Never Kiss A Stranger

by Heather Grothaus

  He turned his back to her to add some slender sticks to the fire. To Piers’s dismay, she came to stand beside him.

  “If you’re not going hunting, what shall we eat? I’m famished.”

  “I’m certain there is no want for food at Fallstowe,” Piers said. “It shall motivate you to walk faster.”

  “Back to that again, are we?”

  Did nothing faze this silly child?

  “We are. If you leave now, you will have some daylight for the whole of your journey.”

  “You want me to leave now?” she asked, as if doubting she had understood him properly.

  “Yes.”

  “Right now? Immediately?”

  “Start walking.”

  Alys Foxe sat down near the fire. “Piers, I’ve been thinking …”

  Piers closed his eyes and sighed. “No, don’t think. And don’t sit! Sitting moves you no closer to Fallstowe and no farther from me!”

  “Do you truly find me so annoying?”

  “Yes!”

  “Well, I’m quite sorry to hear that. But, as I was saying, I’ve been thinking, and—”

  He gained his feet and strode into the trees.

  “Wait!” He heard her scramble to her feet. “Where are you going? Why did you walk away from me?”

  “In part to look for more wood for the fire,” he said, his eyes scanning the forest floor. He leaned down and snatched limbs from the ground as he walked. “And also to keep from strangling you.”

  “That’s rude,” she said, from not very far behind him.

  “I’m certainly not forcing you to put up with me.”

  “True,” she conceded. “Any matter, I know you wish for me to leave you alone with your miserable and quite secretive plans, but there is a problem.”

  Piers came to an abrupt halt, so quickly that Alys ran into his back. The monkey chattered and bounded to the leaves underfoot.

  He did not turn. “What problem?”

  “I … I don’t know the way back to Fallstowe.”

  Piers whipped around to face her, darkly pleased when she took a step back. “What do you mean, you don’t know the way back? You’ve lived there the whole of your life, have you not?”

  “Indeed, I have.” She nodded agreeably.

  “And yet you cannot find your way home little more than an hour from your own keep?”

  She flushed, pursed her lips to the side and her eyes flicked nervously to the trees surrounding them. “No, I don’t think so. I’m afraid not. Sorry.”

  Piers’s own eyes narrowed. “Bullshit.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Bullshit!” he said more loudly and began walking back toward their primitive camp. “I may be mostly of common blood, but—”

  “Mostly?” Alys asked, intrigue high in her voice as she skipped along behind him, and Piers winced inwardly.

  “—I do know how gentle-born ladies behave: riding their ridiculous show mares, going visiting to their neighbors, skipping to market, insisting on accompanying hunts. You will not convince me that a female as sporting as yourself, who would adventure to an old ruin in the middle of the night alone, can not manage a short walk back to her home.”

  “You think I’m sporting?”

  Piers rolled his eyes. “Just go, Alys. No more stalling, I beg of you. Apologize to your sister and take your punishment like a big girl. I don’t want you here.” He threw the small bundle of sticks to the ground near the fire and then looked up at her, prepared to see her properly chastised.

  She was looking back at him boldly, swinging Layla around her body, hand over hand. They both seemed to be enjoying their little game.

  “You have to take me back, Piers.”

  He blinked at her. “What?”

  “I’m sorry, but that’s the only thing for it. I already told you that Sybilla has promised me to Clement Cobb!”

  “So?” Piers ground out expectantly.

  “Well, when Sybilla and I had our row, I told her that I would rather take my chances at the Foxe Ring than marry him, which is where I was fortunate enough to meet you, dear husband.”

  “Alys …” Piers growled.

  “Sybilla told me that if I happened to meet a man at the ring, she would pay Blodshire my dowry and I would be free to do as I chose.”

  He approached her then, causing her eyes to widen and Layla to scamper off to the safety of the lean-to. He grasped her upper arms. “Alys, this is most important, and so I want you to listen carefully: we are not married. I will not tell your sister that we are only so you don’t have to be related to Etheldred Cobb.”

  “I know you think we’re not married, Piers,” Alys said quietly. “But I do. My parents met at the Foxe Ring, and I believe in the legend’s purpose with my whole heart. You don’t have to tell Sybilla that you accept that we are married, necessarily, but Sybilla always, always keeps her word. If you only corroborate my story of how and where we met, I shall be free. Please. Please, take me back to Fallstowe, Piers.”

  “And if I refuse?”

  Her pink lips thinned as she set her mouth. “I shall continue to follow you, for as long as I can keep pace.”

  “And when you can no longer keep pace?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know what, then.”

  He realized he was still holding on to her slight biceps and he let her go suddenly. He didn’t know how it was possible, but the girl actually seemed to smell of nobility. Sweet and clean. It offended Piers, used as he was to manure and sweat and nothing.

  “Please,” she followed him as he walked away from her again. “This is my life, Piers. I need your help. I believe there is a reason you came to the ring last night, even if you do not.”

  “Your life is imposing on mine, Alys Foxe, and I am in a terrible hurry.”

  She hesitated. “I shall give you forty pounds if you will agree. And … and my own horse. I swear it. They should aid you on your journey quite nicely.”

  Then it was Piers’s turn to pause. Forty pounds was a veritable fortune, not to mention the outrageous luxury of a mount. He could be to London in days, even with traveling through the forests. Perhaps returning Alys Foxe to her home was worth the risk.

  In days, he could have his revenge on Bevan and Judith Angwedd.

  He could claim his rightful place as lord of Gillwick.

  Not a fortnight. Days.

  He turned to face her. “Your sister—would she not seek to detain me?”

  Alys appeared perplexed. “Likely she will wish you away from Fallstowe as soon as possible, if only to prevent me from legally marrying you. I hope you’re not offended, but I do doubt Sybilla would consider you a catch.”

  Piers stared at the girl for a moment. He could feel the weight of her foolish hope from where he stood.

  “Get your monkey and your bag.”

  Alys had never been so nervous and excited in the whole of her life as she skipped-ran to keep up with Piers, Layla unwillingly riding in Alys’s drawstring sack. They were retracing the way back to Fallstowe, together.

  Now all Alys had to do was to figure out a way to convince Piers that they were truly meant to be together, forever, as the stones had very obviously decreed. Difficult, as he had refused to respond to her attempts at conversation for the past hour. She didn’t have much time left, but she was confident that something would intervene. After all, it was the Foxe Ring at work. One might even venture to call it fate.

  “Where are you going once you leave Fallstowe?” she tried yet again.

  He merely shrugged.

  “You’re in a terrible hurry, and yet you have no destination in mind?” she teased.

  “London.”

  “Oh, I adore London!” Alys said happily, thrilled to her toes that he had at last responded. “I haven’t been in ages though—since before my mother died.”

  Piers, ever the skillful conversationalist, grunted.

  But Alys was undeterred. “Are you to visit family there?”
/>   “I have no family.”

  “Oh. Friends, then?” She giggled. “No, don’t tell me—you don’t have any friends either.”

  “Right.”

  She reached out an arm to snag a fold of his robe and gave it a playful tug. “I’m your friend.”

  “You’re a ninny.”

  Alys laughed. She was quite certain Piers was in possession of a wonderful sense of humor if she could just coax him to open up a little bit wider than a shoe seam.

  “My favorite activity by far is to market. The markets in London are so very entertaining! Why, I’d wager that you can buy anything at all there. What is your favorite thing to do in London?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve not been.”

  “Really?” Alys was shocked. “Then how do you know where you’re going?”

  “I simply plan on looking for the very biggest palace in the city and then going there.”

  Alys’s mouth fell open. “You’re going to see the king? How exciting! I’ve never met the king. Were you summoned?”

  “Somewhat, I suppose.”

  “Sybilla herself is dreading another summons from Edward.”

  Piers grunted.

  “Do you want to know why?”

  “Not especially.”

  Alys let her voice lower dramatically. “He wants to take Fallstowe from her.”

  “So I’ve heard. Terrible luck, that.”

  “Yes, it is actually. He thinks our mother was a spy and that after my father died, she held Fallstowe illegally. So of course, now that Mother is gone, he is outraged that Sybilla—a lowly daughter, no less—refuses to surrender the castle to the crown.”

  “Your mother was a spy?” He shook his head with a snort. “Obvious now where you get your tenacity from, then. And your recklessness.”

  Alys drew her head back and smiled. “Why, thank you, Piers.”

  “It wasn’t a compliment.”

  “I shall take it as one any matter.”

  The day was only the faint sliver of a memory now, night’s blanket lying orange and pink and soft on the faraway hills as Fallstowe came in sight. Its towers and walls rose solidly in black relief out of a gentle purple and indigo mist, and a group of riders rode toward the keep on the road ahead of them, their figures as black and muted as the stones.

  The thought crossed her mind that, if they hurried, she and Piers could gain entry along with the mounted party before the portcullis was lowered. Alys’s mood soured. Yes, she had lived at Fallstowe all of her life, but now that her mother was dead and Sybilla was at the family helm, the grand castle had lost that comforting feeling of home. Alys felt almost adrift on the waves of rolling hills surrounding the keep, as if she was being sucked relentlessly closer to a certain and deadly whirlpool. That whirlpool was her cold, demanding sister, ready to sacrifice Alys to the depths.

  Perhaps the enigmatic man who accompanied her would somehow become an anchor. So far though, there had been no sign that he would remain steadfast.

  The harker called out from the watch, his words little more than a whisper from such a great height. “Who approaches? Declare yourself under threat of death!”

  Piers came to a halt well before the road leading to the drawbridge, and turned to look expectantly at Alys. Even in the gloom of evening, she could see the look of wariness on his face, and sense the change in his posture.

  “Would they fire upon us?” he demanded.

  Alys stopped as well, setting Layla’s conveyance on the ground. She’d let the monkey out in a moment, now that she wasn’t being forced to practically run to keep up with Piers. “Would they? If we were both strangers and proceeded, then certainly, yes. I doubt he’s even noticed us yet at such a fair distance, let alone expects to hit one of us with an arrow. His warning was for the riders ahead of us.”

  She cupped her hands around her mouth, readying to shout up to the wall to hold the gate for them, but before she could announce herself, another voice called out of the night from the mounted party already before the drawbridge.

  “Lady Judith Angwedd Mallory of Gillwick Manor, and her son!”

  Alys rolled her eyes with a groan and was turning to lament the visitors to Piers when he snatched her around the waist from behind and threw her to the ground. She started to cry out that Piers was crushing her, but his hand came up to clap over her mouth, and then his lips brushed her ear.

  “Unless you wish me dead in the next pair of moments, lie absolutely still, Alys.”

  The rumble of chain and wood soon shook ground beneath Alys’s smashed bosom, and she could feel Piers’s shallow breathing against her back. He really was taking this secret mission of his seriously, to be worried about such lesser nobles as the Mallorys. Why, Judith Angwedd hadn’t even been invited to the winter feast!

  And although he truly was a weighty man, Alys began to enjoy the feel of Pier’s body atop hers. She wiggled a bit to test him and, to her delight, his hold on her tightened.

  “Shh,” he breathed into her ear. “Alys, please. I’m trying not to hurt you.”

  Her stomach clenched and she closed her eyes to savor the sensations his body and words were creating within her. One thick forearm was pinned between the ground and her navel, while his opposite hand now cupped the back of her head, ensuring that she remained completely prone. His face pressed against the side of hers through the window his arm created, and his legs were to either side of hers, holding her tightly. Alys struggled against the temptation to ease her bottom upward. She’d experienced more excitement and adventure since meeting the man atop her than she had the entire eighteen years of her life before him.

  “That’s it,” he whispered. “Easy now. Almost over.”

  Alys gave a disappointed little whimper—she didn’t want it to be over. But a moment later, the ground shook again as the portcullis lowered on the hoof beats that were fading away into the barbican. Piers lay very still atop her for several more breaths before whispering in her ear once more.

  “Our deal is off.”

  Then, in a blink, his weight was gone from her, and she was alone on the cold, wet ground.

  From within the sack still on the ground an arm’s length away, Layla gave a questioning little coo.

  “I haven’t the slightest idea,” Alys sighed.

  Then she gathered her limbs beneath her and pushed up from the ground. Snatching the sack up, she turned and fled from Fallstowe’s wall toward the blackened wood once more.

  Chapter 6

  Sybilla had no earthly idea what Judith Angwedd of simple and bucolic Gillwick Manor wanted from her, and normally she would have had Graves play the go-between for the unsavory lady and her strange son, but after an entire day of placating Etheldred Cobb and the vapid Clement, any distraction was heartily welcome.

  Sybilla hoped the woman wasn’t there to present her son as a match for one of the Foxe sisters. The very idea of a Mallory and a Foxe was absurd.

  Judith Angwedd swept into Fallstowe’s great hall and down the center aisle created by the dining tables as if she floated rather than walked on two legs, her son lumbering along behind her. She was a tall woman, on the spare side, and of the eccentric habit of wearing her dull red hair long and straight down her back, but short and rolled into perfect, thumbsized curls on the sides and top of her head. Her face was paunchy and waxen, like the thick butter Gillwick manor was known for producing, and her dirt-brown eyes sat in fatty folds not matching the rest of her thin figure. She had extremely large teeth, wide and long and white, and was quite proud of them by the way her tongue constantly attended to their polishing. Judith Angwedd could in no way be called a handsome woman.

  Her son was her male counterpart. Tall like his mother, but blocky and wide, his large, flat face was surrounded by the same childish, fat, red curls. His eyes, too, were like Judith Angwedd’s, enveloped in swollen flesh to the point that they seemed to be in danger of being swallowed by his face. And Bevan Mallory’s face appeared just hateful enough to
do it. The purple-red hue of his nose emboldened rather than detracted from the brown freckles splashed across his cheeks. Sybilla thought he looked mean and stupid, and she wondered if he would prove her suspicions when she first heard him speak. Although the Mallorys had been in attendance at a handful of functions at which Sybilla had also been present, the two families had never had cause for direct conversation. The strange Gillwick clan had never been invited to Fallstowe castle, as far as Sybilla could recall.

  “Lady Foxe.” Judith Angwedd floated to a stop before Sybilla’s dais and sank into a deep curtsey. Behind his mother, Bevan bowed sloppily. “I do beg your pardon for arriving so unannounced, and I must confess straight away that my appearance is in part to ask for your assistance.”

  Sybilla’s eyebrows rose. The woman obviously thought much of herself to request anything from Fallstowe. She was little more than a commoner. Perhaps if Gillwick lay in a town, Judith Angwedd would be considered a burgess’s wife, but the announcement of requested aid was very strange any matter, and set Sybilla immediately on alert.

  “Indeed? Our houses are not well connected, but of course I am always willing to offer what I can in the spirit of Christian charity. What troubles you, Lady Judith?”

  The woman’s brow gave a flicker of displeasure at being reminded of her station, but she continued. “As you likely have heard, my husband, Lord Warin Mallory, died only a fortnight ago.”

  “No, I hadn’t,” Sybilla replied mildly, not caring in the least. Perhaps Judith Angwedd was to ask for money, then. “May God receive his soul.”

  Judith Angwedd’s color was high now. “Thank you, my lady,” she gritted out. “Unfortunately, his death caused his other son a great deal of distress, to the point that I’m afraid he went quite mad.”

  “You have another child?” Sybilla asked, her eyes going to Bevan, whose face was now entirely covered by the purplish tinge.

  “Piers is not my child,” Judith Angwedd hissed, and even to Sybilla, who was known to be cool of nature, the words were icy. “He is a bastard born by a common whore of our village. A farm hand. No one of any consequence.”