by Wood, Lynn
The Michaels lord lavished his attention on his first born with little to spare for his younger one. As a young boy Luke did everything he could to earn his father’s pride and approval. The young boy he was would have settled for the smallest scrap of fatherly affection, but none was forthcoming. At least from his own father. Rafe’s father, sensing Luke’s loneliness and confusion about being unable to please his lord, took pity on him and taught him all the things a man in his position would need to know in order to survive. Not that there was any risk Luke would ever be forced to make his own way in the world. His father might not give a damn about his younger son on a personal level, but he was imbued with too much family pride to let a son of his seek wages as a paid mercenary. So while Luke enjoyed the trappings of the Michaels’ wealth he wished he’d been born a son of his father’s commander rather than as a progeny of the lord himself.
To please the man he wished was his father, Luke focused his efforts and concentration on the knightly skills demanded of his profession. In time he grew so skilled he sometimes thought he sensed his true father’s reluctant admiration when his eyes rested on him. Too late, as far as Luke was concerned. By the time his father realized he even had a second son, Luke had already carved out his own life, often by the side of the men he trained along as a boy, defending the Michaels’ family interests across their far-reaching estates. In doing so, Luke unknowingly earned the loyalty and respect of his father’s soldiers, a circumstance that led Mason to resent his influence among them and undermine it at every opportunity. As much as Luke’s relationship with his father was a strained one, he held no illusions about his place on Michaels’ family land once his father died and Mason become the new lord.
So while appearances led outsiders to believe Luke was a man of wealth and would live out his life in the comfort of one of his family’s many estates, he understood from a very young age such a grand life was not destined to be his fate, unless providence took a hand and his brother died before his father. Luke remembered dreaming of that very outcome as a boy, and even plotted in the depths of a boy’s resentment how to hasten fate along whenever his brother was particularly abusive. Unfortunately, the devil seemed intent on keeping his protégé alive.
Mason was never particularly careful of his life. He was as wild and reckless as his father claimed and faced death and contested against it with a regularity and courage Luke couldn’t help but admire. His father, belatedly realizing the consequences of Mason pre-deceasing him, would half-heartedly plead with his older son to be more careful, at least until he was wed and sired an heir. Mason had only laughed at his father’s fears. He assured him God was in no hurry to claim his tarnished soul and he was in no rush to wed. Besides, he would protest laughingly with a mocking glance in Luke’s direction, their father already had a substitute heir.
For the third time, the distant cry of an animal in pain interrupted Luke’s reminiscences. He wondered if perhaps Mason’s horse met a similar fate to its master. That, in Luke’s mind, would be a circumstance worth mourning. He saw no evidence of the stallion’s presence as of yet, but he reluctantly approached the edge over which he found his brother just to make certain there was no indication the stallion followed its master and shared in his death. The cry grew louder as Luke approached the ledge, but it was not coming from beneath him, but to his right. He turned his attention to the direction of the pitiful whimper and saw a small cave carved out of the rock face not far from where he stood.
He approached it cautiously, knowing it could very well be a wild animal that took refuge there after losing a battle against a stronger foe. With the sunlight failing he could only see a few feet inside the shadowed cave, but the animal-like cry suddenly took on a human moan and Luke abandoned caution and strode swiftly to the source at the deepest recesses of the cave. His eyes could make out only the outlines of a body rolled up in a torn cloth. He thought at first it must be some poor wounded soldier left for dead on the battlefield who woke to find the battle and his comrades left him behind and he had managed to make his way to this forsaken place to either tend his wounds or await death.
Luke knelt at the feet of the unfortunate victim while his eyes adjusted to the shadowed light. If it was a soldier felled in battle, then from the size of him Luke concluded he was little more than a youth. The boy sighed in his sleep and rolled over on his back. At the same moment the fading light fell across his battered face and Luke felt his stomach lurch at the sight. It was no youth whose face was so bruised he could barely discern the delicate features the dark, swollen blotches hid, but a woman. Part of Luke prayed to God it wasn’t Lady Melissa who lay unconscious before him, but some unfortunate servant or camp follower who’d been so abused by one of her clients she could no longer perform the services of her profession and was left for dead when the army broke camp.
He drew nearer to her head in slow measured movements, not wanting to startle her. The woman appeared unconscious but that might just be because her face and eyelids were so swollen she was unable to open her eyes. He blanched at the sight of her face and knelt down beside her, cautiously reaching out a gentle hand to smooth the tangled, blood-caked hair away from her battered features. The prone woman reacted instantly. Her arm swung up to knock his hand away. With her hands clenched in claw position she slashed her nails blindly in the direction of his face, managing only to inflict a glancing gash before he was able to restrain her. Her tongue was perhaps an even more effective weapon. She swore at him in more languages than he could comprehend, but in the few he could she promised to carve his manhood from his bleeding body and stuff it down his lying, honorless Norman-pig throat.
His restraint unleashed an even greater panic from the injured woman and she used every pitiful weapon at her disposal, slapping and kicking beneath his well-intentioned constraint in an effort to escape his hold on her. His soothing reassurances seemed to invoke the opposite reaction he intended. If anything, the sound of his voice sent her into an even greater frenzy until he was forced to knock her unconscious as gently as he could lest she injure herself more severely, if such a circumstance was even possible.
As soon as he knew she was truly asleep and no longer feigning the condition, he called out to Rafe.
“I’m here.” Rafe called out from the entrance.
“She’s hurt. Bring bandages, fresh water, blankets. Start a fire. Her face is a god-awful mess. I can’t see the rest of her clearly, but she’s running a fever.” When he realized his friend was still standing at the entrance and made no move to carry out his orders, Luke turned his attention from where he was examining the scratches on the woman’s arms to where Rafe waited by the entrance. Rafe met his searching glance with one of his own and approached where Luke knelt by the woman, his eyes examining her dispassionately.
“Looks like she met up with the same pack of wolves as your brother. A little surprising they didn’t finish her off.”
Luke knew Rafe suspected as he did that Mason was responsible for the unfortunate woman’s condition, but he was in no mood to fence with his friend. “Just get the supplies.”
“As you wish, my lord.” Rafe bowed mockingly.
“What did you just call me?”
“My lord. I believe that is the appropriate form of address when speaking to the Michaels heir.”
Luke wasn’t ready yet to deal with the repercussions, for him at least, of his brother’s death. “Just get the supplies.”
Rafe grinned and bowed again, then retreated towards the entrance.
Luke took the opportunity to discover the answer to the dread building inside him since he first discovered the woman. He raised the unconscious woman’s skirts and looked for signs of a more intimate form of attack. To his intense relief, there was no dried blood on her thighs, and her underthings near her thighs remained unstained. She hadn’t been raped, at least, as part of the brutal blows inflicted upon her slender body. Undoubtedly the last circumstance was only because the intended victim wa
s armed.
Luke didn’t require any further confirmation of the woman’s identity. He knew it was no simple refugee from the war he tended. The cloak she wore, while little more than tattered threads now, was fashioned from a rich, soft cloth made to caress a lady’s tender skin. While her swollen face disguised her delicate features, he could see her hands were finely formed and her palms were without the callouses a servant’s would bear. This was no servant, or camp follower. His weary mind led him to the inevitable conclusion. His search was over. He’d found both his brother and Lady Rhiann’s sister, Melissa, who he felt safe in assuming was the one who stuck her blade through his half-brother’s black heart and sent him plunging to his death off the edge of the cliff.
His mind boggled at the complications inherent in those two truths but for now he was more concerned with the lady’s grave condition. She moaned again in her sleep and her body was suddenly wracked with shivers. Her teeth chattered loudly in the silence hanging over her dismal sanctuary. Luke removed his cloak and wrapped it tightly around her even as Rafe returned with the requested supplies. He piled the blankets on top of his cloak, careful to tuck the ends around the maid’s still trembling form. He could see the evidence of a fire his men lit near the entrance and Luke lifted his unconscious patient from the ground and carried her closer to its warmth. Rafe fashioned a pallet on the hard stone from the remaining blankets and then Luke set his slender burden down on top of them.
She burned with fever and an agonized groan escaped her lips even as she searched blindly for the warmth she found when he held her close against his chest. Luke sat down beside his brother’s victim and lifted her back into his arms. She instinctively burrowed closer, then sighing with relief, rested her face against the bare skin of his neck and fell into a deeper, more peaceful sleep.
Luke met Rafe’s compassionate gaze. “If my brother was still alive, I would hunt him down and carve his heart from his chest and leave what was left of him for the wolves to feed on.”
“Then let us be grateful the lady already took care of that satisfying task for you.”
“No one must ever know Mason died at her hands.”
“No one ever shall.”
Luke nodded, never for a moment doubting his friend’s word. “She’s feverish, but I don’t think any limbs are broken.”
“Those scratches up and down her arms are infected.”
Luke nodded.
“Luke, you believe the woman is Lady Melissa?”
“Yes.”
“How can you be certain? Did she speak to you?”
“She didn’t have to.” Luke pulled the dagger he discovered in his brother’s chest from where he kept it hidden beneath his cloak.
Eyeing it, Rafe let out a soft whistle. “No one would blame her, Luke. Your brother…”
Luke completed his friend’s truth. “My brother was a monster. Melissa did the world a favor. Every woman within a day’s ride of one of the family estates will sleep easier at the news of Mason’s death, but I very much doubt my father’s reaction will mirror theirs.”
“Agreed. We will all swear quite truthfully we found your brother dead at the bottom of a ravine. There’s no reason for your father to suspect any differently.”
Luke nodded and reached for the clean cloths and fresh water Rafe brought with him and began carefully cleansing Melissa’s wounds. She couldn’t die. He wouldn’t allow her to die. If she did, it was because he failed to protect her. He should have killed the bastard the first time he learned what he was capable of, not suspected, but knew for a fact. He saw the evidence with his own eyes. His youth at the time was no excuse for his inaction when he came upon his brother’s young victim, crying and broken in the woods near the family seat. He knew his boy’s eyes must have worn the same dazed expression as the young girl’s at the discovery there was so much evil in the world. Even then Luke cringed at the knowledge he shared the blood of the man capable of committing it. Leaving the girl where she lay, he’d run to the keep for help. Not of course to his own father, but to Rafe’s.
It was Phillip who followed him back to where the girl lay, only by then she wasn’t moaning in pain from his brother’s brutal invasion. No, she was mercifully asleep. Or so Luke at first believed. Then at the pitiful expression on the older man’s face he understood the girl, younger even in years than his own, would never wake up. Luke couldn’t recall clearly what happened after that. Was there even a funeral? Or had compensation for their loss from the lord of the keep kept her family’s lips sealed, as Luke later learned it had on the other occasions?
No one spoke of the girl again. Or the others. But Luke never forgot her or the look in her deep blue, almost violet eyes, when their dazed glances met that morning. Melissa shifted in his arms and his hold tightened instinctively around her. He wasn’t able to save the others, but he reached Melissa in time. She was still alive. Gravely injured yes, but older, more substantial than the young innocent he stumbled upon so many years earlier. Lady Melissa already proved she was a fighter. She could contest and emerge triumphant in the battle confronting her now. He would save her from the consequences of his brother’s depraved lust. Oh, he’d momentarily forgotten. She already did that herself.
Lady Melissa regained consciousness only once during the long night Luke kept vigil. From where she lay curled up against his chest, she lifted glazed, feverish eyes to his face. Seeing him, she squirmed in his arms yelling, “Devil’s spawn. Norman pig. How many times do I have to kill you before you stay dead?
Luke easily blocked the blow she aimed at his face. The short burst of activity apparently exhausted his patient, as she immediately fell back into a troubled sleep, muttering unladylike curses under her breath, and promising death himself would kill him for her. She had only to make the request of him.
Chapter Eight
“Go away. Leave me to die in peace,” Melissa whined, as her savior lifted her head and spooned a warm broth between her feverish lips.
“No. I will not leave you here to die alone in the wilderness,” Luke’s gentle voice replied.
“Why not? It was your brother’s aim. Are you intent on nursing me back to health, so I might provide you with more amusing entertainment when you rape me?”
Luke bit down on his instinctive defense of his honor. He reminded himself the lady was well justified in flinging her ever-ready insults at his head. “No, I am nursing you back to health so you can be reunited with your family.”
“My family’s dead. You killed them. You and your greedy, land-stealing, pig of a duke who decided he would prefer to be a king and to hell with the lives lost and ruined in the process.”
Not for the first time, Luke wondered if the difficult, opinionated lady he tended could in fact be the sister of his friend’s gentle young wife. He couldn’t imagine even the gentlest complaints passing through Lady Rhiann’s innocent lips, yet her older sister had given him an education on the definition of the word blasphemy. The fact she was so well acquainted with the practice and could blister him with unrepeatable curses in several languages simultaneously was not only disconcerting coming from a well-bred lady’s lips, but damned impressive. Her education at least marked her a duke’s daughter, if the words emitted from between her beautiful lips belied the fact.
“He liked it, you know.” It was in the form of a conspiratorial whisper she addressed him now. Her moods rocked from one extreme to the other so quickly it dizzied him in his attempt to keep up with them.
“He liked what?” Luke asked, puzzled by his patient’s abrupt change in topic.
“He liked hurting me. He laughed when I screamed after he struck me. My pain incited his lust. When I ran from him, I could see it excited him. Even as I slashed his arms and chest with my blade, his eyes burned with the pleasure of it, and the anticipation of the revenge he would inflict on me.”
Luke closed his eyes against the shame that built inside of him. “Melissa, not all men…my brother was evil…he no longer
deserved to be called a man…”
“He wasn’t a man,” she whispered so softly he had to bend his head to hear her. “He was a demon unleashed from hell.”
“At last, we have finally found a point of agreement between us.”
An amused smile flashed across her face and through her incredible blue eyes. It was there and gone so quickly he thought he must have imagined it. “He offered to kill him for me.”
“Who?” Luke demanded, but Melissa failed to respond to his curiosity. She was asleep again, leaving Luke to puzzle over her last remark. Was it possible someone else witnessed his brother’s attack? He thought it unlikely, especially if he stood in defense of the lady. No, Melissa was feverish. She no doubt conjured an imaginary protector to keep her company in her cold and lonely hiding place.
Melissa tossed restlessly in her sleep. Fever burned through her body. The days and nights blurred together so she could no longer distinguish one from the other. She felt both a contradictory heaviness in her limbs and a lightness of spirit at the same time, as if her limbs were slowly sinking into the earth and her spirit was separating from her body to begin its ascent to heaven. At least she hoped that was the direction of the journey her soul was about to undertake. She doubted the old woman from her dream’s assertion the decision was hers to make. It appeared as if God already made up his mind about her future on this earth and it was destined to be a brief one.
She had only one regret, well maybe a few more than one. She regretted she wouldn’t have the chance to say goodbye to either her beloved Michel, or Rhiann. She was sorry her death would come at the hand of the Norman pig intent on raping her, though she could smile at the thought he passed from this world ahead of her and with her dagger in his chest.
There was no doubt in her mind as to the direction his soul took when it left this world. The devil’s spawn was taken straight to hell to meet his just reward. Hopefully he would burn eternally for his sins. Melissa was quite certain she wasn’t the only woman he assaulted and concluded sadly he was likely successful in his previous attempts. There was no telling how many bastard sons he unleashed upon the world to follow in his sordid footsteps. Melissa felt no remorse about taking his life. When it came to kill or be killed (or raped), Melissa was quite certain her maker would understand her decision. Likely he would even applaud it.