LADY UNDAUNTED: A Medieval Romance (9 page)

Slipping out of the palace proved easier than expected. Under cover of her unadorned woolen mantle, she joined a group of women servants, none of whom received more than a cursory glance from the guards. What did not bear thinking on was how she was to make her way back into the palace without drawing attention.

As she crossed the second of three drawbridges behind a procession of carts, hay wains, pie makers, and fishmongers, she peered up from beneath her hood at the outermost bastion of the stronghold’s defense—the last she must pass to reach the outside. Appropriately named the Lion Tower, it was a massive structure liberally studded with men-at-arms.

She moved her gaze to the left and saw suspicion on the face of a soldier who eyed her. Blessedly, he was distracted by the toppling of a commoner’s cart that loosed flapping chickens from woven cages.

Joslyn pushed past the others, and not until her slippers were dusted with the dirt of the road leading away from the palace did she expel her breath.

Dear Lord, I have done it!
she silently rejoiced as she hastened into the city of which she knew so little. Fortunately, during the ride to the monastery where Oliver had been left in the care of monks before Father Ivo and she had continued on to the palace, she had heeded her surroundings. Thus, she could find her way back to her son.

Winding west, she hurried past crowded shops capped with cramped housing, men and women who called for her to touch and taste their wares, and children who played in the streets as if fields of grass were beneath their feet. Then the street she traversed ended—as it should not.

She turned fully around. This morn there had been the option of going forward as well as left or right. Or was she mistaken? Oliver’s chatter had distracted her a time or two, but surely not so much she should lose her way.

She peered down the street that jutted left, then looked right, and finding the latter familiar, moved in that direction. Minutes later, the decision proved a poor one, the street narrowing and darkening for want of sunlight.

Though she preferred to find the monastery without compromising the commoner she appeared to be, she would have to ask someone to set her right.

Pausing in front of a shop offering fish that smelled well past consumption, she looked about for a woman to approach.

They were nearly all men, and several stopped to cast eyes upon her as if she were edible.

Revisited by the alarm she had felt when Liam Fawke had set himself at her across the green, she hunched into her mantle and wished the short sword Maynard had gifted to Oliver were at her waist. Knowing it would be unseemly to wear it upon her person at court, she had left it at the monastery.

Looking back the way she had come, she had just resolved to retrace her steps when a screech brought her head up and around.

In the window of the third floor up from the street stood a woman with shoulders bared and a bearded man in her embrace. He laughed, she laughed, and the lovers dropped out of sight.

She was in a place of ill repute—a place into which no lady would even dare toss her slipper.

“Whatcha hiding yourself fer, girl?” a gruff voice asked.

She jumped back and came up against a barrel of reeking fish.

“Ye an ugly one?” The thickly jowled, pockmarked man stepped nearer. “I don’t mind, ye know. Same to me, especially if it costs less.” He reached for her hood.

Joslyn sidestepped and turned to flee, but he pulled her back.

“I may not be handsome and strappin’, but me coin’s good, wench.”

Feeling every beat of her heart, hearing every draw of her breath, she searched for words that would free her from the man’s attentions. “Keep your distance! I have the pox.”

Disease a thing to be feared nearly as much as a dagger to one’s throat, especially with word arriving daily of the great plague spreading out of the Mediterranean and ravaging France, the man released her.

“The whore’s with the pox!” he shouted as she hastened past him.

Those who feared to be crossed by her shadow shrank away, while others began scooping up gravel.

Grateful her mantle took the sting out of the small rocks pelting her, Joslyn ran. But it was no small rock that struck the center of her back and dropped her to her knees.

Amidst fiery pain and faltering breath, she looked up and saw a half dozen men advancing on her. Her only hope of escape to go farther down the forbidding street, she stumbled upright and swung around. But striding toward her was the one who had sought to buy her favors, and another came from the right.

Which was worse? To be murdered or defiled? Murdered, Oliver would have no one. Defiled, she might yet return to him.

“God be with me,” she whispered and tossed back her hood and lifted her chin to reveal the nobility imparted by the maid Father Ivo had sent to her.

Her pursuers halted, and their hesitation presented a possibility beyond murder and defilement. Joslyn ran forward and slipped between the two men.

Shouts and the pound of feet followed.

Knowing her only chance was to veer onto a side street, she turned left, and when another street opened up, turned onto that. But it was not a street. It was an alley, dark and without exit.

She whirled around, in the next instant pressed herself back against the wall. A hand over her mouth to mute her breathing, she watched the men run past her hiding place.

“Praise You, Lord,” she whispered.

Lest her pursuers returned when no further sighting of her was had, she stepped toward the opening. And nearly screamed when a large figure appeared there.

Containing terror that could draw the others back, and with no way around the one advancing on her, she retreated deeper into the alley and came up against the far wall.

As she tried to see past shadows the man wore as near him as his clothes, she began praying for deliverance—even if only that of being spared the greater horror of the many for the one. But when fingers turned around her arm, her throat opened up to loose a scream sure to betray her to the others. It was caught in the calloused palm that clamped over her mouth.

Heavenly Father, protect me,
she silently beseeched.
And if I meet my end this day, protect Oliver.

“Fool woman! What were you thinking?”

She drew a breath through her nose, strained her eyes to search the face whose features were without definition in the alley.

“I ought to have left you to them,” he growled.

It was
him
! But her relief scattered with the reminder he was as much an enemy as those who had chased her, and she began to struggle.

“God’s eyes, Lady Joslyn! ’Tis Liam Fawke!”

She continued to kick and strain, then writhe when he pinned her to the wall with his muscled body.

“Enough!” he commanded.

She whipped her head to the side, but he thwarted her attempt to dislodge his hand by gripping her mouth harder.

“Hear me! You are safe.”

Hardly, but his strength was so much greater that the only possibility of escape was to lull him into believing she submitted.

When she stilled, he said, “You will not scream?”

She shook her head.

He eased his hand from her mouth, and when no sound passed her lips, pulled back a space.

Never had Joslyn done what she intended, but she had seen it once, and it had been effective. She moved her leg into position and lifted her foot to thrust her knee up between Liam Fawke’s thighs. But he once more slammed his body against hers, denying her the space required to unman him.

“Nay, Lady, you will not do that to me!”

Tears burned her eyes. If he had not been going to kill her before, he would now. Certain she had naught to lose, she resumed her struggle—jabbing with elbows and clawing with nails. But he was too large and strong, and when she slackened, it was with fatigue, not trickery.

“Accursed woman! You truly think I mean you harm?”

Uncomfortably aware of every place his body fit to hers, she replenished her breath. “I will not die easily, Liam Fawke!”

His sigh warmed her brow. “I do not imagine you would. Thus, I count it my good fortune I do not seek your death.”

Eyes having adjusted to the dim, she was able to make out the hard line of his jaw, the soft line of his lower lip, the glitter of his gaze. “Do you not?”

“Think, lady! Were murder my intent, would I not have slit your throat ere you knew ’twas I who wielded the blade?”

As commanded, she thought. And grudgingly found his argument valid, at least where she was concerned. But Oliver—

Another muttered curse. “In spite of the lies fed you, I am no murderer. Just as I am not one to take what does not belong to me.”

As her son took what she was inclined to believe this man had a greater claim upon.

Hating the guilt sinking its claws into her, especially since she was powerless to alleviate it in light of the king’s decision, she returned to the more immediate concern. “Forgive me if I find it difficult to believe you make yourself savior to the woman who provided your brother with the heir who stands between you and Ashlingford.”

His laughter was bitter. “I do it not out of kindness, but to keep my head on my shoulders. As suspicion will land first on me should ill befall your son or you, it is in my best interest to ensure your safety. And that I have done.”

As she mulled what seemed another valid argument, she was struck by the question she should have asked earlier.

“Now,” he said, “lest those men return—”

“How did you find me?” she blurted.

“Enough talk, Woman.” He pulled away and drew her toward the street. But at the alley’s opening, he dragged her back into the nearest shadows.

“God’s wounds!” he muttered, and she heard what he had first happened upon—the sound of her pursuers’ return.

“Check ’em all,” one shouted. “Gotta be hidin’ here somewhere.”

Then they would soon be discovered. However, Liam Fawke gave Joslyn no time to contemplate the consequences. He turned her against the wall and wrenched the metal fillet with its mesh cylinders from her head.

“What do you?” she gasped.

“Playing a part, as will you.” He raked fingers through her pinned hair, loosing the plaits and tumbling her tresses past her shoulders. Then he pulled her close and lifted her chin. “Pretend you like this,” he said and put his mouth on hers.

For a moment, she was too shocked to feel anything. Then sensation leapt up her spine, and she loosed a small sound he took from her and answered with a husky groan as his lips trailed their moist warmth down her neck.

Nothing in Joslyn’s twenty-one years had prepared her for this, not the innocent kisses of her youth, and certainly not the unwelcome ones of the man who had been her husband. Nothing.

“Put your arms around me,” he rasped.

A shout sounded from the alley’s entrance, and it was then she understood the role she must also play to convince her pursuers they had stumbled on something not of their concern.

“Now!” Liam growled.

She slid an arm around his waist, the other across his shoulder, and pushed fingers into the hair at his nape.

When one of the men stepped into the alley, Liam snapped his head around. “Who goes?” he demanded in a guttural accent far from noble, voice drenched in drink his breath told he had not had. Fortunately, the dim alley hid the attire that would have made a lie of him.

The man halted. “Lookin’ fer a lady, a noblewoman who came this way.”

“Noblewoman!” Liam spat. “Yer dreamin’, man. Ain’t no lady come near Whore’s Way.”

“Who be that with ye?” the man demanded.

“Ain’t no lady, eh, my love?”

At Joslyn’s hesitation, Liam yanked her hair.

She gulped, then affecting an accent she prayed would be believed, called, “Go on with ye! I got money to make, and I canna do it with ye standin’ there gapin’ like fools.”

From what well had she drawn that? she marveled.

“Ye heard the wench. Be gone!”

The man took another step forward, and Liam unsheathed his dagger and swept it into the light. “Ye can have her when I be finished, not before.”

“Aye, do ye got enough coin,” Joslyn drew from the well again. “I don’t do nothin’ fer free.”

The man turned toward the others. “Just a whore turnin’ her trade,” he griped.

When they went from sight, Joslyn’s fear eased in sharp contrast to the tension of being so intimately entwined with Liam. Everywhere they touched, her body knew it, from their hands on each other to their chests, hips, and legs.

Thinking herself depraved to be so aware of him, she dropped her arms to her sides. But he did not release her. Was the danger not past?

“Sir Liam?” she breathed.

Though his gaze was more felt than seen, the thumb he brushed over her lips was unmistakable. Nay, the danger—albeit of a different sort—was not past.

“I see Maynard neglected your mouth,” he said softly of the deeper intimacy they had shared, and to which she had not known how to respond—an intimacy that, as a woman who had birthed a child, she ought to have more experience with. “What else did he neglect, fair Joslyn?”

Untried emotions moving through her, she closed her fingers into her palms. “I know not what you mean.”

He lowered his face so near hers, the hair on his brow grazed her forehead. “He wanted you only for what you could give him that could take from me. Is that not true?”

Mostly. But though Maynard had been attracted to her, she had held him to the bargain that had seen her wedded and bedded. Had she not, perhaps they could have grown into something more, but never could she forget his maneuverings that had forced her to sell herself to save her father—much like the whore she played this day.

“There was no pleasure in it, was there, Joslyn?”

No pleasure, no love, only the conception of an heir. But never would she admit it. “We should leave,” she said and set her chin high, too late realizing the defiant gesture brought her mouth nearer his.

“Should we?”

A peculiar ache in her chest, she moistened her lips. “They might return.”

“Will you not answer me, Joslyn?”