funny.”
Sue her. She didn’t speak freaking Chaucer.
“Her people are Welsh.” Oliver shrugged.
The guarded nodded, as if that made sense. “All right then, but be quick about it.”
“Thank you, kind sir.”
“Try not to speak.” Oliver jerked her hand, snapping her head back.
A little gratitude would be nice. “What are you bitching about? I saved your ass.”
Chapter Ten
Confusion had taken over as Laura’s default mental condition ever since she’d woken up to Oliver in her bedroom. Ignoring the obvious time leaping confusing thing, her current information input also didn’t jibe with what Elewys and Oliver had told her. Below Questing’s walls, on a swathe of bright green grass, a family enjoyed the warm day. “That’s your big bad Wolfe?”
William de Wolfe was a big handsome man with dark hair, broad shoulders and a barrel chest. Over his clothes, he wore chain mail. The man had been…was a knight. What else would he wear? He made those guys who did the Vegas show look kind of pathetic. He had his arm around the woman’s shoulder, one child tugging on his hand, while another skipped ahead.
Smiling and laughing, he didn’t look like the sort of guy who would chase down a defenseless woman and her infant and try to kill them. Lunging, he made the boys shriek and run away with delighted smiles. Granted, how someone behaved with their family could be completely different to how they treated others, but in this case, she didn’t see it.
Her second sticking point came right on the first’s heels. Age could be hard to tell, but Laura put the man playing with his children at no more than thirty-five. Either Elewys had been seducing little boys, or lying through her teeth. Point three, no way could she see Elewys and de Wolfe getting it on. It took all types and predicting what others found attractive was harder than picking winning lottery numbers, but she couldn’t see the smoking hot knight below them chasing after Elewys. Even with twenty-odd years off Elewys’s age, she still didn’t see it.
Face grim, his big hands white-knuckle clenched on the wall in front of them, Oliver was tense enough to pluck. He whispered the words like a prayer. “William de Wolfe.”
Elewys had certainly done a number on her son. Even Singen would have paused in his assessment of Oliver’s mental health had he seen the obsession on Oliver’s face.
“Who is that with him?” Laura pointed to a tiny, pretty, blonde woman.
“His wife.” Oliver spat the words. “He married a Scottish whore.”
“She’s beautiful.” Laura needed him to see the family below him as people.
“Aye.” Oliver rammed his palm into the wall. “She has bewitched him, wrapped her whore hands around his cock and leads him about by it.” Oliver opened his mouth and Elewys spewed out.
With the woman deemed a Scottish whore, Laura pointed to the two young children with the couple. “Are those their children?”
“Aye.” Oliver flinched. “Twin boys. They carry his name.”
“Oliver.” Elewys had been conditioning him for twenty years, while Laura had five minutes to get through to him somehow. “Look at me.”
He scowled at the family having a harmless picnic.
“Look at me.” She grabbed his chin, and forced his head around. “I want you to try something for me. Can you do that?”
“If you don’t wish to see blood, leave now.” As he stood his dark eyes had turned colder than stone. Gone was her charming Oliver, and in his place a merciless killer with the same intensity that had broken Seth’s nose, twice. “Once I get down there, it will happen fast. De Wolfe is armed. I will have a mere heartbeat to strike first.”
“First try this one thing.” Eye contact was imperative and she tugged him back down to where she kneeled behind the rampart. “Then I will go and leave you to do what you think best.” Not a chance, but he didn’t know that.
He jerked his chin away. “What?”
“I want you to look at them again. Not yet.” She put her hand to his cheek and kept him facing her. “When you look at them this time, I want you to imagine that you don’t know who they are. Imagine you’ve never seen those people before and tell me what you see.”
“This is pointless.” Oliver pounded his thigh. “I know who they are. They have to die.”
“Maybe they do.” Laura kept her tone as even as she could manage. Elewys had used her son’s childhood to snake her twisted logic into his mind. Laura had to undo as much as she could. “But do this for me anyway. You owe me this.”
“What?” He blinked and the rage in his face receded a tiny bit.
“For dragging me back in time.”
“You held on to me.”
“You broke into my house and kidnapped me.”
“You made them keep my sword.”
“You threatened to break my bones, and snap my neck.”
He huffed. “Fine.” He stared over the wall again. “I see a man, a woman and two children.”
“Pretend I can’t see them and describe them to me.”
“The man is tall, a knight, dark hair. He is carrying one of the children on his shoulders.”
She wiped her sweaty palms on her dress. They trained hostage negotiators for this kind of thing, not young shrinks who weren’t so sure they wanted the job anymore. “What does the child look like?”
“Like a child.” Oliver tossed her an aggrieved glance.
“How old would you say he was?”
“I don’t know.” Oliver growled. “Maybe two or three.”
“Good. Dark hair, light hair?”
“Dark.”
A delighted child’s giggle floated up from the garden.
“Now he is laughing,” Oliver said. “De
Wolfe—”
“Uh-uh.” Laura shook her head. “You do not know this man. You don’t know what his name is.”
“Fine.” Rolling his eyes, Oliver took a deep breath. “The man,”—pointed glare—“is toting the child on his shoulders and making him laugh.”
“Who else do you see?”
“His wife, a blonde woman, who is carrying the other child and laughing with them.”
“What does she look like?”
“Pretty.” Oliver shrugged.
“Do you think they are a family?”
“Laura.” Oliver spun in his crouch and faced her. “This is fucking stupid. I need to kill that bastard.”
She kept her voice firm and nonjudgmental. “Are they a family?”
“Yes!”
“Do you think they are a happy family?”
“For God’s sake…yes!”
Okay, baby steps. She put her hand on his knee to make the human connection. “So, what you are looking at is a mother, father and two children. Right?”
“Right.” Oliver frowned, and went back to staring.
One of the children shrieked, his piping voice carrying clear as a bell. “Chase me, Da. Chase me.”
A man’s roar sounded, followed shortly by a child’s shriek.
The woman laughed. “Be careful, William. Do not toss him so high.”
Oliver breathed hard, his chest rising and falling. He dropped his forehead onto the crenellations with a thunk. “He is William de Wolfe, the man who abandoned my mother and me. He wants nothing more than to kill us.”
Laura scooted closer and entwined her fingers with his. “He is also a father and a husband. A man who plays with his children and makes them laugh.”
“He never did that for me.” Oliver raised his head, anguish stamped on his features.
The next thing she needed him to realize would take delicate handling. Laura ached to soothe away that hurt and make it all right again, but first she needed him to absorb. “Oliver. Look at that man again. How old would you say he was?”
Oliver frowned. He reared back as if she had struck him and stared at de Wolfe. “I am not sure. My mother says he was very young when she met him.”
“He looks like he could be your older brother.”
Oliver scoffed, and then frowned. He took another, longer, look at De Wolfe.
“Nay.” Oliver dropped back onto his butt. He shook his head. “That cannot be right.”
“Before you kill him, and make that woman a widow, and those children as fatherless as you are right now, don’t you think we should get the answers?”
Oliver stayed quiet and thoughtful on their long walk home. Laura left him to his silence, ready to talk if he needed to. He’d made a huge shift today and these things took time to process. Medieval England was pretty, all nature and unspoiled landscape. What a pity all this had been lost in the years following.
As they approached the cottage, the door flew open and Elewys came running. She stopped in front of Oliver, face flushed. “Is it done?”
“Nay.” Oliver sidestepped her and went into the cottage.
Eyes flashing, Elewys turned on Laura. “What did you do?”
“I reasoned with him.” Laura moved to go around her.
Elewys jumped into her path. “You have interfered where you had no right.” Spittle flew from her mouth. “William de Wolfe must die. Oliver needs this.”
“Oliver needs this?” Laura stepped past her. “Or you need this?”
“They are one and the same,” Elewys said.
So not true.
Oliver came out of the cottage carrying an axe. “I’m going to do some clearing.”
“I’ll come with you.” Alone with Elewys, really not an option right now.
He shrugged and stomped into the surrounding forest.
Laura followed him. As he got to work, she perched on an overturned log.
Oliver stripped small shoots from a young tree.
“What are you doing?”
He glanced at her and went back to his tree. “We need more land for planting. I need to clear this area.”
A small glade of younger trees nestled between their larger cousins, the canopy so thick it filtered the sunlight in a green haze. “It’s pretty here. It seems a shame to disturb it.”
Oliver stopped his work and glanced about him. “If we don’t have more land, we can’t plant enough to get us through the winter.”
She did understand. Life in this time revolved around practicalities. “I know that. But in my time, places like this are so hard to find. We’ve pretty much destroyed most of them.”
Oliver nodded, finished stripping the sapling and braced his axe. Stilling, he looked at her. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure?”
“Why did you stop me?”
Ah. She had expected this. “I don’t want you to do something you’ll regret.”
“How could I regret killing de Wolfe?” He hefted the axe. “After all he has done to me.”
“Oliver.” Laura stood and approached him. She needed to tread carefully. “Even if everything you and your mother say is true, I think you would still regret killing him.”
Frowning, he dropped his head.
She touched his arm. “Nothing can change the past, and nothing can right it either.”
Shutting his eyes, he breathed deep. “What about justice?”
“You are so sure killing him would be justice?”
He swore and tossed his axe to the side. “You and your damned questions all the time.” He crowded closer. “You pick and pick at a thing. Asking all these questions all the time. I am not a man of your time, Laura.” He grabbed her arms and yanked her closer to him. “I am not some ballockless puny excuse for a man with a weak stomach.”
For the first time since she had arrived in this time, Laura felt truly scared. She’d pushed Oliver, perhaps too far, too fast, but she’d had to stop him from killing de Wolfe. “Oliver, you need to let me go.”
“You spend a lot of time telling me what to do.” His face tightened in anger. “Oliver do this, don’t do that. I am a man, Laura, not a sheep.”
“I know that.” A very big man and standing far too close. “But right now you are frightening me.”
“Am I?” His grip loosened. “We can’t have that, can we?”
His mood changed so swiftly she barely caught it. From anger to something far more disturbing. Something that burned as hot and as wild.
Laura’s response was instinctive. Her libido recognized what her mind refused to. He desired her.
“Am I frightening you now?” His voice stroked her. “Your face is flushed.”
Along with other parts of her. She felt the heat of his gaze all over.
He slid his hands under her hair and cupped her head. “Do you know what I thought when I first saw you?”
She shook her head. One brief moment they had passed in the hall. Pinned beneath Seth, Oliver had fought with such fury, fighting against the effects of the drug.
Laura had stopped to see the new inmate.
Oliver’s gaze had snapped to hers, and he’d stilled. Just briefly, but the drug had caught up with him and he’d passed out.
His thumbs brushed her jawline. “In the midst of all that chaos stood you. The loveliest thing I had ever seen.”
Laura’s breath caught. His words caused a crack in her armor against him.
“I saw you and knew. You were the one for me.”
It didn’t make any sense. Laura shook her head, unable to find the right words.
“I’m not mad, Laura, and I’m not a crazed lunatic. You know that now.” He dipped his head. “We are not in that bloody place. You stand in my world now, and I have waited too long for this.”
The first touch of his lips took her breath away.
He came back for more, pressing his mouth more firmly over hers.
She couldn’t do this. This was all wrong. Oliver was…what?
He swooped in a third time, demanding as he fastened his mouth over hers.
She opened for him.
On a groan, Oliver took the invitation and swept his tongue inside her mouth. He tilted her head and deepened the kiss.
It was like being kissed for the very first time. Oliver roared through her weak defenses and demanded her response.
Her mind shut down and gave in. There was no space between them for lies anymore. Oliver’s kiss wouldn’t allow it. She had lied to herself for long enough. All those hours spent pushing away her feelings for him, pretending they didn’t exist because of how wrong they were. She wrapped arms around his waist and pressed herself against him.
Her breasts molded to the hard planes of his chest.
He tore his mouth away from hers. “Laura.” As if he wanted to own her he moved to her neck, tasting her skin, nipping the curve of her shoulder. “Mine.”
Yes, his. No not his. Laura tried to grab onto her disappearing bearings. “Oliver.”
“I want you.”
His erection pressed into the apex of her thighs. She could let this happen. Let him take her right here on the forest floor and assuage this thing that had been building between them over these months.
No, she couldn’t let this happen. God, she needed to get some control here. “Oliver. Stop.”
He raised his head and hungry gaze roamed her face. “Why?”
“Because we can’t.”
“Why? I want you and you want me.”
She opened her mouth to tell him because this couldn’t go anywhere. They came from different times for God’s sake. There was no future.
Suddenly he made a lot more sense. They did want each other. This didn’t have to be about forever. It could be about right now and what they both wanted. “You’re right.”
He blinked at her.
Laura tugged his head down to hers. What they had stood outside of time and none of the rules need apply.
He groaned and kissed her back, his lips bruising in their intensity, the tangle of their tongues banishing any lingering doubt. “Laura?”
“Yes.” Because she wanted him as much, and all her forbidden needs demanded she let them out. Laura pressed closer to the heat of him.
Romance the De Wolfe Page 23