The force of the table falling had knocked her cold and she lay on the floor, amidst the scraps and old rushes. Gravely concerned, Constantine rolled her onto her back to survey the damage, but there wasn’t anything he could see. He wasn’t going to take the time to fully inspect her, either, so he moved to gather her into his arms.
“I must remove her from this place,” he told Lucifer. “Clear a path to the door for me.”
Lucifer was on his feet, shoving men aside with his big arms and big weapon. Augustin and Remy, seeing the unconscious lady in Constantine’s arms, moved to assist, fighting their way through the crowd and helping Constantine make his way to the door. It was blind chaos in the room, now with flames from the disturbed hearth creeping up one of the walls, and Lucifer began to bellow to the men to retreat. Everyone began moving for any opening, windows included.
Lucifer was nearly to the door when he suddenly grunted and listed sideways. He wasn’t moving forward any longer and Remy and Augustin had to rush forward to see why the man wasn’t moving, but they couldn’t quite see what had the man hobbled. All they knew was that they had to get out of the fighting, so they each took an arm and dragged Lucifer out as Constantine, carrying Gregoria, came up behind them.
Now, they were out of the tavern and in the street. Several of Constantine’s men were mounted already, trying to fight off the tide of opponents that were now spilling out of the smoking building. Constantine was greatly concerned for Gregoria but he was also greatly concerned for Lucifer, who was on his knees. When he came around the front of the man, he saw why.
A long dagger hilt was protruding out of his left side, right at the base of his ribcage.
“Damnation,” Lucifer hissed as Augustin and Remy dropped to their knees to assist him. “I almost made it out before someone threw a knife at me.”
Constantine took a moment to visually inspect the wound, as much as he could without actually touching anything. He was still holding Gregoria.
“Bloody hell,” he muttered when he saw the size of the hilt. “The blade has to be a least the length of the hilt.”
“I will remove it,” Remy said, moving in to get a grip on it.
“Nay!” Constantine snapped. “There is no time to do it here. Get him back to the Gaia. I will take Augustin with me to Three Crosses. Move.”
They did. Remy slung Lucifer’s right arm across his broad shoulders, practically carrying the man back to the sandy beach where the Gaia hopefully hadn’t moved too far off shore yet. There hadn’t been enough time to really move the vessel very far and that’s what they were counting on. But Remy was having trouble dragging Lucifer’s dead weight along with him, so another of Constantine’s men came to his aid, helping him evacuate Lucifer to the beach.
Meanwhile, Constantine had to move quickly. He had to think of himself, of Gregoria, and of getting clear of the fighting. His silver steed was still tethered where he’d left it and he raced to the animal, heaving Gregoria up into the saddle as gently as he could before leaping onto the saddle himself and taking hold of Gregoria before digging his heels into the animal and tearing off out of town.
He hoped Augustin and the remainder of his men were following because he couldn’t take the time to look back. His only concern at the moment was removing Gregoria from the battle and taking her someplace safe to assess her injuries. It could have been nothing more than a knock on the head when the table fell, or it could be something substantially worse. All he knew was that he had to get her to safety. He didn’t even care about himself at that moment; only her.
The dark forests of Wales swallowed them up as the road disappeared into the trees.
Chapter Thirteen
She was back on the ship again. It was rolling.
Everything was rolling.
Gregoria opened her eyes to see horse’s legs beneath her and the muddy road zinging by as the horse ran. Everything was a blur. Some of the mud was flying up in her face, specs of it hitting her in the forehead. Realizing she was upside down, slung over the saddle of a horse, when her last memory had been of a fight going on around her, she panicked in thinking that she’d been abducted from the fight.
All kicking feet and swinging arms, she could feel someone trying to steady her. She thought she might have even heard a familiar voice… Constantine’s voice… but she couldn’t be sure. All she knew was that she wanted off the galloping horse.
Gregoria got her wish. She was fighting so much that the horse was pulled up to a stumbling halt and she managed to pitch herself off in such a way that she ended up on her feet. But she was still moving with the momentum of the swiftly-moving horse and she stumbled back, ending up on her arse in the middle of the muddy, rocky road. Feet suddenly hit the ground beside her.
“Are you well, love?” It was Constantine, grasping her by the arm and hauling her to her feet. “Did you hurt yourself?”
Gregoria’s head was swimming as she held on to Constantine for support, relieved that it was him to her rescue and she wasn’t in the clutches of an enemy. “I… I do not think so,” she said, putting a hand to her head. “What… what happened? Where are we?”
Constantine put both hands on her because she seemed so unsteady. “Come over here,” he said, leading her over to the side of the road where there was an upturned stump. “Sit down before you fall down. How do you feel?”
Gregoria wasn’t entirely sure how to answer that question. Sitting on the stump, she struggled to orient herself. “My head hurts,” she said, looking up to Constantine and wincing because the bright sky over his head hurt her eyes. “What happened? Where are we?”
Constantine crouched down beside her. “There was a fight back in Eynon,” he said. “Do you remember that?”
She nodded. “I do,” she said. “There were men all around and then… I think they broke the table I was hiding under.”
Constantine grinned faintly. “They did, indeed,” he said. “It was a heavy table and it must have hit you on the head when it fell. I took you out as quickly as I could and now we are on our way to Three Crosses.”
Three Crosses. Suddenly, Gregoria’s head wasn’t hurting as badly as the stab of terror those two words gave her. Everything came to her all in a flood; her thoughts before the fight began, when she had been planning on telling Constantine everything, and then her intentions being thwarted by the battle. She began looking around in a panic.
“How long has it been since we left the town?” she asked. “How far have we come?”
Constantine could see the fear in her expression, although he didn’t understand it. “Everything is well,” he assured her. “We were not followed from town.”
That wasn’t the answer she sought. She looked at him. “How far have we come?”
Constantine threw a thumb at the road, in a general northerly direction. “Far enough,” he said. “At this pace, we should be there in another hour or two. We are not too far away now.”
That bit of news gripped Gregoria with fear. We are not too far away. She grabbed hold of him, looking at their surroundings, seeing mostly hills and fields with trees in the distance. There were dots of white sheep down the hill, corralled by two figures she presumed to be shepherds, but other than the sheep and the two men, she couldn’t see anyone else. No army was lying in wait.
Thank God!
There was no more time to waste.
“I must speak with you privately, my lord,” she said to Constantine, her pale face full of angst. “Please send your men away.”
Constantine simply nodded, turning to tell Augustin to take the men up the road and he would join them later. As the men began to move, Gregoria kept her head down, watching them out of her peripheral vision, waiting until they were far enough away before she would bring forth that painful subject. Before she could speak, however, Constantine was brushing the specs of mud from her forehead.
“I must tell you something,” he said.
Her hand went to her forehead to brush off
the area he was picking at. “What is it?”
“You will call me Constantine. Or Con. I will answer to whatever you want to call me, Gregg. But please do not address me formally any longer.”
She looked at him, wide-eyed. That sweet request had her heart racing and her courage fading. But… no. She couldn’t lose courage, not now.
She had to save Constantine’s life.
“I want you to listen to me carefully and try to reserve judgment until I am finished,” she said, her voice trembling. “I have a great deal to say and not much time to say it. Will you do that? Will you listen to me?”
“I will always listen to you.”
God, he was just making this harder. Frightened, full of sorrow, Gregoria stood up from the stump and moved away from him, if only to gather her thoughts. After a few moments, she turned to him.
“I grew up in a household with my mother, my brother, and my father,” she said quietly. “My mother and father died some time ago, leaving me with my brother. He is very ambitious, you see, for the Earl of March’s favor. He is so desperate for it that he offered to help the earl gain a clear path to the throne and he is using me to accomplish that task.”
Constantine wasn’t sure what she was talking about, an unexpected subject in the midst of chaos. He stood up, his gaze upon her.
“What do you mean?” he asked. “What is he having you do?”
Gregoria could see that he wasn’t understanding what she was trying to say. Heavily, she sighed. “I am not being clear,” she said. “Constantine, I must be plain. I lied to you. Miles Tenby is not my father and I was never married to a man named Meyrick. I have never been married at all. The cup I told you is a holy relic is simply an old cup with no greater glory. My name is Lady Gregoria de Moyon and my brother is Olin de Moyon, Baron Buckland. His liege is Lord Wembury. If you do not know him, you should. He hates you with a vengeance. My brother and Lord Wembury, in order to be in March’s good graces, have forced me to lie to you. If you go to Three Crosses, the Earl of March is waiting for you. You are a threat to the earl’s claim to the throne and they want you removed. Therefore, you must turn around at this very moment and make haste back to your ship. Get out of here, Constantine. Get out of here before they find you and kill you.”
By the time she was finished, there were tears brimming in her eyes. Had Constantine any less self-control, there would have been tears in his eyes, too. He felt as if he’d just been hit in the gut, feeling shock and disappointment as he’d never felt in his life. No, he hadn’t seen this coming. He hadn’t seen this at all. But he should have.
He felt like a fool.
“Are you serious?” he asked, stunned.
“Never more serious in my life.”
If the first hit to the gut was painful, this second hit was about to take him to the ground. He was actually having trouble standing as he realized that all had not been as it seemed. Something had been going on around him that he’d been too blind to suspect or too foolish to realize.
Gregoria wasn’t who she appeared to be.
She was a traitor.
“Then all of this was part of your plan,” he said, trying to remain calm. “Endearing yourself to me, making me feel as if… all of it was part of your plan.”
“I had to earn your trust, aye.”
“It worked. Brava, my lady. Now, what do you intend to do?”
Gregoria could see the pain in his eyes as he spoke and it clawed at her, ripping her heart and soul right out of her body. She could see, in just that brief exchange, that she had badly hurt him.
“I do not plan to do anything more,” she insisted. “I told you to go. You must return to your ship immediately. I… I cannot let you go to Three Crosses.”
Constantine’s pain-filled gaze lingered on her before looking away. “Now you become the noble hero?” he said. “You have me now. You could easily finish what you started.”
Gregoria shook he head. “Nay, I cannot,” she said. She was desperate to explain herself, as if that would make a difference now. “When I came to Perran Castle, I simply wanted to be done with all of this. I had been bullied into this position, promised a small house and a garden of my own should I succeed. All I wanted was my house and my garden, and to get away from my wicked brother. I am his ward, you see, and he controls everything. When he told me what I had to do, I could not refuse him. I had no choice but to go through with it. I didn’t care that I was betraying you at first, a greatly feared pirate. I thought that I might even be doing the world a great service. But as we came to know one another… I came to care very much. No one has ever been as kind to me as you have been, Constantine. You changed everything.”
Constantine wasn’t going to be taken in again; his defenses went up. All of the soft words in the world weren’t going to matter to him now. He wasn’t going to fall for them.
“That was my mistake,” he rumbled. “It was my terrible mistake to be kind to you, to think you were different from the other women I have known. But I see you are just like the rest. Greedy, treacherous wenches.”
His words hurt her, but Gregoria knew she deserved them. “I know you must think so,” she said, fighting off the tears. “I knew that by telling you the truth, we would lose everything between us. I did not have to tell you, Constantine, but I did. I love you too much to see the Earl of March get his hands on you. That is why you must take your men and flee back to your ship this very moment. I cannot even be sure the Earl of March and his men have not come down this far, thinking we might be coming into Eynon Bay. They may very well be scouring the road for you.”
His eyes narrowed. “How would they know that?” he asked. “Did you manipulate that, too, somehow?”
Gregoria shook her head. “I heard my brother mention, once, that you would not dock in Swansea because there are too many people there who would either try to capture you or resist you,” she said. “Everyone knows that Eynon is a port for smugglers. There are only so many bays along this coast that you could have come to.”
She had a point. She also had a point in mentioning that she did not have to tell him about any of this. She could have quite easily allowed them to continue on, right into the waiting arms of the Earl of March. But she didn’t. Something had stopped her from finishing her objective.
I love you too much to see the Earl of March get his hands on you…
Bloody Beard, was it true? Did she really love him?
Frustrated, and deeply hurt, he turned away from her, taking a few steps down the road, his mind mulling over what he’d been told. He was in such turmoil that it was difficult for him to grasp only one thought. All he knew was that he’d let his guard down for this woman and it had turned around to bite him in the arse. He was an idiot; he knew that now. His men had known it all along and they’d tried to warn him, but he didn’t listen. He hadn’t wanted to listen, thinking he knew best.
Is this what it felt like to have loved and lost? No wonder he’d never wanted any part of it.
“I thought you were different,” he finally said. “A beautiful, intelligent woman who wanted to be with me. A woman who was willing to accept me for all of my faults and willing to accept who I am.”
Gregoria could hear the anguish in his voice and she took a step towards him, wanting so badly to put her arms around him. This was what she had been so fearful of; losing him. Now, it was happening. She’d already lost him. All of that warmth and affection between them was gone, and the pain of it was more than she could bear.
“I am willing to accept you for who you are,” she said hoarsely. “I am sorry I came to you under false pretenses; I truly am. Had I not fallen in love with you, it would not have mattered. I would have turned you over to the Earl of March and not thought anything of it. But it was my mistake to love you and everything about you. That is why I am telling you that you cannot go to Three Crosses. I will go on alone and explain to them that I was unable to bring you to them. I will think of something. But you… yo
u must leave immediately. The longer you remain, the more chance of you being seen. Will you go, Constantine? Will you please go?”
He simply stood there while everything she said sank in, not moving. Had he not been so emotionally fragile, it would have been much easier to walk away from her. But one very large factor kept him from walking away – she had confessed to him before he discovered it for himself. Now, she was trying to save him, trying to prevent something terrible from happening. She loved him. No one had ever loved him before, at least no one he wanted to love him. Could he really walk away from her under these circumstances? He was afraid that if he did, he would never forgive himself.
God, he wanted to believe her.
So badly.
“If you go to Three Crosses to tell the Earl of March I have escaped you, he will not treat you kindly,” he said, turning to look at her. “Look me in the eye, Gregg; tell me that there is nothing else you are withholding from me, nothing else you have lied about. Now is the moment for total truth between us or, I swear, you will be dead to me.”
Hope sprouted in her heart. “I have told you everything,” she said, feeling desperate and anxious. “But I must apologize; when I started this task, I was only thinking of myself. I was only thinking of the house and garden I was promised. I was not thinking of the man I had been sent to betray. I am sorry that I thought my house and garden to be more important than you in the beginning. I was wrong; so very wrong.”
All he could see in her face was total, utter honesty. He could see the same pain reflecting in her eyes that he was feeling at the moment, the pain of something precious slipping away. She loved him; not only had she told him so, but he could tell simply by looking at her. If he was honest with himself, then he supposed he loved her, too. Having never been in love, there was no other way to explain the feelings in his heart. There was no other way to explain the joy he felt when he looked at her. Even now, he was feeling joy even though she’d hurt him. But she was trying to redeem herself.
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