by Sue Wilson
Nottingham returned the smile, although no mirth reached his smoky eyes. "You amuse yourself with these word games, do you not? What is it, Thea? Have you challenged yourself to see how many times during the course of the evening you can mention how displeased you are to be here?"
Thea's smile dissolved. It would not do to play the innocent with this man, and he was already tiring of her attempts to gain her freedom through verbal persuasion. There was something in his forced smile, something in the hardness about his mouth and eyes that told her he would not bear continued harping on a subject he had considered closed the moment he'd given the order that she stay. She felt his iron control close around her, a control that for all his mild chatter, the man had never relinquished.
"You are still resisting me, it seems," the Sheriff said, taking the goblet and swirling the burgundy liquid within it. "I understand that feminine game, have even stooped to participate in it on an occasion or two, when the chase seemed particularly exhilarating. But you, Thea-somehow I believed you above such wiles. You are plain and forthright and direct. Resistance does not become you."
He stabbed another piece of meat. "And besides, resistance makes me uncomfortable of late, what with a forest full of irritating resistance. I know you understand. I don't need it brought under my own roof."
He paused, looking at the trencher of meat, and frowned. "Surely you're hungry," he said, holding the dagger with its skewered piece of venison close enough that she could smell the seasoned oil with which the meat was basted.
Thea shook her head, certain it would be impossible to force down food in between Nottingham's carefully phrased innuendoes.
"Fresh deer is a delightful change," he tempted her. "And for once, this is not overly spiced. The cook will do that, you know. Serve meat that has gone over the day before and hide the spoiled flavor with seasonings and such. I'd have him flayed, but he's been with me a good many years, and I've come to trust he'll keep the henbane out."
Thea watched in horror as the Sheriff closed his lips over the dagger's tip and took the proffered meat himself. How could he make such a casual reference to the deadly poison between one bite and the next?
"No, it's not the cook I'm concerned about. You are the mystery. The enigma. And yet I've entrusted you with my life. That's a curious thing. People want to know why. I want to know why. Some say you've bewitched me...and there is other talk."
"Other talk?" Thea asked, not entirely certain she wanted to hear Nottingham elaborate on the tales that had spread about the castle in the past fortnight.
He lifted the goblet to his lips, letting any clarification hang silently in the air while he took a long drink of wine. He put down the cup again and rubbed his thumb across his wet lower lip. Thea watched the gesture, entranced, and horrified at her own fascination.
"They say you're a forest viper I have mistakenly allowed entrance into my camp. That your venom is deadly, your bite mortal, your intent unpredictable. That I have forecast my own doom by inviting you here and holding you unwittingly close."
"Your rumor-mongers are a very poetic sort, my lord."
Did she imagine it or had his face darkened? He bent to the trencher again, any revealing expression temporarily hidden in the shadows of his bowed head.
"I would not listen to castle talk, my lord," she offered. "You said yourself I am plain, forthright, and direct. Better to trust your own instincts."
"Only if they are correct, woman."
He took another swallow of wine, then another, draining, then refilling the cup. When he placed the goblet on the table, his hand lingered around its carved stem, knuckles whitened as if forcing control to stay with him. When he looked up at her, his face was unreadable, and he continued speaking with unfathomable amiability.
"Would you not say I have reason to be cautious?"
"Cautious, yes. Of course. I can see you must. But-" Silently, she cursed herself for stammering over such broken fragments of sentences.
"If not cautious, then surely curious. Allow me that. After all, you are a lovely woman of marriageable age, and yet you have lived alone these many years. Is it solitude you prefer, when you have just finished making complaint of such?"
He rushed ahead, not letting her answer, although truly no answer to his taunting wit came to mind. "You have a small holding of land, not easily tilled, I'd imagine, but passable for grazing and having the advantage of all taxes paid in full. Even Monteforte is not so scrupulous with his manor's wealth. It escapes me then why no swarm of land-hungry bastards has descended upon you, Thea. Or does the cool disdain you display for me work as well to keep your suitors at a safe distance?"
Thea swallowed hard, stunned. The Sheriff had tipped his hand, and it revealed no lack of knowledge about her. "I am given to no man," she replied.
"But your affections, Thea. Is there no one for whom you feel the slightest tenderness of heart? A lover, perhaps, whom you meet in secret?"
She felt her cheeks ruddy, making her guilty when she was not. John, of course. He spoke of John.
"The villagers talk," he explained.
Thea folded her hands meticulously in her lap and met his eyes coldly. "If the villagers talk, then you must already know the answer to that."
"I did not intend to pry."
"Of course you did. You've been listening to-no, more likely, soliciting-talk and gossip, and tossing out pieces of it to bait me. Was it Gisborne? Did you send him into Edwinstowe to inquire about me? Likely he came back with an evening's worth of tales and hearsay. Tell me. Is that what this is all about? Are you wanting to confirm his recently retrieved intelligence with dinner conversation?"
Her words bit with sarcasm, and she rose to her feet, fingers splayed on the table. "Am I here because I am suspect?"
A frown creased Nottingham's brow. "Suspect of what?"
"I have no idea, my lord. Of whatever it is Gisborne thinks me guilty."
"Gisborne is merely doing his job."
"Then he has made charges."
"He has a suspicious nature, which serves me well, I might add, but, no, there are no formal charges, no proof of wrongdoing. Why? Do you wish to confess?"
"I've committed no crime," she replied coolly.
"Then why this insecurity, Thea?"
"Because you torment me so. Because clearly you suspect me."
"I suspect everyone, as I should, as I must," he admitted. "But I did not bring you here to see you so skillfully avoid questions I have not even asked. This is not the interrogation you fear."
"Is it not?"
"No," a soft breath of denial. "I promise you. It is not."
Thea looked down at him, unaccustomed to the sound of gentleness in his voice. His head was bent low, and he rubbed at the vertical furrow between his brows. His hand ceased its telltale motion and moved again to finger the cup.
"Please sit," he said without looking up. "You need not satisfy my curiosity, but allow me to have it. Me? My life? The events are known to you, to all, in some distorted manner of the truth, yet you tell me nothing of yourself."
"It is none of your concern whom I bed."
"Then you are not virgin?"
The air rushed out of Thea's lungs at once, not for the boldness of his question-for what was there to the man but boldness and the perverse pleasure he took in shocking her?-but because he did not know.
He had sent Gisborne and he knew of her land, knew its uselessness to her though she owed no debt of tax, knew even, or suspected, her secret meetings with John, her presumed lover. But he did not know more. He knew nothing of Brand, of her marriage, of Brand's death, obvious facts any villager could report.
Had the people of Edwinstowe suddenly developed discretion on that one account while foolishly intimating she carried on a liaison with a known felon? Or had Gisborne held back something of the truth?
"Please. Sit."
His words roused her, silencing her own unanswered questions, and she found her knees bending of their
own accord as she lowered herself to the chair. It should comfort her that he did not know, that she was not transparent to him after all, that remnants of her private life were still hers to guard and protect and lie about, if that would serve her.
How to explain then the eerie foreboding that he would uncover her, layer by layer, until there was not a secret left, and John were found out? And Robin. And Much. And the truth bared that she had given her virginity to a child of a husband when she was but a child herself.
"What is the point of all this?" she asked, a veneer of hostility put quickly between them before he deigned to know more.
"As I said, curiosity-"
"A prurient curiosity, although why I should be surprised at your lewdness-"
"About your family, Mistress Aelredson. About how you've managed to support yourself these years when you make no profit from your land."
"I have no family. My parents are dead. Surely you knew that."
She cringed at the bitterness that had crept into her voice. He would use that; use any emotion she had to overturn her hidden truths. She swore to say nothing else save what he already knew, and repeat that only as if it were the stuff of blandest disinterest. "I have survived by bartering for my herbal remedies and, upon occasion, for my surgical skills."
"Which are considerable."
Thea made no reply.
"I would not have made you my surgeon were they any less."
"Then you have answered your own question, my lord."
"Have I?"
"From before, when you seemed in doubt about having made me your personal physician, when you called yourself...'foolhardy,' I believe it was. It would seem you believe I have the skills to be your surgeon."
"Skills, unquestionably. But do I have your loyalty?"
An uneasy silence swallowed the room. Thea looked across the candles and their flickering pools of incandescence to the Sheriff. He regarded her carefully, but without the minute traces of accusation she fully expected to encounter, as if having shaken her with the directness of his question was enough.
He waited there for so long, Thea was almost tempted to reply, but with what truth?
She was still searching for a response vague enough to satisfy him when his expression changed abruptly. The calculating hardness fell away, and he looked at her as if he did not want to hear her answer, as if, indeed, he preferred the silence, the enigma.
"Stay with me tonight."
Where there had been only silence, the chamber now reverberated with his words. For a time, Thea could hear nothing but their soft echoes and, unexpectedly, the yearning behind what, for once, had not been an order. She became conscious suddenly of the way the candlelight played across his features, obscuring any vulnerability that might have revealed itself, lighting his dark eyes with desire as blatant and demanding as she had seen in any man.
Slowly, softly, her voice whispered into the quiet tension between them. "Surely not to prove my loyalty, my lord."
He merely shook his head, as if her allegiance to him were incidental, irrelevant, maybe even unnecessary.
"I want you in my bed." Again, not an order.
"My lord, I cannot."
"'Cannot'? Somehow, Thea, I think you probably can, and very well, too." His words were full of suggestion; his voice caressed her without a touch.
"Then I will not, my lord, if I have a choice."
The Sheriff nodded, then looked away, as if considering something unseen in the distance. When he spoke, his voice was oddly strained. "This is not a test of your allegiance, Thea. If anything, it was a test of myself, to see if those instincts you urged me to trust are even reliable. Apparently, they are not."
"My lord, I regret-"
"Don't rub your apologies like some salve over my wounded pride. That's quite unnecessary. It was a valuable lesson, and I learned far more than that you have no wish to share my bed."
He pushed his chair back from the table, stood, and walked across the room to the fireplace. The log within was smoldering, and he kicked it with his booted foot, sending up a spray of sparks and a few threads of flame.
"I've been honest with you, Thea, so you know something of me now. You have some private knowledge of my desires-something I was a fool to disclose," he muttered. "But you-"
He turned, reached for the clasp of his cloak, unbuckled the mantle single-handedly, and with undisguised frustration threw it across the room. "You are a temptress who would have only my undoing. And I, by Christ, will not be undone!"
Long fingers fumbled with the thin silk laces at the neck of his tunic, as if the garment suffocated him, and when they did not readily give, he tore through them, bared chest laboring to breathe. "Let there be no more of this pretense, this charade where I offer you food and wine, where we dress ourselves in fine clothes and make clever, witty conversation around questions you are too afraid to answer. There's only one thing I want from you tonight-"
Thea's chair scraped back against the floor, but he was over her, one hand on each arm of the chair, before she could stand.
"-One thing I would hope to have." His hands circled over her forearms, pinning her to the chair. "Not loyalty, Thea, for I doubt there is enough coin in the realm to buy that. Not even your body. Not now." His gaze trailed over her. "Not yet, although that might be far easier for you to surrender than what I really need."
He leaned forward, his face disturbingly close. He brought his mouth to hover warmly over hers, and his lips parted.
Thea trembled as if her body had no volition of its own, and for the first time that evening, maybe for the first time since he had broken rudely into her life, she abandoned every illusion of sparring with the Sheriff of Nottingham, and coming out of it whole.
She cursed herself for a fool, for as much as he had drawn together a veneer of civilized behavior to entice her into this trap, she had unwittingly played into his every ploy. She had accepted his invitation, worn the clothes he had given her, tried to keep pace with his dangerous chatter, even believed she could say no to his sexual overtures, and he would do nothing more than sit politely at his end of the table and resume some veiled inquisition that passed for conversation. What was worse, and far more condemning, was that she had stopped listening to him altogether, and did not even heed the small warnings of caution that flashed within her brain. She drank in his closeness and the terrifying sense of his power, and lifted her lips to his.
The Sheriff stepped back.
Thea felt his hands loosen around her. He was looking at her strangely, and her face grew hot with shame.
"I have need of honesty, Thea," he said. "Not some chaste kiss, but answers without deception. Is that possible?"
She looked away, unable to bear the driven intensity she had so mistaken for desire, unable to face her own humiliation for having been so ready to succumb to it. What more honesty did he want from her than that?
"Answers!" The demand came like muted thunder.
There was no question now that she had lost any pardon from interrogation. Thea could not help but wonder, if she had lain with him as he'd wanted, would the questions that plagued him so have been silenced forever or would they have only been delayed until the following morn? Perhaps he would have forced answers from her lips between kisses. She made no reply.
"Then I'm curious." The Sheriff reached into the pocket beneath his tunic and drew out the arrow's tip that Thea had removed from his side. He picked up her hand and placed the metal point in her palm. "You recognized the mark of the castle forge. That's a strange piece of knowledge for a peasant to have."
"Damn your curiosity! I need explain naught to you."
"Could you have seen the mark elsewhere, in other surgeries? Tell me, Thea, how many times have you removed such arrowheads?"
Thea met his eyes with icy silence.
"And from whom? Outlaws, perhaps?"
She rose to her feet at the challenge, clutching the thin, translucent shimmer of her tunic in tight fist
s. "That's preposterous!"
"Is it? You live near Sherwood, you travel within it freely and unharmed, you live alone, without a husband, yet no man assaults you. In fact, the villagers seem quite in awe of you. I thought, perhaps, you rendered your services in exchange for protection."
"To outlaws?"
The Sheriff's mouth turned down at one corner. "Possibly."
"I would not seek protection from a rabble of thieves," she said defensively.
"Possibly from Hood himself," the Sheriff continued, as if he'd not heard her. "He's quite the champion of defenseless women, I hear."
"You obviously hear a great many things, and have difficulty sorting truth from hearsay."
He leaned over her again, treacherously close, his eyes traveling to her mouth. "And you are a master of deceit."
Abruptly, he pushed himself away and strode to the fireplace. "Gisborne's men found several items of interest in your cottage." He bent to retrieve an object that rested against the brickwork on the far side of the hearth. "This, for example."
He held a longbow in his hands. "Do you still feel comfortable with your lie, Thea? You see, you recognize the mark of the castle forge. I recognize the workmanship of a particular hooded archer."
The Sheriff turned the bow gracefully in his hands until it was in a vertical position. "The precise bend of the wood-and only the finest yew-buffed to an exquisite smoothness."
With deliberation, he bent the bow, not by pulling the string, but by pressing his whole body into the stance, betraying no small acquaintance with the weapon. The muscles of his back and shoulders rippled beneath the glitter of his tunic as he anchored the draw expertly at his bearded jaw.
Thea shuddered. For a moment, she imagined him clothed in doeskin, the bow pulled against nothing more than their evening meal. Then his eyes narrowed to hate-filled slits, and he aimed the bow as if at some unseen enemy. The empty string vibrated with a resonating thrum.