Teresa Medeiros (5 page)

She glanced down at her chest. A thin thread of blood trickled between her breasts, affirming his fears. But as her bewildered gaze met his and the ringing in his ears deepened to an inescapable roaring, he realized what she had already discovered. ’Twas not her blood staining her breast, but his own. His blood seeping from his body in welling drops that were rapidly becoming a steady trickle down the blade of his sword. Horror buffeted him as he realized it was he, and not she, who was in danger of swooning. The sword slipped from his numb fingers, tumbling harmlessly to the grass.

He slumped over the horse’s neck, clutching at the coarse mane. He could feel his powerful legs weakening, betrayed by the weight of the chain mail that was supposed to protect him. Sweat trickled into his eyes, its relentless sting blinding him.

“Go,” he gritted out. “Leave me be.”

At first he thought she would obey. He heard her skitter sideways, then hesitate, poised on the brink of flight.

His flesh felt as if it were tearing from his bones as he summoned one last burst of strength to roar, “I bid you to leave my sight, woman. Now!”

The effort shredded the tatters of his will. He could almost feel his pride crumbling along with his resolve, forcing him to choke out the one word he detested above all others. “Please …”

Swaying in the saddle, he pried open his eyes to cast her a beseeching glance. Sir Colin of Ravenshaw had never fallen before anyone, especially not a woman.

And in the end he didn’t fall before this one either.

He fell on her.

CHAPTER
5

T
abitha lay utterly still, afraid to breathe. In her most daring fantasies, she had wondered what it might feel like to have a man on top of her. To lay hip to hip, thigh to thigh, her tender breasts crushed against his brawny chest, his face nuzzled in her freshly washed hair.

She sniffed lightly, unable to resist satisfying her clinical curiosity. Her father always walked around in a cloud of expensive aftershave and the handful of men she’d dared to date showered and shaved twice a day. She’d never before smelled the sweat of honest toil, tempered with the mingled musk of horse, woodsmoke, and leather. She found the combination earthy, yet as undeniably beguiling as the prickle of the stranger’s unshaven jaw against her cheek. She half expected him to murmur some husky endearment.

He groaned. Tabitha’s eyes flew open. The poor man probably wouldn’t be inclined to whisper sweet nothings in her ear while bleeding to death. As much as she wanted to believe he was just some flunky hired by her parents to woo her, the blood soaking the front of her pajama shirt felt alarmingly real.

She tugged one hand free and shoved at his shoulder. “Mr. Ruggles?” she hissed. “George?”

He groaned again and settled his body more firmly against hers. Tabitha squirmed at the increasing intimacy, but that only made things worse.

This was frustrating. And it was her own fault. When he’d fixed her with that puppy-dog stare and started to tumble off the horse, she’d had every opportunity to hop out of harm’s way. Instead, she’d given in to the inexplicable urge to break his fall. All she’d gotten for her heroic effort was to be pinned under his weight. She was afraid he’d crush her, but it was as if he’d deliberately landed so as to do her the least harm. Even the glasses in her shirt pocket seemed to have survived the impact.

She turned her head, looking around for help. The horse stood a few feet away, placidly munching on a patch of clover as if he hadn’t threatened to trample her to death only minutes before. Lucy had draped her small, furry body over a sun-drenched hillock and was blissfully napping.

A butterfly perched briefly on Tabitha’s nose, making her eyes cross, then fluttered away with blithe abandon. She sighed, wondering if she was destined to spend eternity trapped beneath this ill-tempered stranger.

When she turned back, he was gazing down at her, his golden eyes more quizzical than threatening. Tabitha’s breath stalled in her throat. He looked like a sleepy tiger trying to decide if he should eat his prey or simply toy with it.

Tabitha did not need her glasses to see him clearly. She was nearsighted and he was very near indeed. She could feel the pounding of his heart as if it were her own.

His face loomed in her vision—angry slashes of eyebrows
over deep-set eyes; a strong, blunt nose; a mouth that had lost its smile, but not its winsome quirk; a stubborn jaw armored with dark stubble. The faint bags beneath his eyes hinted at exhaustion, but did not detract from the dangerous appeal of his thick, stubby lashes.

Tabitha blinked. She’d never been the sort of woman to fall for a pair of bedroom eyes. His gruff words reminded her why.

“Whose woman are you?”

Her dismay erupted in outrage. “Why, of all the arrogant, politically incorrect, blatantly chauvinistic—”

He behaved exactly as she would have expected an arrogant, politically incorrect, blatantly chauvinistic male to behave. He clapped a gauntleted hand over her mouth, stifling her words. She glared at him, tasting leather against her lips.

“I asked you a simple question, lass. Do you belong to any man?”

She shook her head furiously, but it wasn’t until his gaze softened, becoming both tender and predatory, that she remembered she had practically invited him to ravish her before he’d come tumbling into her arms.

She was being ridiculous. Surely no man who’d lost that much blood could—

A faint shift of his hips brought a warm and fulsome weight to bear against the softness of her belly. Apparently, he hadn’t lost
that
much blood.

She gazed at him, the two of them suddenly reduced to something more elemental than the sum of their parts. Man. Woman. Power. Vulnerability. She felt a flicker of doubt. Her mother might bemoan the fact that Tabitha spent most of her Saturday nights at home watching reruns of
The X-Files
on the Sci-Fi network,
but she wouldn’t have set her up on a blind date with a rapist.

Would she?

As he freed her mouth and lowered his parted lips to hers, a fresh realization struck terror in Tabitha’s heart. He wasn’t going to rape her. He was going to kiss her. Struck by a vision of this mighty warrior squatting on her chest croaking “rbbit, rbbit,” she turned her face away and gave his chest a panicked shove.

He rolled off of her with less resistance than she expected, groaning as if in mortal agony.

Tabitha sprang to her feet. “You were going to kiss me!”

“I know,” he muttered, eyeing her warily. “Delirium must be setting in.”

She rested her hands on her hips, trying to decide whether to be relieved or insulted. “You can whine and moan all you like, you bogus Beowulf, but I’m not going to feel sorry for you.” She pulled the sticky flannel from her skin, grimacing in distaste. “Why look what you’ve done! Ruined my very favorite pair of pajamas!”

“Do forgive me. I’ll take more care where I spill my heart’s blood in the future.”

She flinched. As he lay there propped up on his elbows in the grass, those golden eyes burning with pride over his pinched, pale mouth, she discovered to her dismay that she did feel sorry for him.

She dropped to her knees at his side. He eyed her with sullen suspicion, but allowed her to gently pry away the hand he’d cupped protectively over his shoulder.

“ ’Tis naught but a scratch,” he muttered.

Tabitha winced. Something had slashed through his armor, carving an ugly furrow just above his armpit. “If that’s a scratch, I’d hate to see what you consider a
laceration.” She began to tear the hem from her pajama shirt.

He nodded toward her straining hands. “I thought that was your favorite garment.”

“At the moment it’s my only garment,” she mumbled ruefully, using her teeth to rip free a broad strip of the flannel.

He surprised her by cupping her throat in his hand, his grip somewhere between a caress and a threat. “I might not live to regret this if you turn out to be one of them.”

The ruthless glitter of his eyes convinced her that this man’s enemy was not something she should ever aspire to be.

She forced a cool smile. “You won’t live to regret it if you bleed to death either.”

Conceding her point, he allowed her to proceed. After she’d torn another strip from her pajamas, she peeled back the soft leather shirt beneath his armor to reveal the sort of chest one couldn’t buy from a personal trainer or expensive gym. Oddly enough, the numerous nicks and scars seemed as much a part of him as the crisp whorls of dark hair that fanned across the dusky expanse. Tabitha bit her bottom lip, struggling to concentrate on the task at hand.

As she wound the fabric around his shoulder, she glanced up to find him transfixed by her feet. He nodded toward her slippers with their bright plastic eyes and cheerfully bobbing whiskers. “What manner of creature did you kill for those?”

This time her smile was genuine. “The dreaded polyester.” She was securing the bandage with a tasteful bow when his head snapped upright.

“What is it?” Tabitha whispered. She heard nothing.
Nothing but the eerie silence that had preceded his own arrival.

She sincerely hoped his tense posture was simply psychotic paranoia or overwrought acting. “What is it?” she repeated. “I don’t hear anything.”

He held up a hand for silence. Lucy crouched on the hillock, fully alert now, hackles rising. The horse tossed his head, whickering a warning. Then she heard it, far off in the distance like an echo from a nightmare.

The thunder of hoofbeats. The baying of hounds. The excited clamor of male voices.

The stranger grabbed her hand. “Flee, woman! I’m too weak to ride and if they find you here with me, ’twill not go well for you.”

“If those are the same men who stabbed you, then I doubt it’ll go very well for you either,” she pointed out with irrefutable logic.

Bitterness darkened his eyes. “I’m a man. They’ll only string me up from the nearest oak or cut my throat. But you’re a woman. If Brisbane’s dogs don’t tear you to shreds, his men will.”

Suddenly Tabitha didn’t want to play this particular game anymore. She wanted to snatch Lucy into her arms and sprint for the far side of the meadow. She wanted to tip her face to the sky and wail, “I want my mommy!”

But her mother was nowhere in sight and this man’s urgency was real, as real as the blood still seeping through the clumsy flannel bandage, as real as the bite of his fingers into her flesh, the desperate entreaty in his eyes.

“Take my mount and go,” he commanded. “Before ’tis too late.”

The forest no longer looked cheerful and welcoming, but dark and sinister—just right for Snow White’s
wicked stepmother and an entire orchard of poison apples. The baying of the hounds was growing louder and more relentless with each passing second.

Tabitha looked uncertainly at the horse. “I’ve never ridden before. Is it anything like riding in the back of a limousine?”

Her captor softened his grip, caressing her knuckles with his gauntleted thumb. “Go, lass,” he said gently. “We’ll have no more of your dallying.”

Oddly enough, it was that tender rebuke that decided her.

Tabitha would never know where she found the strength to try and get him astride the horse. He cursed the entire time, colorful indictments of the fair sex in general and herself in particular. Her shortcomings were described in meticulous detail, down to her wretched stubbornness, disobedient nature, and deplorable lack of wit. When he tumbled off the horse for the third time while reaching to give her ears a halfhearted cuff, she was finally forced to admit defeat.

They lay on their backs in the grass, Tabitha gasping for breath, the knight glowering at her through the dark locks of hair that spilled over his forehead. She felt a familiar vibration shimmy up her spine, a thousand times worse than it had been before. The ground trembled as if a herd of elephants was stampeding straight for them. Not elephants, she realized in panic, but horses.

She scrambled to her feet.

“Now will you go?” the stranger bit off, his eyes glazed with a blend of fury and pain.

Sunlight glinted off steel, catching Tabitha’s frantic eye. She snatched up Lucy and thrust the kitten into the man’s hands. His sputters deepened to oaths when she bent to retrieve his fallen sword. It strained every muscle
in her shoulders to lift the massive weapon, but lift it she did, staggering around to face the invisible threat.

If these men were ruthless enough to cut down a wounded man, they would have to come through her first.

Tabitha had never thought of herself as being particularly brave. Somehow she found the courage to stand her ground when the horses came pouring out of the forest, led by a pack of baying hounds. The riders reined in their mounts less than a foot from her outstretched blade, fanning out in a circle to surround them. The hounds bared their teeth and snapped at her pajama legs. Tabitha bit her bottom lip until she tasted blood to keep from crying out in terror.

The man mounted at the head of the party shouted some incomprehensible command and the dogs fell back, slinking away with flagging tails and reproachful looks.