GREENWOOD

by Sue Wilson

  "Are you quite certain?" he asked, the familiar teasing quality flavoring his voice. He looked over the edge of the crenel at the long drop to the ground and back to Thea. "Before breakfast?"

  "Now, if I must," she said meaningfully.

  For the first time since he had entered her chamber and dragged her from bath to battlement, she realized what she must look like to him, with sleep-tumbled hair and the untied ribbons of her shift streaming from waist and wrists. The bodice had slipped off her shoulder where he'd kissed her, and she gathered the surfeit of fabric about her, feeling his unrelenting inspection as the breeze caught the shapeless garment, alternately puffing her voluminous skirts and flattening the sheer linen against her body.

  His hands slipped easily between the loosened, crisscrossed laces at her back, and she gasped at the unexpected contact of his skin against hers.

  The man was thoroughly, utterly, unredeemably wicked! Why, it was daylight, and the church bells were ringing Matins, and his soldiers were close at hand-they were close at hand, were they not? God in heaven, had they left, abandoning her to him? And if so, what kind of protection was that if sentries scurried every time their Sheriff planned a romantic interlude on the battlements? Her mind raced in a wild effort to counter the racing of her heart.

  "What? No attempt to hurl yourself to an untimely death?" The deep timbre of his voice shivered through her.

  Damn the insufferable bastard! The smug, arrogant-

  His hand splayed across the swell of her buttocks and he pulled her against him. She damned him again, damned the shift she wore for the gossamer barrier it was. He was lean and taut in every place their bodies touched, from the muscles of his chest, sleek beneath his tunic, to the tense pressure of his thighs. Lean and taut and swollen with the challenge to conquer something she denied him.

  Resolve crumbled around her. His hands were like firebrands on her back, his fingers like tendrils of heat tracing the indentation of her spine. They curled through the ribbons of her shift, parting the laces until the filmy garment sagged off her shoulders, caught in the crooks of her elbows and the tight, desperate fistful she clutched to her breast.

  His lips, soft as smoke, touched the hollow of her throat, and Thea cried out, unable to keep from responding. God in heaven, it was happening again! The same torrent of feeling she had succumbed to before, a fiery liquid sensation melting her resistance, stinging through her veins, leaving desire to pool like thick, warm honey in her belly and drip its aching heat between her legs. He had but to touch her there to know, and he would think their argument ended when it was not.

  Damn him, he could not erase it all as simply as that! There was too much between them, too much to be wiped away with a kiss or a touch, too much-

  With a cry, she tore herself from his arms and stumbled away from him, pressing back into the stone of the merlon as if she could escape him.

  The argument ended then, ripped from her more quickly than it was supplied, for as she pulled away from him, she saw the pained disappointment and unguarded longing on his face. She could stand anything, she thought-his determined, narrow view of things, his brutal need for authority and obedience, his overpowering touches, anything-except that fleeting look of vulnerability, that look of failure and loss.

  "He is still between us, is he not?" he said, words barely audible.

  She shook her head fiercely, refusing to listen, recoiling from his touch.

  "Damn it, Thea, don't turn from me. If I intended to take you at every whim, I would have done so on that night. I told you. I am not a noble man. What I did-what I chose not to do-there was always a purpose. If I did not force myself to finish with you, it was because I hoped-what I wanted most-was that one day-one day you would come to me, Thea, and you would feel something of the desire I feel for you."

  "Spare me your version of charity, Sheriff."

  "I do not keep myself from you to be charitable. I fully intend to have you. But share you with him? That is something I will not do."

  From the hoarse sound of his voice, he had slipped on his mask of control again, wore it like armor around his heart. She closed her eyes, squeezing back tears of confusion.

  "Look at me!" he commanded, his hands circling her arms. When she made no move to obey, he cupped her chin in his hand and tilted her face up to his. "Damn it, woman, look at me! I will have you know who holds you!"

  Her eyes flickered open, and reluctantly Thea dragged her gaze from the open throat of his tunic, to the soft sweep of beard along his chin and across the curve of his upper lip, and finally to his eyes. She thought she saw the last of some unnamed emotion drown in the swirling gray depths that, even as she watched, turned black and fathomless. She dreaded what he saw in hers: weakness, wavering conviction, tears, the lingering stain of desire that no amount of denial could erase.

  His hand loosened around her arm. Unexpectedly, he released her and stepped back, the battle with himself waging eloquently on his face. Thea could tell the decision he made was not easily won, but he did not reach for her again. Resolution firmed his jaw.

  "You are spared, Thea. For now. Take your loyalties to Locksley, or love, if that is what holds you to him, and cling to them if you must. I will not force you, or even tempt you, if that is what you fear more. I am content to wait. For as long as it takes."

  She did not wholly trust him, wondered if she could ever trust him. He had toyed with her from the beginning. Likely, this was just another ruse. She looked at his face and watched the mask slide back into place, the candid torment of moments before erasing right before her eyes.

  He was right, of course. She did not know who he was. The despot of legend she despised? The caustic-witted rake whose practiced seduction stole her breath? Any one of the versions of himself the Sheriff had revealed to her in his carefully constructed disclosure? All of these? None?

  "It will take forever," she said.

  "Be that as it may," he allowed, "when next I come for you, it will be when you are free from him, and only then-when you can come to me without your mind full of his words, his touches-when this desire for me you say does not exist burns again, as I promise it will-"

  Confusion made her angry. How useless to protest her innocence yet again! The man was stubborn and would think what he wanted, despite the misery it caused him. Simpler to play to his role as he expected, as she had learned to do, and with an ease that disturbed her.

  "Spare me your seductive drivel, Sheriff," she said, gripping the edges of her shift together until her knuckles whitened and the trembling fled her hands. "It is not privileged knowledge that you're skilled in more than swordplay, but I'll not wait dutifully for my turn in your arms, or be awakened and summoned whenever the mood strikes you, which apparently it does with alarming frequency. I'll not follow Aelwynn or Agatha or any unknown number of wenches to your bed."

  "Nor to the castle battlements, I presume." Unruffled, Nottingham glanced over his shoulder with a meaningful look at their surroundings. His brow arched, and his bearded lip turned down at one corner in a private smile of amusement. The mask was fully in place. The rake had returned.

  "Damn you for the braying jackass you are! You are a vile, despicable, cruel, loathsome creature!"

  "I follow the general trend of your affections-"

  "And there is no desire, small or large, secret or known, but that I be away from here, from you and your puffed-up pride and your crudely forced intimacies." She searched for the trap door they had climbed through to reach the wall-walk, temper spilling a dark flush across her cheeks. "Isn't there a way down from this God-forsaken place?"

  The Sheriff heaved a sigh that was part frustration, part resignation, all feigned for her benefit. Although he was clearly in no hurry to leave, he walked to the trap door and pulled the iron ring to open the portal.

  "Even I am not so foolish to believe there's no passion hidden behind such a hot spew of words," he said with infuriating calmness as he climbed through the openin
g and held out his arms for her. "I imagine you'll be quite unstoppable when those passions are finally loosed."

  "Imagine what you please, because that's all you'll have."

  With a huff of disdain and embarrassing clumsiness, she lowered herself into his arms. Silently, she cursed their necessary closeness and the tangle of her skirts as they caught on the ornate silver-studded leather of his sword belt. Nottingham plucked the linen loose with pretended graciousness.

  "That and memories," he reminded her.

  Thea yanked her skirt from the Sheriff's hand.

  She did not want to be reminded.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The Sheriff asked Thea to join him for dinner in the great hall that evening. And the evening after. And the next as well. And so through a fortnight of evenings until she was as customary a guest at the high table as the Sheriff himself.

  Mildthryth made much of the entire affair, spending, what seemed to Thea, an inordinate amount of time selecting just the right gown from the treasure trove of silk and samite the Sheriff had provided, and weaving Thea's unruly spirals of hair into thick braids, heavy with the adornment of ribbons.

  "I'm no more than a bauble to him," Thea fumed, "and you're cooperating."

  "Hush, lamb," Mildthryth said. "'Tis an honor to sit at his side."

  Thea looked down at the woman's grizzled head as Mildthryth knelt and brushed the chaff of the rushes away from Thea's hem. Honor, was it? It felt more like being on display, like a prize peregrine falcon-fancy hood and jesses and bells dangling from her taloned feet, but owned nonetheless, the very trappings to ensure she never strayed far from her owner.

  As for Mildthryth's clucking about, Thea was not the least bit fooled into thinking her maidservant had anything in mind but making a match of her and the awful Nottingham.

  That, Thea could have told her, was a useless pursuit. She would sit at the Sheriff's side, share his cup and trencher with forced civility, and endure his conversation, but it would take more than mere exposure to the man to wear down her resistance. It would take more than the strongest love philter any wicca woman could concoct, more than the most earnest charm she could utter, before Thea would tolerate his kisses or caresses.

  Of course, there were no kisses or caresses, and this fact alone unsettled her in a way she did not particularly care to acknowledge. Surely this paragon of silver-tongued liars did not mean to keep his word! She found herself glancing askance at him during dinner when she thought him unaware of her observation, wondered at his seeming nonchalance as she studied him in this new light.

  She had seen people who were sullen and saturnine, those who were illogically cheerful even amidst despair, and those whose natures changed with the waxing and waning of the moon. Nottingham was none of these. Nottingham was unpredictable.

  One evening he would carouse with his men, hoisting endless cups of ale, mingling among them with his arm slung over an occasional shoulder. His throaty laughter filled the hall as he ate heartily and drank with gusto, bragging of his exploits in the tourneys and cursing the "wild Welsh."

  Another evening would find him cloistered at one end of the high table with Gisborne at his side, his dark head bent close to Guy's, brows drawn low over stern eyes, his rich baritone voice reduced to a stream of murmured French Thea could barely hear, much less understand. She knew little of their heated words save what she could see, and guess: the look of reined-in anger on Nottingham's taut features; the slap of his palm on the oaken table and the resultant paling of Gisborne's face; the harsh, frustrated gestures of plans gone awry, of other schemes devised.

  Mixed among the times the Sheriff ignored her were times when his attention bore down upon her with such intensity that Thea could barely swallow the bites of fatted goose on their trencher.

  The impromptu chorus of lusty alehouse songs that rang through the rafters night after night gave way to a minstrel singing of courtly love. Where once the hall rocked with laughter and wild shrieks of drunken revelry, an unusual decorum now reigned. Men no longer pulled unsuspecting serving wenches onto their laps, and couples who thought nothing of groping through various stages of amorous conquest now sought the privacy of shadowy corners or dark stairways.

  That they did so at Nottingham's instruction seemed obvious, for he had apparently set about imbuing his hall with all the atmosphere of a priory in order to contain his own too easily aroused appetites.

  In truth, the changes had the opposite effect on her. Thea missed the joy of boisterous voices raised in song, even missed the bawdy lyrics she knew from the village taverns. They reminded her of home and were far more comfortable to her ears than the minstrel and his failing soprano.

  And, quite frankly, had Nottingham asked-which he did not-she would have much preferred the open displays of affection that went on before the Sheriff's self-inflicted chastity, when men and women traded kisses between sips of wine and no one gave thought to the fondling that passed between courses. That, too, was like home, the easy give-and-take between men and women to which she was accustomed. It was an odd reaction, she knew, but the Sheriff having banned such pleasures from the hall only made her think of nothing else.

  She could not sit next to him without feeling his muscular thigh against hers. And how often had she seen him lift his cup, drink, and watched the remnant of wine glistening on his lips, only to remember his kisses? She imagined the intimate press of his mouth on hers, the taste of the wine, and the slow, heated friction of his tongue as they shared that taste.

  And then he would dab away the tempting wetness with a linen napkin and make some insipid remark about the weather or the honeyed sauce dripped over the goose, and her fantasy would crash like a house of cards.

  Something in the way he looked at her said her own thoughts were neither secret nor unique, but merely a mirror of his own, that he needed only a private moment away from the dais and the spectacle of the great hall to abandon his sanctimonious charade.

  Tonight, when the Sheriff escorted her back to her chamber and bid her good eve, she waited for the indiscretion she knew would come. The stray touch. The kiss he could not prevent laying on her lips. The black-booted foot thrust inside her door to prevent her closing him out.

  What he offered was nothing more than a stiff bow of leave-taking.

  The devil take the man, and his faultless courtesy, too! He had not spared her virtue at all, but set flames licking at its very foundation. Did he think to erase the memory of that night with a few newly acquired manners?

  She remembered, damn him, and what she remembered was that he had held her and caressed her, touched her and tasted her, broken every restraint she tried so desperately to scrape together, and what had she taken of him? In the end, she had lain naked beneath him, shivering, weak from the release he had given her, and the bastard had not even bothered to take off his boots!

  Thea watched the dark-cloaked figure stride down the hall, wishing she knew some spell strong enough to cast upon him, some curse powerful enough to bring upon his deserving head. Her sole revenge lay in the hope that his monastic behavior would turn on him as thoroughly as it had on her, that he would chafe under his vow of self-denial and grow mad with wanting her.

  In the days that passed, the stable became her refuge. It was an unlikely haven, for she had yet to conquer her fear of the beasts there, but Simeon's hand, torn by the tethers, needed tending.

  The lad was decidedly opposed to the unguent she daubed on him daily and even more averse to the bath Thea insisted precede the treatment. They struck a bargain. Simeon agreed to an occasional acquaintance with water and lye soap-hands and face only; he was quite adamant about that-and Thea agreed to an occasional acquaintance with his equine friends.

  It was an uneasy agreement at best. While she did not mind a pass over Chimera's sleek coat with a currycomb, she drew the line at venturing anywhere near the horse's restless legs with a hoof pick. Her balk only triggered an equally stubborn response in Simeon.
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  "We had an agreement, Mistress," he reminded her, arms crossed over his chest and dirty fists balled into his armpits. "I'd be about this bathing if you'd see to Chimera's grooming. Cleaning his hooves, 'tis part of the grooming."

  "Washing your hair is part of the bathing," she countered.

  His fists dug in deeper, lower lip thrust out more in dare than defiance.

  "Very well, then," Thea said, vowing the boy would see his head dunked and scrubbed before the day was out. She snatched up the pick and bent to her task, hands nervously approaching the stallion and darting back at his slightest movement.

  "You must grab him...so." Simeon demonstrated his usual lack of caution as he reached for the horse's deadly hoof, picked it up as if it had been mere tuppence on the ground, and showed her the dirt-packed underside.

  Thea tried again. God had given her too few limbs with which to steady herself against Chimera's shoulder, grab his ankle, and wield the pick at the same time. It did not help that bending over left her woefully off balance or that, in her upended position, her thick braid insisted on flopping over her shoulder and dangling in her field of vision. It did not help that Chimera seemed as set against having his hooves cleaned as Simeon was about climbing into a cask tub. Nor did it help that Simeon's innocent snicker drew an audience of not-so-innocent stable hands, all too eager to offer a round of unwelcome advice.

  "Little beast," she muttered to Simeon. "Nothing short of full immersion for you. And I will see to your ears personally."

  Naturally, Nottingham chose that particular time to visit his prize animal. She saw an upside down view of him striding toward the stall and the cluster of onlookers scurrying like rats back to their work. With a start, she corrected her less than dignified posture and swiped the back of her hand across reddened cheeks.

  "Simeon!" the Sheriff called out, tossing his mantle into the boy's outstretched arms.

  The child's face broke into a grin as he caught the cloak and crushed the heavy woolen fabric to his chest. "G'day, my lord." Excitement added breathlessness to his high-pitched child's voice, as if Nottingham's presence were the greatest boon the seven-year-old could desire.