Knights of de Ware 03 - My Hero (26 page)

Faint alarm registered in her breast. She searched Roger’s eyes. “What do you mean, ‘not well’?”

“He has the sickness, my lady,” Elspeth burst out, “the sickness from the village.”

Dread insinuated itself like odious, curling smoke into her thoughts. She stared, unseeing, into the flames.

“He’s asked for you,” Elspeth whispered.

Garth. He’d walked all the way to the monastery in the chill damp of night, probably already suffering from fever. Such exposure might have weakened him, left him more susceptible to the murrain’s attack, unable to effectively battle it.

Then a darker, more sinister thought followed. If Garth carried the disease…

“Bloody hell.”

He’d communicate it to the prior, his novitiates, and eventually all the monks. Despite the blazing fire thawing her bones, she shuddered.

Already she sensed the sickness encircling the monastery like a grim cloud raining death.

There was no time to waste. In spite of her fatigue, she had to get to Garth.

By the time she arrived at the monastery, the low twilight clouds had turned the colors of a bruise. Cynthia glanced at the threatening sky, unable to dismiss the bad omen. The foreboding she’d felt in the village was nothing compared to her crippling fear as she approached the door of Garth’s cell.

What if she put her hands upon Garth and felt nothing? Or worse, what if she felt his life force ebbing? What if she sensed that he was destined not to live, but to…

She clamped her lips together. She wouldn’t think of that. He needed her. He’d asked for her. And she’d do everything in her power to save him.

Squaring her shoulders, she entered the cell.

The first thing she did was calmly empty it of the half dozen monks who stood gaping at her. Women were normally not admitted to monasteries, but she didn’t have time to argue with them. They endangered their own health every moment they lingered. Pushing back her sleeves and authoritatively dropping her bag onto the bed, she informed the prior she needed to work in peace.

Only when the door closed behind him did she let her mask of cool detachment slip. She rushed to Garth’s side, peering anxiously into his face.

By the candlelight, his skin appeared as pale and transparent as vellum. Beneath damp tangles of hair, his brow was troubled, creased in a furrow of suffering. His breath came shallow and strained, scarcely budging the wool coverlet doubled over his chest. He shivered faintly, as if the marrow of his bones were made of ice. As she watched him, his eyelids rippled, and his lips moved over silent syllables of the language of dreams.

She closed her eyes. The gift was weak within her, weary with use. Still, praying for one last glimmer of her exhausted talent, just enough for Garth, she began rubbing her hands together.

His temples were hot where she placed her palms upon them, yet he shuddered as if he slept in snow. A faint vibration tickled her fingertips, and she gratefully felt the golden glow expanding, connecting her energies to his. Then she waited for a sign—the name of an herb or a vision of the specific combination of extracts that would heal his particular ills.

When the vision swirled and resolved to crystal clarity, she snatched her hands back. But it was too late. She’d seen it. The all-too-familiar black demon still slithered across her mind, breathing poisonous fog to wither everything in its path.

“Nay,” she wheezed.

The black snake. Death.

“Nay.”

Garth couldn’t die. He was young and fit. His entire life stretched out before him. It couldn’t be true.

And yet, she’d never been wrong. Garth de Ware was marked for death.

“Nay,” she insisted, twisting her fingers, as if repeating the word would somehow drive destiny away.

He couldn’t die,
couldn’t
. It wasn’t fair. He’d never truly lived. He’d never sworn his eternal love to a bride, never bounced a child of his own flesh and blood on his knee, never known the deep satisfaction of gazing across land that belonged to him.

Tears of dismay filled her eyes even as her chest heaved with angry breath. She doubled her fists.

He wasn’t going to die. By God, she wouldn’t let him.

She clamped her jaw and ran a shaky hand through her hair. There was no walking away—not while he needed her, not while he still breathed.

She sighed raggedly. For Garth to have any hope of survival, she’d have to joust with death itself.

From the depths of his dream, Garth groaned. The ache of spent desire rested low in his belly. But Mariana, her green eyes full of smoke, her hair splayed like splinters of charred wood against his skin, still smoldered with longing.

“Take me. Take me again,” she pleaded.

He wanted to. Lord, he wanted to. Mariana was devilishly beautiful. Her writhing body shone with sweat, accentuating each supple curve and alluring hollow. Her breasts heaved dramatically with every breath, her hard, red nipples perched like ripe cherries atop the snowy globes. The tangle of ebony curls between her legs was matted, soaked with her juices, yet the dark pink petals of her womanhood swelled for him again. His milky essence painted her breasts and belly and thighs. And still she wanted more.

She deserved more. He wanted to give her more.

But he couldn’t.

Five times he’d risen for her, joined with her, made her moan and scream with ecstasy as they rode over the brink of lust together. Another half dozen times he’d pleasured her with hands and tongue until he thought she’d surely swoon with exhaustion.

And now
he
was exhausted. She’d depleted him. His weary flag refused to rise even once more. Shite, he hardly had the strength to hoist a flag of surrender.

“What have you done to me, woman?” he murmured with a smile, slurring the words.

“Done? I’ve only begun,” she purred, bisecting his chest with a sharp fingernail.

This time his groan was half a chuckle. He was drunk with exhaustion. “You’ve worn me out.”

“Nonsense,” she breathed, dragging her thigh sensuously over his.

“Drained me dry.”

She pouted prettily and traced circles in the damp hair below his navel. “I’d wager your brothers wouldn’t tire so easily,” she mewled in disappointment.

He rose to the bait at once. “My brothers?” He stopped her fingers in his.

She shrugged and gave a small sigh. “But then, you aren’t quite like your brothers, er, half-brothers, are you?” Cruelty overlaid her sweet words like bitter poison dissolved in mead as she patronizingly patted his limp ballocks. “Not quite the man that Holden and Duncan are.”

She slunk from the bed then, brushing past him like a sultry current of air blowing through a chill day, then moving on.

If a man had spoken the insult, he would’ve slammed him up against the wall faster than a cat pouncing on a mouse. No one compared him unfavorably with his brothers. And since he’d earned his spurs, no one dared call him less than a man.

But Mariana was a lady. She cared for him. Whatever she said, she said out of love and concern, or pity. He was sure of it. If Mariana believed him inferior to other men, then maybe it was true.

Suddenly, he grew painfully aware of his nakedness, of the shrunken member slumbering in its dark nest. It took all his will not to cover it with his hands, to hide the despicable thing from her sight. Shame scorched his face, burning him with a hotter fire than lust ever had, a fire that would never be extinguished.

Yet even as he watched the trailing hem of her scarlet robe slither out the door and heard the brittle jangle of her departing laughter, from the edges of sleep came refreshing solace. Someone stroked his fevered cheek with a wet cloth, gently blowing mint-scented breath across his skin to cool him.

The painful dream melted like chips of ice. His tension eased as the furrow between his brows was wiped gently away.

Briefly, he raised his sleep-heavy lids, just enough to peep through his lashes.

Tousled orange curls. Strong, graceful hands. Eyes darkened in concern and compassion.

Cynthia.

Relief swept through him.

Cynthia. Not the lust-filled dragon wench stealing through his dreams, but a real woman, kind and genuine. He sighed. With that sweet comfort, he closed his lids and sank deeper into sleep, past the land of dreams.

Cynthia held her breath. Had Garth wakened? Or was it only a figment of her desperate imagination? After two days of watching over him, grabbing what rest she could in short, fitful naps in the chair the prior had brought, she wasn’t sure.

Those two days, Garth had smoldered like a slow-burning log, alternately sweating and shivering, and breathing with the shallow gasps of a child. He’d tossed weakly on his bed, his sleep plagued by upsetting dreams, and he’d been unable to keep down even the weakest broth with eggs she’d smuggled in.

There wasn’t a part of him she didn’t know intimately now, from the rough stubble of his unshaved chin and the glossy scar traversing his chest to the fine line of hair dividing his belly and the carved hollows of his buttocks.

But none of his features, not even his man’s staff that occasionally, inexplicable decided to rouse, could distract her from the overpowering dread that she was going to lose him.

She dropped the cloth into the basin of water and ran a tired hand through her sticky hair. No healing flowed through her hands now. She was too drained. Now she relied on sheer instinct.

She leaned back against the table and watched him. As absurd as it seemed, she couldn’t stop the feeling that she was partly to blame for his condition. If he hadn’t been in such a rush to leave Wendeville…

She curled her hands in frustration, catching splinters of wood under her nails.

If only she’d stayed in her room that night, if only she’d resisted her desires and hadn’t pushed him so far, he might not have trudged all night in the damp, killing fog to reach the monastery, weakening his resistance to the murrain.

She turned her back to him, unable to face her guilt. Vials and packets of extracts and herbs covered the table before her. Two days ago, they’d been effectual cures, the reliable tools of her trade. Today, they seemed like the counterfeit oils and ointments of a traveling chapman.

Behind her, Garth’s breathing grew ragged. She feared it would become much worse. Then coughing would set in and eventually difficulty drawing air into his lungs. Finally…

She couldn’t think about it. Since that first night, she hadn’t called upon her powers. She wouldn’t do it now. She didn’t want to face despair.

She eyed the medicines on the table again. Somewhere in that vast array of rainbow-colored bottles, there hid a cure. She had to find it.

Garth’s dreams possessed such accurate memory when it came to painful details.

Slats of black hair obscured Mariana’s smoldering eyes, but diluted none of her scorn.

“Marriage?” She rocked backward onto her bread-soft buttocks, gripping Garth’s trembling thighs between her own. “Why would I want to marry you when I can have you anytime I want?” She coiled a lock of his hair around her finger.

“Because…” Because he loved her—utterly, desperately, devotedly. But he couldn’t tell her that, not while derision tainted her voice. “Because it’s the proper thing.”

“And do you always do the proper thing, Garth?” Grinning, she reached behind her back and gave his ballocks a tweak.

“Mariana…”

“Aye?” She slid back and forth against him, ready for another bout.

“Mariana,” he said, grasping her knees to still her. “Not now. I have to speak with you.”

“Speak!” She scowled, ruining her finely-painted features. “Speak! All you ever want to do is speak!”

“But Mariana…”

Diplomacy was useless now. She was riled. And when she was riled, her temper exploded quicker than a thundertube.

“What kind of beast are you?” she fired, dragging herself off of him. “Other men would give their right arm to lie with me!” She snatched her vermilion gown from the peg. “Yet here I stay—ready, willing, begging for your affections!” She struggled into her surcoat. “And you! You want to talk!” The dress scraped over her hips and pooled at her feet like blood. “Do you know what I think? I think you have nothing left to give me!” She ran her long nails briskly through the tangles of her hair. “You say you want to marry me. Well, I’ve waited months for you to mature, to grow into the lover they claim is the de Ware legacy, and I have yet to see it.” She stuffed her feet into her slippers. “How can you call yourself a de Ware? How can you call yourself a man?”

An unshed agony of tears burned Garth’s throat. His chest felt heavy, as if he were burdened by ten coats of chain mail.

His vulnerability must have shown on his face, for Mariana’s next words were laced with pity.

“I can’t marry you, Garthie. No woman should have to live so…” She glanced at the bed. “Unfulfilled.” Whirling her matching red cloak about her shoulders, she gave him one last, long, appraising look. Then she added with a gentle sigh, “Maybe you were right to choose the church after all. You should have no trouble pleasing that bride.”

And then she was gone forever.

Beneath his ponderous ribs, his crushed heart knifed diagonally against his lungs. Pain and shame and despair balled into a knot in his belly. For an awful eternity, he was unable to draw breath.

Then, when he did, when he knew he’d not die mercifully of a broken heart, the air rasped across his torn throat in a horrible, inhuman sob.

“Mariana!” he cried. “Don’t leave me!” His own voice sounded foreign to his ears, like the wailing of a tortured prisoner. “Mariana!”

“Garth!”