Dom wanted to hit the old man. Hit the king! For what he was suggesting. “She’s mine! If I have to kidnap her myself and take her far away, she’ll always be mine. About this there can be no discussion.”
“So you love her?”
“I do!”
“Oh.” The wrath died out of King Jerome as if it had never been, and he sank back into his chair. “In that case, you want to ask me something.”
Dom’s head was reeling. “I... you ...” He’d been played by a maestro. He knew it; he deserved it. “Your Majesty, may I have your daughter’s hand in marriage?”
“I am pleased to welcome you to the family.” King Jerome picked up his quill and another stack of papers. “If you can convince the princess Laurentia.”
Dom could. He had to. “I’d be delighted, Your Majesty. If you could direct me to her?”
King Jerome looked up. “She has gone to her cottage.”
Chapter Thirty-one
Chariton rode with Laurentia up to the cottage and unsaddled and groomed Sterling for her before mounting his own steed to ride away.
“Thank you, Chariton.” She stood in the door of the stable and smiled at him. “I know I don’t say it often enough, but I do appreciate you.”
“You don’t need to say it.” He controlled his anxious horse with a firm grip on the reins. “I know that you appreciate me. You treat my parents and me as kindly as if we were part of the royal family, and we are humbly aware of your generosity. That is the reason, Your Highness, I feel that I can tell you the truth. I don’t approve of Dominic of Sereminia.”
Oh, she didn’t want to hear this! She shook her head and tried to speak, but Chariton continued relentlessly.
“In my opinion, he doesn’t deserve you. But His Majesty does approve of him, so I feel I must confess what I know Dominic will not.”
She didn’t want to hear this, but... “What?”
“He’s not the one who betrayed you and Bertinierre. Weltrude got to de Emmerich first.”
“Weltrude?” Laurentia’s heart gave a joyful leap into her throat. Then her happy flush died. “You mean Weltrude beat Dom to the reward.”
“Yes.”
“How do you know that?”
“Weltrude told me in a discussion in her prison room. Gloria confirmed it.”
Bitterly, Laurentia asked, “Did Gloria also tell you Dom would have betrayed me if he’d had the chance?”
“We don’t know that.”
“I do.” Wearily, she waved him on. “Go back to Gloria, Chariton. I’m glad you care enough for Dom to speak for him at all, but the fact he wasn’t the actual villain changes nothing.”
Chariton looked as if he wished to argue, but after a telling hesitation he bowed from the saddle. “I don’t like leaving you alone, so promise me you’ll be careful, Your Highness.”
“I will.” She watched him ride away and reflected on her foolish compulsion to be at the cottage when Pollardine’s army was fleeing the country and mercenary soldiers were seeking for new employment. But Pollardine was east, the cottage was west, and she had to complete her mission. For some reason, completing her mission had taken on an importance exceeding any task she’d ever set herself.
She’d explained that to King Jerome just before she went to change into her second-best riding costume, the one that required a corset, a full set of petticoats, and all her undergarments.
Papa had understood. She hadn’t even tried to elucidate why she wanted to be here high in the mountains where the stones sang of simpler times, the pines swayed in time, and dreams wafted along on the breeze. She didn’t quite comprehend why herself, but she needed peace, solitude, and a chance to think.
To ensure her peace, she had two loaded pistols in her saddlebags. Two loaded pistols to shoot at any intruder who showed up at her cottage and disturbed her solitude. Intruders like ... Dom.
She wouldn’t miss this time. She didn’t want him to come. She wanted a chance to heal, to recover a thimbleful of dignity and try to discover what pattern she would stitch for the future.
At the same time, she wanted him here.
She rubbed her forehead against the stable door-sill. So maybe she was stupid.
She wanted Dom to come after her, to go down on his knees, admit his guilt, beg for her forgiveness ... so she could reject him and throw him out of the country.
Behind her Sterling snorted, and she had to agree. Her fantasies read like a marionette’s melodrama.
Wearily she walked into the dim, hay-scented stable and threw back the shutters on the window. Fresh air rushed in, and she took a healing breath. This, yes, this was what she needed.
The most likely scenario, should Dom show up, was that he would toss her over his shoulder and carry her into the cottage where he’d make love to her until he’d driven all reason from her head. Why shouldn’t he? It had worked every other time.
And she was sick of being tossed about like a bit of flotsam on the ocean.
Oh, in the heat of passion he might be able to seduce another marriage proposal out of her, but they couldn’t stay naked all the time. Sooner or later they would have to put on some sense with their clothes and she knew she couldn’t live like that, always wondering if he ... loved her.
She rubbed the aching place in the middle of her chest right over her heart. That was it in an acorn. She wanted Dom, but only if he loved her, and even if he said so, would she believe him?
She heard his shout even before she heard the sound of Oscuro’s hooves. “Laurentia!”
He’d found her.
No, she knew better. Her father had sent him. For some obscure reason, her father really wanted her to take Dom as her husband, and His Majesty, in his own way, could be just as stubborn as she could.
Well, she didn’t want to be just standing pathetically, looking as if she’d been waiting for Dom to deign to make his appearance. She had a task to do, and she didn’t care if he had to wait all day while she did it. Hastily she picked up the pitchfork and walked to the pile of straw in the corner.
He yelled again.
“In here,” she yelled back. That felt good, expanding her lungs, opening her mouth and shouting at Dom. She did it again. “In the stable.”
He appeared at the door, a hulking silhouette that blocked the sun. With his shoulders hunched like that and his hands twitching, she thought he looked like the portrait of a penned bull in a rage.
Good. Let him suffer the results of ineffectual fury.
He stalked into the stable, Oscuro on a leading rein behind him. “I thought you promised not to disappear without telling me.”
Sinking the pitchfork into the pile of straw, she shoved it aside to reveal the trapdoor. “That was before.”
“Before what?” demanded the snorting bull.
“Before you disappeared without a word.” Dropping the pitchfork, she grasped the iron ring in both hands. “Maybe I should demand that promise from you, too.”
Dom relaxed a little. “I give it.”
She laughed without amusement. “What are your promises worth?”
Frustration must act as fertilizer, for Laurentia would have sworn he grew taller and broader. “My promises are worth everything. Because I fulfilled my promise to de Emmerich, I threw away my chance to marry, to be a prince, to be respectable. I threw away every dream I ever had.”
“Touching.” Proud of her cool reply, she lifted up on the ring and dragged the door away from the shallow cavity below the floor.
Then he came at her, his hands outstretched as if he would help her, and he stepped into the light of the window. He still wore the black leather and silk. He hadn’t stopped to bathe, and smudges of dirt and gunpowder still covered him in liberal amounts. His hair stood on end in a mad frenzy. He probably smelled like horse and sweaty man. And he was so handsome her body ached for him.
Her aplomb abruptly abandoned her. “No!”
He stopped.
“No. I’ll do it. I’m stro
ng.” She stood, bosom heaving, daring him to come closer.
And he backed away, his hands still outstretched. “Laurentia...”
Oscuro stomped his hooves, upset by the lack of attention and, no doubt, by her shrieking. “Your horse,” she managed.
Apparently, Dom hadn’t even noticed Oscuro’s distress. “What?”
“Your horse is lathered. You must have ridden him hard. You had best curry him.”
Dom looked behind him at the horse. “Oh. Yes, I...” He caught the leading rein again and led Oscuro to his stall. With rags and straw, he wiped Oscuro down. “Yes.” His voice sounded a little more like the Dom she knew—hard and confident. “I did ride hard. There are scoundrels out here.”
“Untrustworthy knaves like... you.” She looked at her hands. Her riding gloves hadn’t been built for physical labor, but in her haste she hadn’t remembered to change into work gloves. The fine leather was scuffed. Would anything ever go right again? “I comprehend my peril. Do you know what I’ve been doing for the last two days?”
“Directing the uprising in the city.” Gathering the brushes, Dom began to groom Oscuro quickly as if the physical exertion would relieve his tension. “Telling men what to do, where to fight, who to kill—”
Picking up the shovel, she threw it in the hole. “I am aware of every danger that threatens me, Dom.”
He heard what she didn’t say, and answered that. “I am not a danger to you.”
She had thought that the days of revolution, of imprisonment, of thwarted passion and disgraceful love had burned the rage away. She had thought she had learned her lesson, and mat she would never again tumble into this turmoil of intemperate emotion. But just seeing Dom, hearing him speak, knowing what he had done to her and her country—that brought fury roiling forth from the hidden places of her soul. “Oh, aren’t you?” She paced toward the stall. “Wasn’t it you who courted me with such charm, rescued me with such efficiency, told me your story with such pathos, that I decided to do what I hadn’t done in almost ten years?”
“I didn’t lie about my past.”
“Then, then you seduced me! You didn’t have to. I had told you the most important secret I knew. You had everything you needed to collect your fee.” Although she stood right outside the stall, Dom still worked. He didn’t look at her, she wasn’t even sure he was listening to her, and somehow that made the acrimonious words flow freely. “You could have ridden off and left me hurt, but heart-whole. But no, you had to take my virginity, make me love you, get me to propose. Propose marriage to you, because I was so blindly in love! You were my great moment of passion, my leap of faith—and I leaped right into a huge, empty cavern and found myself all alone, naked and shivering.”
Dom tossed the brushes in the corner and stalked toward her, and if she had been incensed, he was furious. She took a step back.
He pointed his finger at her and in a low, unwavering voice said, “Yes, I seduced you. I always knew I could do that. But I didn’t make you love me. If I could make a woman love me, don’t you think I would have done it sooner? Do you think I would have stumbled around this world, an outcast and a bastard, if I had the power to make a woman love me?” He took another step toward her. “You gave me your love, and you can’t have it back.”
She had advanced, he had retreated. Now he advanced, and she retreated. Retreated back to the knee-deep cavity, and picked up her shovel.
He looked at her, standing in that hole, and without demanding an explanation went back to Oscuro’s stall. She dug the shovel into the dirt.
His vehemence had shaken her.
All the things she’d sensed, heard, suspected about him during that day and that night in the cottage were true. He had been a lost soul, resentful and hostile, wandering around the world seeking he knew not what. Now like a child with a new toy, he clung to her declaration of love, imagining that if he refused to give it up it could not slip away. Love wasn’t like that, but he didn’t know.
Or maybe he did, and that explained the desperation that compelled him to ride in all speed up a mountain after her.
The sound of the currycomb started again. “I thought you were angry at me.”
She tossed out the first shovelful of dirt. “I am.”
“I understand that. I’d be angry, too. But I figure, if you’re just angry, I can cajole you out of it.”
She wondered how hard she’d have to hit him with the shovel before he went down. “Cajole me?”
“I’ve been angry most of my life, but you have to be honed to maintain that kind of hostility. Have to be a bastard and a king’s son and be used in a brothel and lose your mother to the pox before you’re thirteen.” His litany might have sounded like an appeal for sympathy, except it was delivered in such a mild tone. “You, Laurentia, had some bad experiences. I won’t deny that. But you could never make anger an avocation. You just don’t have the bitterness.”
What was she supposed to say to that? Thank you?
“But Brat told me something else about you.”
Laurentia squeezed the handle on the shovel. “I never talked to Brat about us.”
“Apparently you didn’t have to. Ever since she gave birth, she’s suffered from bouts of intuition, and I can tell you from experience she’s pretty good at it.”
Laurentia already knew she didn’t want this.
“She says you’re hurt.”
Laurentia scuffed her feet in the dirt. “I have never felt healthier.”
“She says you have many layers, and if I can just peel away that layer of anger I’m going to see the pain I caused you.”
Laurentia sank the shovel in the dirt, but she was having trouble seeing. The dirt, the shovel, her feet, they wavered with the onset of those endless tears which she would not, would not, allow to fall. “There’s nothing wrong with me time won’t cure.”
“They say time heals all wounds, but I’m a mercenary. I know what that platitude means.” He’d moved so quietly she hadn’t heard him, but now he was as close to her as he could be without actually being in the pit with her. “Sometimes you have to wait to die to be healed. I want you well now.”
He stood on the stable floor. She stood in the hole. He was taller than she was. Of course. But— “You can’t have your own way about everything.” A tear dropped into the dirt.
“Laurentia, I love you.”
She tossed the dirt on his boots.
“Did you hear me?”
“I heard you.”
“You’re not the first person I’ve loved, you know.”
She froze in the process of dumping another shovelful of dirt on him, and her gaze flew to his.
He watched her relentlessly, observing her agitation, the tears on her face, and, for all she knew, every emotion that skittered through her confused soul.
“I loved my men,” he said, “and I lost them. I love Brat like a sister. I always have. And I love Ruby.”
She thought about how he had held Ruby this morning, and how Ruby had embraced him. “I know.”
“When I lost my men, when Brat and I almost starved and Ruby was born in a cave, I swore I would find some way, any way, to provide for her. No one wanted me as a mercenary.” He kicked the dirt off his boots. “I had no men, and worse, I had a reputation for bad luck. So when de Emmerich offered me twenty-five thousand crowns to seduce you, I took the assignment, and gladly. With that kind of money, I could go back to Sereminia with Brat and Ruby, and we could live like ... well, like kings.”
She sank onto the stable floor as far away from him as she could get and still have her feet in the hole.
“I wanted to go home. I thought going to Sereminia would ease that gnawing in me for something— stability, purpose, I didn’t know what I needed, but I felt like I was starving.” He squatted on his haunches and crumbled a clump of dirt between his fingers. “Then I met you, and I knew getting the secret out of you was going to be easy.”
She puffed with exasperation. “You m
ake me sound like an open book.”
“You were. You wanted everything that I was. Adventure, danger, excitement, good ... coupling.”
“Coupling” wasn’t his first choice of words, she could tell.
“You know I’ve never thought much of royalty,” he said unnecessarily.
“I don’t think much of mercenaries, either,” she retorted.
“I didn’t expect to think much of you. You seemed open, generous, strong-willed, intelligent. All that meant to me was there’d be a greater contrast when I uncovered your viciousness.” He tossed a few dirt clods back in the hole. “Only I never found the bad parts.”
“No wonder you left me.” She was almost embarrassed. “I bored you.”
“Bored me.” He laughed shortly. “I did discover enough pigheaded determination and foolhardy bravery to keep you interesting. And I discovered those layers.”
“I don’t have any layers!”
“Layers,” he repeated. “And secrets that had nothing to do with Bertinierre and everything to do with you. Your past. Your marriage.”
“No layers,” she muttered. He made her sound like an onion.
“So I started thinking about how to complete the job and get the money without putting Bertinierre in peril for more than a few days. I had to go back to Sereminia, which I found did not feel like home, because I only feel at home where you are.”
She dabbed her nose on her sleeve. He was right, damn him. She did have layers. The layer of anger was easier to manage. With anger, all she had to do was stomp around and shout. But this layer was agony, anguish, dolor, torment... that was where the tears were coming from, and she didn’t want to face this.
“My sister-in-law, the queen of Sereminia, said I should tell you I begged on my knees for Danior to bring his army to Bertinierre.”
Laurentia really needed her handkerchief, but if she dug it out of her pocket and openly cried, it would seem like an admission of... something. She just didn’t want Dom to know he’d uncovered a layer. “Am I supposed to be impressed?” She croaked like a frog.
“I told Evangeline that wouldn’t win me clemency.” He sat on the floor across the hole from her, a man too handsome for his own good. “So here’s my question. If you had a chance to save Bertinierre by sacrificing me, what would you do?”
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