by Kris Kennedy
“Sadder than ye know. And ye asked me to kiss ye.”
She glared from beneath lowered eyelids. “You’re laughing at me.”
“Never,” he murmured, dusting his touch up the length of the ring finger of her left hand. This, and the little one beside it, they were the damaged ones. They’d not been set properly. Sinews were already threading themselves wrongly, roping themselves like snakes where they didn’t belong. The bones would knit askew, and she’d never use these fingers again.
Rardove had known what he was doing. He hadn’t shattered the bones—just a nice, clean break. And she could still function without these two fingers. Sick bastard.
“After scrambling around in the dirt with you,” she slurred derisively, then hiccupped. “And without bathing—”
“Back to the bathing, are we?”
“—and you think I asked you to kiss me?” She shook her head. “You, who know so much about women—”
“Who said I know anything about women?”
“—should know a woman does not ask a man to kiss her.” She looked at him triumphantly, her torso weaving slightly.
“Here.” He shoved a large stick between her teeth. “Bite.”
She took it but glared. “Moo, ambove all ufferz, fhould know a woman preffers—Ahhhhh!” she shrieked as he abruptly rebroke her fingers.
She flung herself backward, howling in pain. The stick tumbled to the ground. Rolling over onto her belly, she held her now-straight fingers in her good hand and rose to her knees, then staggered to her feet. Finian sat back and watched. She stumbled forward a few steps before falling to her knees again, clutching her hand and biting back screams of pain.
Finian was surprised it took as long as it did—perhaps a minute—before she found her voice. “Irishman,” she vowed hoarsely, “come a time, I will hurt you as much as you just hurt me.”
“I’ll be counting the days,” he drawled, pleased she showed fire. He must keep her in this angry state, for he still had to set the bones, lash them to hold them straight.
She was kneeling but no longer rocking. In the distance, a chorus of frog songs bubbled out of the creek. She sniffled.
“Ye’re wailing and complaining in a childly way,” he remarked coldly, to give her anger, and thereby strength.
She glared. “I neither wail nor complain—”
“Come here,” he ordered roughly, reaching out his hand, done with placating. There was a bone to be set and sleep to be had. He yawned hungrily and turned his palm up.
She staggered over, weaving as she came. She lowered herself, swaying slightly as she sat, her knees bent, legs kicked out to the side. Her hair was free of its confinement, a tumbling chestnut wave that spilled over her shoulders and down her back. She looked like she belonged in some sultan’s palace. Or right where she was, on the hills, with him.
She shook and cried out as he worked on her fingers—first whisky, then poultice, then cobwebs, then strips of linen torn from the spare tunic in her pack. She kept him informed of every bolt of fiery pain that shot through her body, but she did not move her hand until he was done, by which time she’d become utterly quiet. He lifted his head to encounter a small, shocked, tearstained face.
With a muffled curse, he held out his arms. She fell forward into them and he wrapped her up, stroking her hair and murmuring soft, soothing words for a long time.
“The yarrow should start to dull the pain soon,” he murmured eventually.
“’Tis a’ready.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You should be.”
He held her tighter. Her faint words rose up some time later. “I am left breathing, which was more than I hoped for a few moments ago. My thanks.”
“Aye, angel.”
Her fingers throbbed with pain, but she suspected this was because Finian had shifted something back to right, and now the messages were flowing between her body and mind as they ought: Attend. This hurts.
In fact, many things hurt. Her fingers, her knees, due to the small jagged rock she was kneeling on, but she didn’t move. Because more important than the pain was the feel of Finian’s arms around her, the soft, gentling words he was murmuring in her ear, designed to comfort and calm. They did both.
After a while, with great reluctance, she disentangled herself from the solid warmth of him. One could not lie in a warm embrace indefinitely.
“I’m fine now,” she said stiffly. He released her silently.
Throwing herself down on the ground, she tried to sleep. She punched the sack serving as her pillow and turned on her side. Ouch. Muttering, she flipped to the other shoulder. No, that was not helpful. She flung herself on her back, feeling the earth bite into her bones, and hummed until her own off-key tune annoyed herself. She tried imagining the sounds of a waterfall, hoping that would lure her into sleep. It didn’t.
She stared up at the sky, which was lightening into predawn. It was no good, nothing helped. Tears loomed.
She heard a small movement in the grasses, then his arms were around her, pulling her backward into his warmth. He lay on his side and tucked her into his chest. As if she’d been waiting for just this, she relaxed.
“Rest, angel.” His soft, rough voice rumbled through her hair, onto her neck.
His lean, hard body was stretched against hers, heating every inch of her from neck to knees. One powerful arm was slung over her hip, the other stretched on the ground above their heads. She sighed deeply. This was beyond goodly, and more than enough to hold her pain in abeyance. Now, how had he accomplished that?
“Thank you,” she whispered just as sleep stole over her.
“Thank ye,” he murmured back. She snuggled in and his hand tightened on her hip. She fit right in.
Chapter 19
When Senna awoke, Finian was already up, standing a few feet away, kicking more dirt atop what had been their firepit. Each time his foot moved forward, the rest of his body adjusted for the movement, muscular arms out slightly, the hair beside his face—that not trapped in its binding at the nape of his neck—swaying slightly. His chiseled face was dusky with beard growth. His gaze was intent on the pit.
She sat up. He looked over. His eyes dropped to her hand. “Yer fingers?”
She thought about them, then realized the fact that she needed to think about them with purpose was a good sign. “They do not throb so much, and there’s no pock.”
He nodded appraisingly. “Aye, no swelling. Here’s yer chance to wash.” He pointed to a small creek she hadn’t noticed last night.
She looked at it without moving. There was absolutely no way she was going to undress in front of him.
“Now, lass. We leave as soon as we’re done.” He pointed again.
“I do believe a good rest was all I required,” she said brightly. “Sleep,” she added when he looked confused. “Not a bath.”
His face cleared. One dark eyebrow slanted up. “I will not watch ye, Senna.” Was he amused? It certainly appeared to be a smile threatening to break free on his face.
“I simply do not think ’tis wise to dampen my hand,” she said coldly. “All your leech craft would have been for naught.”
A small smile did curve up a corner of his mouth at this, but he didn’t say any more. He finished with the fire and started unbuckling his hauberk. Its flap fell down over the soft undertunic and he dragged the armor over his head.
“I don’t want to hear any regrets later,” he said, his voice muffled.
She didn’t reply. She was too busy staring in amazement: the Irishman was going to undress right in front of her! The armor came off, and he pulled up the bottom of his tunic. He was going to remove it. She couldn’t rip her eyes away. Excitement flew around her belly like birds coming out of a nest, swirling and fluttering. He tugged up, revealing his flat stomach. Senna lurched back into speech.
“You shall hear no regrets,” she said sharply. “Although it seems quite likely that you knew of this stream last night when I wished to bathe, an
d did not mention it…”
Her words trailed off. There was simply nothing more to say on the subject, and the tunic had gone up and over Finian’s head, dropping onto the ground beside him.
Tangled black hair fell down around his smooth, muscular shoulders as he rotated each one in turn, stretching his head the opposite way and groaning in appreciation, apparently unconcerned that she was watching him undress. Staring. She wrenched her gaze away.
He stepped over to the far side of the creek that ran in the gully, an easier access point than the side Senna stood on, and ducked his head under the water. He came out wet, and shook his head, sending water droplets spraying into the air. He pushed his hair off his forehead with a swift push of his palm, then looked at her.
“So tell me, lass, why are ye the one managing the books for yer father’s business?”
She watched as he splashed more water over his face, then took one of the cakes of soap and clumped its misshapen lump in his palm. He spread it over his cheeks and jaws. Reaching into the belt lashed to his waist, he pulled out a blade.
“You shave!” she exclaimed in surprise.
“Aye.”
She watched in utter silence. When he was done, he plunged his head into the water a second time, threw his drenched hair back, and revealed his unbearded face for the first time.
Long dark hair slicked back, revealing the sharp, fine lines of his jaw and cheekbones. His mouth still held the grin that so beguiled, the one that made her heart thump, but now the full sensuousness of his lips was fully revealed, and it set her heart hammering as she recalled what he’d done to her with them.
Thick fingers entwined in his hair as he shoved the hair off his face, and before Senna’s eyes flashed an image of them tugging through her own. The sculpted definition in his arms, bent above his head, exposed curves and lines that her eyes followed with greedy intensity. A dusting of dark hair covered his flat, ridged belly, which narrowed to trim waist and hips, then widened again to thick, corded thighs.
Her gaze devoured his body as if it were a meal, mindless of the fact that he was watching her watch him. Finishing, she lifted her gaze and encountered his wolfish grin.
“A woman who looks at a man like that, Senna, is a very tempting thing.”
God save her, the Irishman knew every turning in her wicked thoughts, every depraved notion and erotic wanting that had flickered through her mind. She blushed. He cocked an eyebrow. Her flush met her hairline. She ripped her gaze away.
Apparently satisfied, he knelt back by the stream. “The accounts,” he said, prompting her to recall his question.
She half turned her head, trying to ignore the sight of the bunched muscles of his thighs as he crouched beside the stream, splashing water over the cake of soap in his large hand, then rubbing it over his wet arms and chest.
“I manage the accounts because I am quite good at it.”
“I didn’t so much mean how ye came to it, Senna, as how yer father came to not.”
“Oh. Indeed. As I said, Sir Gerald gambled. Come a time, he would wager on anything. Horses, tourneys, raindrops, anything. Once he bet my mother’s brother whether King Edward would choose Balliol or The Bruce to rule Scotland.”
Finian picked up his tunic and rubbed it over his damp hair. “And which did yer father choose?”
She gave a bitter smile. “One of the few times he was right, and the only time he was not pleased. Gambling became his passion, after my mother left.”
His gaze flicked over, but he didn’t ask the question begging to be asked: What do you mean, “after your mother left”? Senna hurried on before he could. “Sir Gerald regularly raided the coffers. He has incurred debts to rather…unsavory men.”
“Your father has dealings with unsavory men?”
“My father has dealings with whomever will feed the beast. Noble thugs or dock workers, what matters that?” She flicked him a glance. “You are not afflicted by it, so you would not understand.”
“Unsavory, of what sort?”
“Of the manly sort, that comes to the house at night, sometimes in noble finery, sometimes plain as dirt.” She was distracted by his undressing and washing and his glistening, wet body and such, but beneath the glory of Finian, she realized she was speaking of things she hadn’t for many years. “The sort who visits late at night, and you hear their angry voices, but all in whispers, as if they are sharing great, angry secrets. The sort that is gone the next morning, your father along with them. Unsavory, of that sort.”
He crumpled his tunic into a ball. “Ye call yer father Sir Gerald.”
“Oh,” she said, flustered and irritated. Why did he need to be perceptive as well? Could he not be lacking in some regard? “I’m used to referring to him thusly. Our contractors. Business, you know.”
“Well, I’m fair surprised to find such a spirited lady coming from his seed.”
“Me?” she shouted in laughter. “You must mean some other.”
“Och, ye’re right, now. I’m talking about all the other fine ladies who stole me out of prison.”
Straightening, he stepped back across the stream and turned to reach down for his armor. The movement drew her eye. What she saw drained all the blood from her face.
“Mother of God,” she whispered, all of it an exhale.
His back was shredded. Long, deep lacerations whipped in a jagged orbit around his body, bisecting one another in a red fire and tortured map of brutality. Some were scarring, some spoke of more recent acquaintance with a leather strap. She rose slowly to her feet, her eyes fixed on the horror.
“Jésu, Finian.”
Gladiator muscles slid beneath his satiny skin as he turned to her. She could almost feel the razor-sharp whip snapping through the air, ripping open his flesh, tearing into the awesome strength beneath, like a knife cutting through a pear. Her trembling fingers passed a hairsbreadth above the ravaged flesh and she lifted her head to meet his steady gaze.
There are green flecks in his eyes.
“Ye suffered too,” he murmured, his eyes lingering on the fading bruises of her cheekbones.
“Oh, Finian,” she exhaled, feeling tears prick. Dropping to her knees, she dragged her pack over. “I’ve unguent,” she reported in a shaky voice, digging through the bag. In wild arcs everything came out, scattering on the ground around her: a brick of hard cheese, three small pouches, linen scraps, a rope, strips of leather.
She lifted her head, holding up a small container as high as she could, which reached to the middle of his chest. With an utterly unreadable look, he took it, and she scrambled to her feet. “Have they festered?”
He shook his head, resettling the damp hair across his shoulders. “They don’t feel to have.”
“Well, I’ll see about that,” she said in a clipped tone. The pricking of tears a moment ago was nothing, of course—simply understandable concern for the wounds of the man she needed healthy to ensure her survival. She put her hand on his arm to turn him around. “Stand fast.”
He allowed her to turn him, and she allowed herself to ignore the feel of his warm, wide shoulder beneath her hand. Clamping her tongue between her teeth, she began applying the thick lotion in slow, gentle movements that sent his muscles shuddering in response.
“Am I hurting you?”
“Aye,” he said gruffly.
She paused and peered over his shoulder at the profile of his square jaw. “Much?”
“Aye, that ye are.”
“Well,” she retorted, then said it again. “Well.”
He stood quietly under the painful repair work. When finished, she stepped back and looked with a critical eye at her handiwork. “I think I’ve got them all,” she muttered, angling her head to the side to see if the light had tricked her and she’d missed one. No, she decided, straightening, I’ve got them all.
His dark eyes were waiting for her.
“I’ve another debt to pay, mistress.”
His gaze dropped to the unguent
still coating her fingertips. A stride of his muscle-corded legs brought him close enough to catch her hand in his.
Her lips parted around a hot rush of breath. Almost thoughtfully, he placed the pad of his thumb on her lower lip, curling it down, his rough, clean skin on the fleshy inner side. Hot coils unwound through her body.
“How shall I repay it? What do ye want, Senna?”
“All I want,” she whispered, “is to go home.”
Home, where there were no wolves baying or soldiers hunting. Where the biggest river to be crossed was the murmuring brook between home and the stables, and the hardest bed she ever had to sleep in was the one she’d made herself by booking passage with the more expensive shipping merchant for last autumn’s Flanders drop.
Home, where the sun slipped away each evening through leaded glass windows, spilling dull green light across the ledgers at her copyist’s desk.
Where months passed with only the servants to talk to, until she had to let them all go too, when the debts grew too large.
Home, where silence reigned and even the ‘lucrative sheep’ were simply bright white specks on the sodden brown landscape of her heart.
His hand was warm curled around hers. “Is that truly all ye want, then? To go home?”
No, her heart cried. No, no, no.
“Aye,” she said dully.
He dropped her hand, and she barely remembered how to lift it again. They shouldered their packs and silently slipped under the cover of trees as twilight spread, leaving neither sound nor trace of their passing.
Chapter 20
“Praise God. A boat.”
Senna had the exact opposite reaction. “Oh, dear Lord. A boat.”
It was the third noontide after their escape from Rardove, and they were crouched above a river. On a small isle in the center of the rushing currents was a small village. Perhaps five little tear-shaped boats bobbed at the edge of their side of the river.
“A boat will make travel much faster. And easier.”
“We’re stealing a boat,” she clarified flatly. As if thievery was the reason for her protest.