by Quinn, Paula
“Now?” Rauf asked, hand to chest. “If she’s not dangerous—”
“Rauf.”
“She managed to get the lad to finally—”
“Now.”
Rauf looked into his gray eyes. If he had any thoughts of challenging Nicholas, those thoughts were driven back by the warning in his lord’s flinty gaze.
“Ye are worse than yer brother,” he thought he heard Rauf murmur on his way down the hall.
Nicholas didn’t wait to see her being escorted out of his son’s room. He hurried away on long strides, down the hall to his solar.
What was she doing here? Julianna. His heart felt as if it were going to cease or ignite and burst into flames. Either way meant the end of him.
It was Julianna with Elias in her arms, looking up at him with wide, dark, frightened eyes and deep red tresses falling over one side of her face and over one shoulder. She was here! His hands shook as he reached for the door to his solar. What did she want? Was he strong enough to resist her, or would he succumb to her maddening beauty and natural grace? No! He swore to himself as he entered his solar. He wouldn’t see her, speak to her. There was too much at risk. He had come back to Rothbury for his son. Not her. His gaze hardened. It had taken him years to fully get over her, and when he finally did, she came back? No! He would never give her another chance to hurt him.
“Why will he not see me?” he heard her demand.
He knew her voice better than his own. He felt it rushing over him like rain on a blistering day. The sound of her was refreshing, laced with the cool undercurrents of fearless determination. She was after something. What was it?
He leaned against the doorframe and peered out into the hall through a slit in the doorway.
“Perhaps your lord should think about cutting off all that hair so that he does not frighten his poor child!”
So, his son’s hysteria was his fault? Of course she would think so.
“I thought he wanted to find a governess. What have I done that is so terrible?” she argued.
She was angry. Nicholas couldn’t see her but he knew her expressions and exactly how she looked right now. Was he to believe she had come here for work? Was she unwed? Penniless? Hadn’t she wed her “man of means”?
He thought about pulling open the door—perhaps even tearing it from its hinges—and storming up to her. He wanted to tell her that he did want a governess, but not her.
What the hell was Rauf doing letting her argue? She should have been gone by now.
“Rauf!” he barked, unable to stop himself. Fortunate for his commander that he didn’t storm out into the hall and toss him out with her! Loyal friend or not.
He heard footsteps marching toward him and realized what he’d done. He should have been prepared to rush out if he opened his mouth. He wasn’t. She was coming!
He pushed the door gently and without a sound and watched the slit disappear—just before a flash of her red hair appeared.
“I see then,” her voice seeped in as the door closed in her face. She was bold enough to open it. But she wasn’t a fool. She didn’t know who he was. She hadn’t recognized him. He would examine why it stung later. For now, she wouldn’t open the door.
“What kind of man hides behind a door like a frightened child? Who would ignore the terrors of the true child in this castle by wanting me to leave? He needs to trust someone. I can help him do that.”
“Someone else will be his governess. Not you,” he muttered in a deep voice through the door. “He will learn to trust me.”
Silence.
“So, ’tis…just me you do not want.”
He heard what it took for her to say such words, for in Berwick, everyone had wanted “Jules” Feathers. “That is correct. You may leave.”
He would admit that someplace deep, deep inside, someplace beyond the stone walls, there was a part of him that wanted to open the door and just look at her. Take her in one more time, like a sunrise after years of darkness—or a forbidden desire he still longed for more than breath.
He was no fool either. He would never go back. Love was pain. Love was torment. Especially loving Julianna. Especially her.
Even after King Robert had given him Lismoor and the title of Earl of Rothbury, he could never forget what he had been. He couldn’t forget because it was the reason he lost her.
She had been all he had for his whole life. Julianna, with her lush, fiery hair and dark, soulful eyes had won his heart from a day before he could remember. He’d had a hope that he could someday be worthy of her. It was foolish and it was deadly, but oh, how he had loved her. He would have done anything, risked everything, including his life for her. She’d been the reason blood flowed in his veins, and when she left, she left him empty.
But he didn’t love her anymore. There were days when he hated her—even the memory of her because she had proven that love was deadly.
Finding his brothers was a miracle and he was grateful, but loving Julianna as a boy had saved him from missing a family he was too young to remember. After Cain and his wife had gone to Invergarry, the fateful truth had settled on him. He felt empty without Julianna. He wrote letters to her. They were rough, he would admit, for he’d always disliked Julianna’s writing lessons. But he wrote them. Six in all. Telling her how he felt and what he thought of her. He’d realized that sending what he wrote in anger wasn’t wise, so he burned them all.
Mattie, a handmaiden at the castle, had stayed behind when her lady left and tried to save him. She had loved him while he’d grown more distant, more impenetrable. She’d clung to any vestige of emotion he had left and pulled him from the wreckage of his own heart.
When he lost her, he knew love was a curse, a torturous ploy to get him to relinquish his heart.
He was not interested in anything or anyone having to do with love; past, present, or future. Love had almost completely destroyed him. He didn’t want to see her or speak to her.
He pressed his ear against the cool wood and listened to her footsteps fading in the distance.
He cracked open the door. She was gone, as was Rauf. He looked down the hall at his son’s room. The little fellow had a good set of lungs on him. It didn’t bother Nicholas that his son cried and screamed often. He wanted something he wasn’t getting. Nicholas understood that.
Just before he had returned to Lismoor, he’d returned to Berwick, now back in the hands of the Scots, and had gone to the castle—to the servants’ quarters. He had wanted to look at where his memories of servitude began at the age of two as he had been told, sold to the house of Governor Feathers of Berwick for a stone. He’d wanted to stare those memories, and the memories of the governor’s daughter, in the face and deny them the power to hurt him anymore. Before he saw his son.
But now she was here and his thoughts were already tossed like leaves in a whirlwind.
His son’s cries halted his thoughts. Even the ones of Julianna.
He yanked the door fully open and, without looking either way, set off down the hall. He didn’t go to his son out of compassion. He felt none. Love did not lead his feet. He didn’t love Elias. Not as he should. All he knew of the babe was screeching. He didn’t go because the crying hurt his ears. It didn’t. In fact, it was familiar and a bit soothing.
He went because he should. It was his child disturbing everyone’s peace.
He had known how his leaving might affect the boy, but he hadn’t been able to give any more of himself after Mattie died. Everyone he had loved…gone, or dead.
Elias was not a servant but the son of an earl. When Nicholas left, he had known his son would be well taken care of. And he had been. Richard and the rest of the household and even the villagers loved the babe and indulged him. He’d had Avice. A young mother from the village who had delivered a stillborn had been hired to nurse him.
But she had left him—just as easily as Berengaria had left him and Julianna.
Damn her.
He reached the room and o
pened the door. When his son saw him, his cries grew more hysterical and he jumped from the bed then leaped under it.
“Son.”
More screeching.
Perhaps your lord should think about cutting off all that hair so that he does not frighten his poor child!
He lifted his fingers to his hair. He had grown it long living the life he’d led, going where the wind led him, even as far south as hell, living in huts along the Marañon River. In some customs, long hair like his signified strength. He guessed it was because of Samson from Father Timothy’s Holy Book. A favorite story of his.
But where was his strength while he hid in his room earlier?
His son continued to cry for the next three hours.
Rauf shot Nicholas some dark glances. The other men were quick to snap at companions. Most ran from the keep. Rauf and Donald stayed. Nicholas was grateful for them. They managed to get the child to eat, at least.
“Nicky, please, hear me,” Rauf pleaded in the great hall that night when the boy finally fell asleep. “I know where the lass is stayin’. Let me go fetch her. She—”
“No.” Nicholas shook his head.
“Who is she? I dinna understand why ye are so dead set against her.”
“She is Julianna, Rauf. Julianna.”
His friend looked off to the side somewhere in his memory and then found her. “The one ye used to cry oot fer in yer sleep.”
Nicholas nodded and sipped his ale. He didn’t know if he’d cried out or not, but Cain and the others knew her name, so he must have. “She was at St. Peter’s Abbey when we went there for Elizabeth, Aleysia’s friend.”
Rauf nodded as if he remembered and rubbed his hand down his bristly face. “What is she doin’ lookin’ fer a way to earn coin?”
“I do not know. I do not know what she wants.”
“She wants to take care of Elias,” Rauf told him.
“She cannot.” He turned his gaze away from Rauf’s searching one. “She does not know who I am. She thinks I am Nicholas MacPherson.”
“But,”—Rauf looked as if he might cry. –“ye are Nicholas Mac…hell, Nicky, did ye pick up some sort of malady that is eatin’ away at yer head? D’ye think I have it?”
Nicholas smiled beneath the hair on his face. Rauf had always remained by him from the day Cain and the men found him beaten and left as dead on the road outside Berwick four years ago. Rauf had never left him. When they had returned from Nicholas’ pilgrimage, Rauf had been named his commander.
“Beneath all this fur,” Nicholas told him, “…if she saw me, she would know me as William Stone. She does not know who I am. You must not tell her.”
“But Nicky, she had a way with the lad. She was patient and tender with him and she told me of her nurse, Berengaria, who by the way is another person ye have never mentioned.”
Berengaria. A name Nicholas couldn’t say correctly until he was five, perhaps six, and stopped saying altogether when he was twelve, after she left him. He’d loved her with his whole being, and she left.
Nicholas didn’t know whether to shout in frustration or whisper his plea. He’d put Berengaria out of his mind since she’d left. He didn’t want to hear about her now. “I know I am asking much of you and of the men,” he said, “but do not ask me to bring Miss Feathers—all this—back into my life.”
“All what?” Rauf stared at him for a moment, as if waiting to discover something he didn’t know after the years they’d spent together. “Why have ye not told me of Julianna, Nicky? Ye let me put her oot of my thoughts because ye never spoke of her. Not once. And yet, ye see her now fer a moment and yer feelin’s fer her are so strong ye canna be near her? Not even fer Elias’ sake?”
“My feelings for her are not strong,” Nicholas disagreed.
“Aye, they are, Nicky. I think ye love her, lad. I think ye have loved her all along.”
Sometimes, Nicholas wanted to strangle Rauf. Times like now when Nicholas had no rebuttal. If everything he felt about love and life was her fault all along then wasn’t it best to face that terrible beast head on? No. He didn’t want to. He’d faced enough beasts in his life. This one was the biggest, the most ferocious. It had been born of misery when he was a babe, beaten and left alone to cry until it drained his heart dry. Until a year later, when the governor’s wife had a child, a girl called Julianna, and hired a wet nurse to tend to the babe.
Berengaria had heard him crying in the servants’ quarters and went to him. She’d cared for him there from then on while she nursed the governor’s new babe. She took him as her own and called him William.
He’d grown up with Julianna, not as a sibling, for they were not equal. He had been taught from an early age that she was his master’s daughter. He must always remember. He had, and he also remembered her red hair and spirited demeanor, how, when she was willing to go head to head, she bristled and had to then blow a curl or two away from her face.
Even later, when she pretended not to know him when her haughty friends or her parents were near, he hadn’t cared. He loved her. He cherished her, emblazoning her every feature on his heart. He knew everything about her, what made her smile and what made her cry. He and no other lad, noble or otherwise, had seen the way her hair spilled down her back in a splash of fiery curls. No one but him had seen her bare feet, as white as freshly fallen snow—like the rest of her skin, save for her full, coral lips above a delicate chin. Her eyes were wide and almond-shaped, dark brown like fine whisky, and almost cherry red in the light. She wore the crown. She wielded the power. Strong feelings. Aye, much stronger than he remembered.
He had to keep her from coming back to the castle.
“I will cut off my hair,” he promised. “All of it, and then I will win my son’s favor.”
“But then she will know—”
“No. She will not, Rauf!” Nicholas stood up from his seat, whatever warmth was in his eyes a moment ago cooled into crystalline shards. “And do you know why she will not? Because tomorrow, you will go to where she is staying and you will tell her to return to her home. She is not needed here.”
He didn’t wait to know Rauf’s reaction or hear his reply. He was tired. He was going to bed.
He forbade himself to think of her while he entered his chambers, undressed and crawled into bed. He barely closed his eyes when his son woke up crying down the hall. He could have fallen asleep if not for his men shouting and grumbling outside his door.
Finally, he left his bed, dressed, and stormed off to the kitchen to find a sharp knife to cut off his hair.
Chapter Four
Julianna nearly leaped at the chance for someone to brush her hair, so when Molly, Walter’s wife, offered to do it, Julianna did not resist. She sat on a wooden stool beside the hearth in their spacious kitchen, while Molly brushed and answered her questions. She and Walter had been here when Giles d’Argentan was alive. Aye, they knew Aleysia, Giles’ sister. Aye, they’d heard of her private war with the Scots and her surrender. But the war had ended. Their beloved Lady of Lismoor had wed Commander Cainnech MacPherson and Lismoor had been given to Cainnech’s brother, Nicholas.
Molly’s brush flowed smoothly after a while, as did her tongue. She’d heard the name William Stone but she didn’t remember when or where. The Scots were kind to her and the others. Of course, they all loved Mattie, too, for they’d known her and Elizabeth, Giles’ betrothed, for many years.
Mattie, Aleysia’s handmaiden! Julianna remembered her now. Elizabeth had spoken of her often when they spent time together at the abbey two years ago.
The earl had wed Mattie? A handmaiden? She smiled a little. The Scots had at least one thing right, then.
“After Mattie died, God rest her,” Molly went on, “the poor earl went mad and left Lismoor. We all took time with the child, helping to raise him like we had done with Aleysia. But when the earl returned recently, he gave Avice such a fright when she saw him and he demanded to know who she was in that voice of his, with those eye
s. Well, she left without even weaning the boy completely. We have all been helping cook for him and feed the little lad, but the earl does not like so many of us coming and going in and out, all day and night long. A governess would solve his problems.”
“Well, he does not want me,” Julianna pouted.
“Do you have any hints as to why not?”
“Not a one. I do not know him. I do not think I do,” she corrected, closing her eyes at Molly’s relaxing strokes. She hadn’t felt so wonderfully good in years. “He is covered in hair.”
Molly laughed. “He did not always look the way he looks now. When Mattie was alive, he was quite the most beautiful man I had ever looked upon. Ask Beatrice. She will attest. He has the most breathtaking gray eyes. Miss, I tell you if I was twenty, well, all right thirty years younger…”
Gray eyes. Julianna opened hers. William had gray eyes. It was the first thing one noticed about him.
Her belly sank and the air suddenly became stiflingly hot. No, of course William was not the Earl of Rothbury! She almost laughed out loud at herself. Perhaps it was crying she should almost be doing. Was she so desperate to find him that she would let herself believe that a slave had become an earl? But what if he had done something to earn the King of Scots’ favor…and a title? Perhaps the earl had married a servant because he was once a servant, too. Her head began to spin. No. The earl was not William. Molly had said he was Cainnech MacPherson’s brother. William had no family.
“Molly!” a rider called out. It was Scarface from the castle. “Ye must come quickly!”
Molly dropped her brush. “What is it?”
“’Tis the lad. He woke with a fever. He is retchin’ up everythin’ we give him. The earl is aboot to go mad with worry! The man has lost much,” he said, shifting his gaze to Julianna as she stood from her stool. “He canna lose his son.”
“He will not lose him,” Julianna promised and smiled at Molly.
Scarface suddenly went a shade paler. “I should tell ye,” he said, avoiding her gaze, “that the earl asked fer Molly and no one else.”