by Sue Wilson
Nottingham's lip curved downward, an eloquent response. With a minute wave of his hand, he dismissed the girl and her pitcher. He waited until he and Thea were alone, his dark gaze fixed on hers in the interval of silence that seemed to stretch endlessly between them. When the door at last thudded shut, he spoke.
"How does Simeon fare?"
Thea drew a deep, steadying breath. "Simeon is sleeping soundly with Mildthryth to look after him. His breathing is deep and unlabored. He appears, miraculously, not to have taken in too much smoke."
"I found him huddled in a little knot, belly against the floor, away from the worst of the smoke and heat. For all his youth, he has cultivated a surprising repertoire of survival skills...and good fortune."
"An angel on his shoulder, perhaps?" Thea suggested.
"If you believe in such things," the Sheriff said gruffly, his tone an indication that he, at least, did not.
Thea cleared her throat, discomfited by the brittle shell he had wrapped around himself. She had visited him to reassure herself of his safety and to a lesser, unexplainable degree, simply to be with him in the aftermath of tragedy. But he had retreated, unreachable by any words she could have conjured up.
"He has a few blisters," she continued, "mostly on his hands. They'll heal, if he'll abide more of the dreaded unguent he disliked so before and keep himself clean of stable leavings. And you, Sheriff?"
Nottingham shook his head as if to dismiss her concern. "A scratch or two, nothing to warrant your hovering over me."
Thea bristled. "I did not come to hover, my lord. Will you be as difficult as Simeon about a harmless salve?"
"I am unscathed-"
"That is codswallop. You nearly swooned when the arrows gouged you. If you are still up and about and provoking the dwindling reserves of my good humor, it is only because you are fueled by panic or anger or a skinful of stout wine. I assure you, when the glow of your bath wears off, your pain will return."
He would have had to be a fool, and deaf, not to hear the sharp point of jealousy bared in her last parry. Thea already regretted the remark, counted it as some verbal misstep that revealed a weakness in her defenses. She opened her mouth to speak again, but his dark brows had already climbed into the dripping tangle of his hair, and he coughed through an unexpected laugh.
"I'm surprised, Thea," he said. "An attempt on my life. A desperately one-sided attack and its resultant carnage. And your worst cares are for a chamber maid?"
She favored him with a withering glance. "Another unsuspecting victim."
"The wench bathes me. She's one of several-"
"I'll wager they fight for their turns," she said tightly.
"It's a harmless indulgence-"
"Swallow your lame explanations, Sheriff. I am here to see to your wounds. Nothing more."
"As I feared." Nottingham shrugged in apparent resignation as he sat, cross-legged, on the sheepskin spread in front of the fire. Grimacing as the muscles of his back flexed, he shouldered out of his robe. The garment fell in a liquid sable moat around his hips. "Then do so."
Thea pressed her lips together, stifling a curse. The incorrigible, manipulative gall of the man! She sent a blistering glare in his direction, trying to ignore the fire-bronzed definition of his shoulders...the hard musculature of his arms and chest, chiseled by a lifetime of sword practice...the sinewed wrist...the long, blunted fingers whose gracefully affected movements belied their permanently callused tips.
He patted the sheepskin beside him. "You cannot tend me at thirty paces, Thea."
Her gaze traveled down the shadowed midline of his chest, past the flat plane of his abdomen, to the brown silk pooled in his lap, then jerked away. Saints! She did not need to imagine what she had so clearly seen just moments ago. The insufferable lout had already carved a surfeit of sensual memories into her addled brain. She must examine his shoulder, his back, and nothing-not his banter, not even his casual disrobing-could prevent that or turn the purpose of this meeting.
Thea snatched up her pouch of herbs and stepped past the puddled water around the tub, past the pile of discarded clothing to the spot the Sheriff had claimed so definitively on the floor. She knelt in front of him, opened her bag of supplies, and spoke without looking at him.
"You should know, my lord, there is only so much I can do. Grazed flesh may heal, if I'm quick and the physic strong enough. An arrow's piercing, as you have seen, tests my ability to its very limits. I may as well credit luck, or prayer, as skill. And there are more horrible contagions, I assure you, that I can do nothing about. Permit me an observation, my lord, but you are at far greater risk to one of those than to a stray arrow or two."
"Hardly stray," he reminded her. "And you are being obtuse. Say what you mean, Thea. That you think I have slept with a dozen women in the past fortnight and have no caution for the consequences."
"I have not kept count," she said blandly. "And it isn't caution that will spare you, but restraint."
The Sheriff tucked a slanted smile into the corner of his bearded lip. "I am not a restrained man."
"Evidently not."
"What would you have me do, Thea?" He grinned, placing two fingers beneath her chin and lifting her face to his. "Limit my amorous pursuits to a single woman? To you, perhaps?"
The heat of his words blazed across her cheeks. "I would suggest celibacy, my lord, if I thought it were at all possible."
"Would you now?" He laughed out loud, head thrown back and firelight glinting amber across his raven hair. "God's blood, woman! Don't you know that I have made it my utmost ambition to woo you beneath the furs of my bed? Had those treacherous bastards a knack for better timing, I might have succeeded."
The solution Thea had concocted to swab the arrows' gashes shook in her hands. She put the bottle down, drawing her hands into fists.
No more of this poor humor and meaningless chatter. No more of his nearness and suggestion upon suggestion, when they could not even speak together frankly. Did he think she had forgotten the night before, that one brief slice of time when what she knew and felt of him was bold, honest truth? Not this taunting artifice, not this smoke screen of insincere banter, but truth! Thea ached with remembering, and the pain lodged deeper inside her with every quip they exchanged. No more! she swore silently. It was past bearing!
"Stop," was all she said, quietly.
The barrage of words fell to a thundering end, and the solar was left muffled in utter silence.
Thea sighed, breathing shakily into the rare hush of peace between them. "Why do we do this?"
Nottingham tucked his chin low to his chest, his expression stripped of the animation that had so completely masked his true mood. "I think, because we do it so well." He glanced up at her, a crooked, beleaguered smile on his lips. "Verbal coupling, it is."
"And not war?"
"I don't think so," he said softly. "Although you are angry enough to draw blood with your wit."
"I am not-"
"You are angry," he repeated, firm words following hers so closely as to fall on top of them before she was finished. "And it has nothing to do with the red on your cheeks or the singed ringlets about your face or even with the line of blisters on the inside of your wrist. You are seething with the need to rail at me, to give me the sharp edge of your tongue and wield it as mercilessly as a Celt's battle-ax. You come here docile and meek, asking after my welfare, when in truth you would sooner string me up by my heels-or some weaker part of my anatomy-so you could fling at me one vindictive oath after another and plead to heaven to send my black soul to the farthest reaches of Lucifer's hell."
"Where you would no doubt dwell happily among the other heartless demons of your ilk. No, Sheriff, hell is too easy for you-" She caught herself and bit her lip to stymie the unbidden rush of words.
"Do not stop, Thea. You are vexed enough and, as I've been given countless occasions to remember, aptly skilled at listing my innumerable offenses. God forbid you spare me now. There is mo
re, is there not? Out with it! Tell me how wrong I was. Call me a fool to the highest heaven. God's oath, woman, we were making love-"
Thea twisted away from him, pain and rage and confusion tumbling inside her. He seized her wrist and turned her toward him, forcing her to meet his eyes.
"We were making love," he repeated, meting out each word as if he could imprint in her brain each touch, each shiver, each sigh and soft moan that had passed between them the night before. "Damn you, if we can share such an intimacy as that, can you not rake my deserving ass over the coals?"
"You accused them!" she cried, unable to keep silent a moment longer, "and me, without evidence, without knowing. You used me to identify Gisborne's captives, men who could have been my friends, and you forced me to look upon their dead faces! Yes, we were making love, and I was giving my body to you and my heart to you and my very soul to you, because I know no other way and you-not a few hours past and you were calculating a means to trade every small mote of trust between us for a chance to indict your damnable outlaws. God in heaven, what am I to you? A political prisoner to do your will? Someone to whore for you until you get the answer you want? Do you think I don't see? It's not me you want, but them!"
"That is untrue-"
"They claim your every waking thought. Every plan, scheme, and motive that drives you comes from them, from Locksley, from Sherwood. It's madness, an obsession, some decay of your soul that saps the very life from you until you cannot breathe for cursing Robin's name. You cannot even gaze out at the splendor of the wood, your shire, Sheriff, without your fists clenching to fight.
"What would you barter to see them all in chains, innocent or not? Justice? You have bartered that. Your people are starving for it; your land is barren of it. Honor? As much as you had, you've surrendered to Robin. Love?"
She ripped her wrist from his hand, choking back tears she had sworn he would not provoke. She could tell she had gone too far, cut too close to the core of what lay between them. His face was leeched of color; even the words that tumbled glibly from his lips at other times seemed dried in his throat.
"And worse," she sobbed, "oh, yes, even worse than any of that, is how unforgivably angry I am at myself. Because I feared for you. I dreaded the sound of each arrow coming, felt each one tear through me, because I knew it was meant for you. God, I would have traded my life for yours, my soul for a longbow to protect you-" She stopped and looked up at him. "And would again."
Nottingham reached for her, fingertips brushing the spill of curls at her cheek, then stopped, respecting the hand she thrust between them to keep him away.
Thea had but to look at him to see the private war played out on his features. She imagined the myriad excuses poised on his lips, all ones she had heard before, none that made any difference. And in his eyes-a silent agony she did not understand, probably would never understand. When he spoke, finally, his voice was low and somber, lashed with remorse she thought never to hear.
"I have lost whatever was between us, have I not? Forfeited some small beginning I should have treasured. Sold it. Bartered it..."
Thea could only shake her head, vowing not to give in to the tears that hung on the fringe of her lashes.
"Clumsy of me, as always. I keep thinking I am beyond that, that if I can disguise you in Norman finery-" he gestured to her soft woolen kirtle with its complex weave and embroidery, "-then I can look at you and not see Sherwood. That if I keep you here, then the forest cannot possibly come between us."
"And yet it does."
"And yet it does," he repeated, turning to stare into the weaving dance of the fire. "The wood plagues me. It lives inside me like an evil thing. Like a demon. Like a legion of demons. And no priest, no leech with bloodletting and purging and incantations to God or beast can rid me of it." He laughed bitterly. "The good citizens of Nottinghamshire say Sherwood is haunted, but they are wrong. My dear surgeon, Sherwood haunts me. Would that there were some nostrum in that bag of yours that could cleanse my mind of every memory that blasted forest holds."
He seemed to catch himself, to hear the loss of reason and control in his own words, and clamped his teeth over the last of them, sending a muscle in his jaw pulsing with the effort of restraint. With a shudder, he wiped a trembling hand over his face.
"Thea-" He paused, unspoken anguish marring his features. "I've no wish to hurt you. Last night, if I lost your affection and earned only your contempt in its stead, it was a poor bargain indeed, made by a fool. The devil take Locklsey and Sherwood and my suspicions...if he will only leave you for me. Rob all else from me, but not again-not again-"
He broke off, flinching as if the effort to muddle through such a plea of apology were alien to his nature. Then he looked at her, his eyes grown black by firelight, and for a moment, the air grew thick and heavy, glutted with the same unknowable energy that had always existed between them.
Thea knelt rooted to the spot, the last of her fury drowning in the Sheriff's admission. His first. But admission of what? Of the very madness she feared? And if that was so, how infinitely more dangerous her plight, for he sat but a hair's breadth away, heart beating, lungs pulling in air, alive-
And she was glad of it.
Her blood poured through her veins, sending relief to every nerve in her body. The very fact that they could sit here, quarreling, was a thing to rejoice. The reality that he could stare confused and brooding into the fire, instead of lying marble-cold beneath a death shroud lifted every burden of her anger.
She had been afraid to look at him before, not wanting to risk the magnetic power he commanded so effortlessly in muscle and tissue, the coiled strength that whipped him into frenetic motion one moment, and propelled him with the fluid, stalking grace of a big cat the next. She had even dreaded the sensual pull of his voice, both raging roar and soft whisper in the same sentence. But now she devoured his presence, raking in the sight of him in the few precious seconds when he was unaware of her observation.
She had no miracle potion, knew no physic for the wounds he would not share with her, for all the scars on the inside of his heart that he kept hidden in darkness. All she possessed was a chaos of emotion, something she had never felt before-and not half the courage Mildthryth claimed she would need.
Cupping her hands beneath his chin, she raised the softly bristled jaw in her palms, and gazed from his lips, so unaccustomed to blurting out the truth of his errors, to his eyes, where truth and regret were clear. "I came back with you willingly," she whispered. "I shall not leave."
Gently, she placed her lips against his, sealing the promise. She felt the harsh exhalation of his breath and his lips moving over hers.
"I do not deserve this mercy-"
She shushed him with a simple breath of a kiss-once, twice, again-then tore away before the desire to linger overtook her senses, and his. "It isn't mercy, Sheriff. It's forgiveness." She started to touch his shoulder, but was at once mindful of his injuries, of the cost to him of ignoring them. She drew out her herbs and dared him to refuse her a second time. "Now let me see to your 'scratches.'"
~*~
She had drugged him-something she had sprinkled in his wine that even spices and warm mulling by the fire could not totally mask. The drink had left him awake, but drowsy, oddly insensate to the sting her potions should have caused. Nottingham had heard her quickly stifled gasp when he bared his back to her and felt the cool trickle of herb-infused water meet the fiery stripes of skin laid open by the arrows, all with a sluggish detachment. And now Thea smoothed something thick and viscous into the twin grooves, something that slid over his raw, blistered skin beneath the soft whisper of her fingertips. A painless caress, drawing oblivion over him like a warm blanket.
His lids struggled to counter the weight the wine had put on them. He had nearly lost her-first to the fire, then to his own stupidity-and could not bear to relinquish the precious sight of her to so paltry a thing as sleep.
He lay with his head pillowed on her thigh
, breathing in the lavender scent of her. His hand curled around the dark blue wool of her kirtle, color like the wash of early evening's inky sky, like her eyes, and slowly edged the skirt and ivory shift up to bare the pink flesh of her leg. She did not protest, either with words or affronted wriggling to regain her modesty. He let his fingers trace indolent patterns against her skin, until they collapsed, tired and leaden, possessively against her.
She had unmanned him-or her white-powdered witch's brew had-filling him with lazy inertia that rendered him harmless. The smooth, liquid paths her fingers made on his scarred back stirred him into a somnolent, gray whirlpool.
Gray...white...a column of smoke writhed skyward, weaving in and out of the lace of leafless winter branches, disappearing into a sky dark with snow clouds.
They were surrounded. His men scattered like fallen blackbirds over the hoar-frosted deadfall on the forest floor. Blossoms of scarlet pooled on their chests...backs...where arrows had stolen life. Two lived, divested of blades and crossbows, their hands high above their heads in compliance.
The coach...
He glanced at the wagon tilted precariously toward its broken wheel, noted the flaming arrow that slumped the driver over his reins, the flames teasing at the wood of the seat.
A quarterstaff prodded between his elbows and ribs, levering his arm away from his side. At the end of the thick length of ash, a swarthy face peered out from beneath a nutmeg hood; a black hedgerow of brows angled low over humorless eyes.
"Sheriff of Nottingham...I do say. Look ye, Martin, we done poached us the high and mighty Sheriff."
"And we'll be dangling by our necks because of it. Christ Jesus, ye done slaughtered half his men-"
Farther away, calling from the edge of the clearing, came another voice, shaking like the arrow he trained on one of the soldiers. "I'm fer quitting this place...the spirits are thick among us. Can ye not feel them?"
"Aye, and me as well," another agreed. "I say we get our arses to safety before there's more of these Norman-helmed bastards come to see what's detaining their lord and master."