Backing toward the window, he pulled out a knife, and Scarlet gasped at the glinting blade. He tried not to care. After all, why should he? If this place had not drained him of his wits, he ought to have cut the little thief’s throat the moment he found him.
“Don’t move,” he growled. “I’m watching you.”
Chapter Two
Scarlet didn’t move. He scarcely breathed. He was too busy observing each move that Melmoth Brien made, admiring the broadness of those shoulders and the way his boots and breeches molded to the muscular contours of his calves and thighs. And then he urged himself to hate the man with everything he had.
Thinking back, Scarlet was a little surprised that he had not instantly known Melmoth Brien. He had sensed something magical stirring even before he’d heard the door being hammered down, a moment when curiosity had mingled with his panic and rooted him to the spot.
Scarlet had watched Brien a decade before, when he himself had been but a tiny waif of a thing, slipping silently through the undergrowth. Back then, Melmoth Brien would come home occasionally to thrill his lonely mother, sporting a red coat with enormous epaulets and gleaming brass buttons. Scarlet had yearned to touch those buttons, to shine them against his ragged sleeve and to hold them up toward the leafy canopy so they caught the glint of the morning sun. He’d thought them very beautiful.
But Scarlet had not found the captain himself beautiful back then. Brien had possessed the brash good looks of a well-made man in his early twenties, but arrogance and impatience to get away from the forest realm had twisted everything about him. And now?
Watching Brien hack his knife through the bleeding stems, Scarlet observed the brutal, jerky movements of a desperate man. Nevertheless, world-weariness had altered the captain’s appearance favorably, bringing a handsome ruggedness to his square-jawed features, which appeared almost as if they could have been wrought from solid oak.
Scarlet squirmed, and for the first time in a while, he almost tried to run again. He must not admire this traitor, this loathed faederswica. A squire of the Greenwood no more, his captain had sold off Carseald Hall and its lands, drawing the modern world into the heart of the Greenwood. Scarlet would have to be very careful if he was to achieve what he must.
And why was he thinking of Brien as “his captain”? He hardly knew what a captain did or was. All he knew was the notion pleased him, igniting a shimmer of unwonted excitement that pierced right to his loins. It confused him almost as much as the fire that shot through his veins when the man had handled him roughly, even as they grappled and fought. Was that why he had surrendered—feeling so strangely overcome—when he should have fought like a wildcat to the last? Scarlet’s confusion dizzied him, but he was running out of time to ponder. His hated captain was pacing back over.
“Give me your arms.”
No. Scarlet didn’t want to do that. He didn’t want this rogue to see the tiny acorn charm that was laced around his wrist. It would probably look worthless to him, but…
The impatience that blazed in Brien’s eyes spoke of a man who didn’t give a fig. Grabbing Scarlet’s wrist, he favored the sight of the crude charm with nothing more than a grunt of derision. Brien then bound Scarlet’s wrist to the chair’s arm with the ivy shoots, which he had stripped of all foliage with his knife.
“Agh! Please…it’s too tight.”
“Be quiet, pixie.”
With his knuckles clenched white, Scarlet tugged halfheartedly against the knots. The wiry stems were thick enough to not cut too brutally into his skin, but there was no give.
After securing the other wrist in a similar fashion, Brien dropped to his knees and wrapped a long length about Scarlet’s left ankle, where his old, battered boots met new but mud-splattered stockings. The bonds bit tightly again, but the feel of Brien’s long, dexterous fingers tying him up with a businesslike abruptness made Scarlet shiver as if Brien were teasing him with the lightest of feathers. Then Brien’s strong hand clamped down around his tensing calf muscle, pushing his right leg into a position that had his slender ankles crossing neatly in front of him. Brien’s handling was too much—and far too little. A shallow gasp escaped Scarlet’s constricted throat.
“Stop squirming,” said Brien, his voice guttural. He wound the natural cord several times around the right ankle, and then the left again, before tying a secure knot. He then circled the ivy about both ankles before passing it between Scarlet’s legs and about his left knee, finally looping around the back of the chair to fix it about the other. Scarlet looked up sharply, and Brien’s mesmeric green gaze impaled him.
Before he could meet the stare with any power of his own, Scarlet realized to his horror that his legs had been forced into a parted position by the bondage. And now Brien’s avid gaze slid over—oh, sweet spirits!—a very visible bulge in Scarlet’s tight breeches. His every sinew tautened.
“Wh-what are you doing?”
“Just making sure you can’t escape.”
“Please don’t waste time. They…they might be back soon.”
“You said they’re returning on the morrow, boy. We’ve got plenty of time.”
Eyes scrunched tightly closed, Scarlet bit into his bottom lip and struggled to stop his body from responding. But what could he do? His captain—no, this hateful traitor, this evil spirit incarnate—touched him again, stroking much higher up his thigh than was surely necessary as he finished his task. The heat of Brien’s palm seared through the thin fabric, setting Scarlet’s flesh ablaze with an intrinsic need for more. Worst of all, softly mocking laughter confirmed the captain had no doubts about how aroused Scarlet was growing.
That cruel hand closed in over Scarlet’s shaft, stroking its full length with an insufferable tenderness. He was already hard, humiliating as it was, and it struck him this man’s touch alone might send him shuddering toward orgasm if he kept on much longer. A whimpered moan escaped his throat before he could do anything about it, and his mind screamed. How can he do this to me? How can I want this so badly…to be possessed…to be bound and claimed…by the traitor I loathe with all my heart?
He breathed deeply; he had to fight this. When he dared to peep again, Brien bared his teeth in a wolfish grin. “No hiding in those breeches. You’re a pixie through and through.”
“No! If I possessed the power of Holgaerst, I’d turn your black heart to stone. Get off me!” Scarlet ground his teeth and tried to quell his arousal with thoughts of raw, unfettered hatred.
Brien’s disdainful laughter rang hollow. The wind heaved an agonized sigh through the ancient timbers of the mansion, and he felt cruel and slightly dirty.
It wasn’t as if he hadn’t bound anybody like this before. Hell, he’d played such games with partners of both sexes. Men with impressive, brawny physiques, whose muscles twitched beneath snug leather straps. For women, he favored voluptuous, fleshy curves that flowed like satin waves between tight strips of black silken cloth. Brien had even let himself be bound on occasion, although he was not naturally predisposed to submitting.
Scarlet, on the other hand, looked right then as if he were put on God’s earth solely to be trussed up. While far from Brien’s ideal, the sight of those slim ankles corded together and those lissome thighs, parted for his easy access, set arousal clenching in his loins—and the boy wasn’t even naked. Damn it, the feel of the smooth fabrics encasing him was enticing enough, but the thought of the inner thighs beneath, no doubt covered with downy, golden-blond hair, and of Scarlet’s proudly jutting prick… What the hell?
He looked up, finding his inner struggle more than matched by the pained conflict in Scarlet’s eyes. He wondered if the lad even knew that what they were doing—well, what he was considering, and Scarlet’s response to his touch—was wrong by every law of Crown and church. Then again, neither of those codes penetrated very deeply into the Greenwood any more than they had into his conscience of recent years.
Still, Scarlet’s cheeks had flushed, well, a bright and beco
ming scarlet, small white teeth clenched in a fashion that expressed the sentiment get off rather more articulately than please fuck me. After a final, halfhearted squeeze, Brien drew his hand away. Scarlet gave a soft grunt, his lip hitching.
Brien winked, guilt swiftly dissipating. “You keep your dreams of Holgaerst to yourself, lad. You’re a pixie by the laws of the London back alleys, and it’s far darker than the Greenwood there.”
“I still don’t know what you mean.” Scarlet tried to wriggle away, shifting his hips awkwardly as Brien leaned into him again, this time to loop a thick but malleable bough around his middle, fastening his body to the heavy chair. Brien made sure the knots were all sound—something other than drinking and fighting that he had excelled at while executing his army commission, if just because of all the other pleasurable purposes he found he could put his skills to. And then he straightened and stepped away.
There was still a notable bulge in Scarlet’s breeches, and Brien could not help but snigger. With his hands and ankles tied like that, the woodsman wasn’t going to get much relief in the near future.
“I’ve got work to do,” he said, admiring his handiwork. Scarlet’s features were etched with the most picturesquely needful grimace he had ever seen. Yes, the lad really could make him a fortune in the right sort of brothel. It occurred to him that, if he was really desperate, he could sell Scarlet on to some such nefarious institution. But he was not quite that needy.
Yet.
“Don’t go anywhere.” He chuckled darkly. “And if I can’t find what I’m looking for, don’t you worry. There’ll be hell to pay if you don’t play this game my way.”
* * *
The hidden safe in his father’s study had been flushed free of its treasures, as had the jewelry box concealed behind the snarling carved head of a wolf. His last hopes pinned on the tin box buried beneath the hearth in the Great Hall, Brien hacked his knife between the glazed orange tiles, searching desperately for loose ones. And he felt a fool. Everything about this creaking dump seemed to taunt him: the blunted swords crossed in the middle of the ancient oak screen, the bats flapping in the beams, the quiet coo of the wood pigeons. But it was the inscription that shouted at him from above the hearth that galled him the most: EARDLUFU.
Brien knew the meaning well enough. In the bastardized Old English that still infiltrated forest dialect, it read “dear home.” The words had been carved there generations back, probably in some time of plague or bloodshed, when being shrouded in the perpetual night of the forest may have seemed at least slightly fortuitous. But not in the nineteenth century, when only a fool’s tongue could still whisper reverently of Holgaerst and curse like a devil about faederswica.
There was nothing “dear” about this place now, a feeling that multiplied a thousandfold when Brien ripped away the loosened tiles, pulled out the tin box, and rattled it. There was no comforting chink of gold or diamonds.
Yet it could still contain papers. Turning it upside down so the lid flew open, he shook the box furiously. It was empty.
“No!” Brien’s roar reverberated to the very apex of the rafters, sending the wood pigeons into a noisy flap and the bats swirling amid a cloud of pigeon feathers and dust. He should have never come back, let alone become so…embroiled, distracted? Brien wanted to spit. Any moment now, he’d be blaming magic and curses, when the truth was only one thing had thrown him off his tack: a pretty woodsman who’d put a strain in his breeches.
He had to get out of there. He’d find a pretty whore back in London, man or woman, and then he’d pay them a fair price in order to fuck them senseless. Brien stormed back into the entrance hall. “Where the hell are they?”
“Where’s what?”
Scarlet was, unsurprisingly, exactly where Brien had left him, tied to the heavy oak chair. He looked suitably alarmed at the sight of one hundred and ninety pounds of raw muscle, sinew, and anger advancing toward him. Brien dismissed the fleeting notion that he’d never find anything this damned alluring again, even if he scoured the farthest reaches of the Seven Seas, and towered over him.
“The papers, boy. Where are my father’s papers?”
“What good are papers to me?” Scarlet lowered his gaze evasively. “I can’t…I can’t hardly read, can I?”
Stooping down, Brien squeezed Scarlet’s chin between his thumb and forefinger and lifted it, trying to force their eyes to meet. “No, of course you can’t. But you’d steal anything, wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t have to know what it was. You can tell me now, or I can beat it out of you. Where are the papers?”
“I don’t know! The fairy must have taken them. Yes…yes, that was it. I remember now. She took away a yellowing sheet with strange markings on it. Happy now?”
Damn it, was that the hint of a pout? The boy’s insolence ought to have made his brittle temper snap like a twig. Yet this new revelation was enough to have Brien backing away, unable to face the onslaught. What would Jemima want with the deeds? Maybe, if she was desperate, she might have taken the jewels. But surely she didn’t have the faculties to know what to do about the papers?
Unless she’d taken a lover who could be manipulating her in some way. A local, maybe?
Brien surveyed Scarlet once more, trying to remain as detached as possible. The little woodsman wriggled within the limits of his constraints, twitching his knees and chewing his bottom lip fretfully. Yet there was something about the boy’s eyes that he couldn’t quite read. Fear was inscribed there, yes, but there was also a gleam of something else. What was it?
Most likely Scarlet was holding information back. Well, Brien would find it all out soon enough.
“So be it,” he growled, dropping to a squat so he could leer up at the boy. “Now, you’re going to tell me what you did with the jewels. And no evading the question this time, or I’ll take every penny you owe me back through that pretty arse of yours.”
“Wh-what do you mean?”
“You know exactly what I mean.” But did he? Even following Scarlet’s lively response to that slight grope earlier, very possibly not. And Brien knew his portent was weak. The prospect of taking anybody against his will, let alone turning pimp, made his self-loathing burgeon irrepressibly. And the notion of anybody else touching Scarlet, let alone fucking him? A silent scream ripped through his guts, taking Brien quite by surprise.
“I don’t know,” Scarlet stuttered. “I don’t understand.”
With an effort, Brien hardened his tone. “This is your last chance for this to end well, Scarlet. Tell me what you did with the jewels or I might just have to kill you.”
The words must have rung more convincingly in Scarlet’s ears than Brien’s. Terror flashed in the woodsman’s eyes. “Please…don’t be angry. I…I…went to one of the forest villages, um, it was Little Lyndton…for the market, two days past, and bartered a silver bracelet for cloth.”
“You bartered my mother’s jewelry so you could dress like a doxy?” Some travelling peddler would be laughing all the way to the alehouse. Brien allowed himself a sigh of bitter frustration. “And the rest of it?”
“If I tell you where they are, will you leave the Greenwood this day and never come back?”
The quiet words slammed into Brien with the force of a swinging club. Who was this boy to make such a request of him? But more confusingly, why did the notion cause his heart to wrench? He hated his place. He wanted to get out of here. His temper finally breaking, Brien pulled out his knife. “Just answer the fucking question.”
Scarlet blanched. “They’re still under my nest, in the stables. No…what are you doing? No…please!”
Clamping one hand down over the lad’s tethered arm, Brien watched him screw his fist into a tiny ball, struggling against his unforgiving bonds. Scarlet clearly feared for his fingers, and Brien reveled in it for a moment. But he was meticulously careful; his knife sliced only through the stems, not leaving a single nick on Scarlet’s golden-pale skin, and he even avoided cutting through that cuff t
he boy wore, with its crude and worthless wooden charm. He repeated the task on the other side before running the knife carefully between Scarlet’s ankles, watching the green ivy split and fall away. All the while, he fought back urges to stroke those graceful ankles, to toy betwixt Scarlet’s thighs and send the blood pumping into the lad’s prick and, hell, his own, once more. He had to resist if he was going to get out of there before nightfall.
“The squirrel games are over. You’re going to show me where you’ve hidden it all,” said Brien. Scarlet nodded and rubbed his sore wrists, pupils darting from side to side. “And don’t even think about escaping, boy. I will keep you bound to me until I’m through with you.”
Chapter Three
Through the blur of his lashes, Scarlet watched while Brien looped and knotted the ivy stalk fast about his neck cloth. Then the captain picked up the end of the thick ivy, fashioning it into a lead.
Still handling him with meticulous care, Brien had not pulled the neck cloth any tighter than Scarlet usually tied it himself. When he strained against the lead, just a little, he felt only a slight pressure build at the back of his neck, soft muslin nuzzling against sensitive flesh.
He couldn’t tug at the collar. Brien had pinioned his arms behind him with the palms kissing, a feat that the captain had taken much time over, using a great length of ivy. Scarlet had found himself peering over his shoulder as the man did it, unable to prevent himself from admiring the skill. And now Scarlet found his breath coming fast and shallow—but why? He was frightened, but nothing explained the powerful swell of emotion he experienced every time he dared look at the man who controlled his every movement.
What was it? A realization of helplessness, a burning hatred, or, most confusing of all, a vague recognition that his kneeling before this man, tethered and submissive, felt absolutely right.
“The stables, you say?” growled Brien. “Come on then, pixie.”
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