The Hostage Bride (33 page)

As he peeled down her riding britches, he realized that the wet had seeped even through the leather. He ran his hands over her belly, down her thighs, across the flare of her backside. Her skin was deadly cold to the touch. He caught his breath.

“God’s bones, girl! You’re soaked to the skin! Of all the demented, infantile things to do! Have you completely taken leave of your wits? What did you think you were doing … taking a Sunday afternoon stroll in the hills?”

Portia stared down at her thin, shivering body. Her skin was a horrible dead white and she shuddered with distaste. Shuddered that he should be looking at her nakedness, should be handling her body as if it were a fish on a slab. She couldn’t bear to be standing naked before him. Her legs seemed like sticks, and her breasts were shriveled and covered in goose bumps, her nipples shrunken.

With an inarticulate imprecation, she shoved him aside and reached for the robe he’d hung to warm in front of the fire. She tore it down. “I can manage … leave me alone.” In her haste, she accidentally put her bad foot to the ground and reeled back with a cry of pain.

Rufus caught her against him. “Be still!” he thundered, and Juno yelped in fright, cowering against the table leg.

Portia gave up. She was at the very limit of her strength and her will to endure.

Rufus rubbed her body with a towel, roughly as he forced the blood back to the surface so that the dead white became tinged once more with a healthy pink. He turned her around, lifted her arms, parted her thighs, abrading the soft inner skin, leaving not an intimate cranny untouched. His jaw was set with grim determination, and if he was aware on any level that this was a body he had possessed, had played upon, had once brought to the peak of pleasure, he gave no sign. And through it all, Portia gritted her teeth and tried not to think of anything. Her skin began to feel as raw as a scraped potato, but she uttered not a sound.

“Now put these on.” He dropped his shirt over her head. It swamped her, reaching to below her knees. He pushed her arms into the wide sleeves of the fur-lined robe, much as he would have manipulated his sons’ arms into their jerkins. “Sit down.” He pushed her back onto the stool, and once more clothed, her vulnerability tucked away beneath wool and fur, Portia could allow herself to be aware of her surroundings.

“When did you last eat?” He began to bandage her ankle with wide strips of cloth.

“I had a mouthful of bread this morning. I had to give the meat and cheese to Juno; she was starving,” Portia replied, her voice dull. She was warm though. A wonderful marrow-deep warmth that went a long way to compensating for the throbbing ankle, now tightly bandaged.

Juno wagged her plumed tail and batted at Rufus’s leg with a small paw.

“She’s hungry too,” Portia explained unnecessarily. “Would you please feed her?”

Rufus looked at Portia on her stool, swathed in garments that completely drowned her. Her head was really all that was visible, an orange tangled halo sitting atop the dark fur collar of his robe. She was regarding him now with the rueful resigned bravado that had always inspired his respect and admiration, however reluctant.

Those slanted green eyes had haunted his dreams ever since she’d left him. That pointed nose. Those high cheekbones. The incredible softness of her skin was embedded in his hands’ memory. He had fought it, denied it. Told himself
that if their encounter had come to a natural end, he would have felt none of these strange hankerings, no sense of unfinished business. But now, as he looked at her, he acknowledged that he had never felt for another woman what he felt for Portia Worth. Not that he knew exactly what it was that he was feeling. But it went way beyond the simple lust of a convenient, brief, sexual partnership.

The dog scratched again at his boot. He looked down at her, seeing how pitifully small and young she was.

He began to laugh. Portia regarded him for a minute as if he’d taken leave of his senses; it was such a volte-face. But then she remembered that Rufus was given to such rapid changes in mood. Warmth and strength began to stir once more. She smiled tentatively and brushed her hair out of her eyes. “Are you pleased to see me?”

“Yes, dammit!” he said with some exasperation. “Don’t ask me why. You turn up in a blizzard, half dead with exposure, scaring the wits out of me …” He looked down at the puppy again and his laugh rippled anew.

“What a pair you are! The pathetic creature could be your daemon.” He picked up Juno and held her in the air to examine her more closely. “I doubt she’s even weaned. Where did she come from?”

Portia told him how she’d found the puppy, and Rufus lost all desire to laugh. “Bastards,” he said. “There’ve been reports of such barbarisms flying around for weeks, but it’s the first time I’ve had an eyewitness account.”

“Is it just the rebels who are being so savage?”

“No,” Rufus said shortly. “I wish I could say it was, but both sides are as bad as each other and the reprisals grow ever more barbarous.” He talked as he poured milk into a saucer that he set on the floor for Juno, who fell on it with an excited yap.

He poured whisky into two cups and gave one to Portia with the injunction that she drink it slowly, then he perched on the corner of the table and considered her closely. “So, what’s all this about hanging from Granville’s battlements?”

“I came to warn you that Cato’s setting a trap for you. I couldn’t send a message since I didn’t know how to find your
spies. Since you consider me to be the enemy, I suppose it’s not surprising you wouldn’t take me into your confidence.” Portia was surprised that she had the energy for challenge.

“You didn’t stay around long enough to warrant my confidence,” he said quietly.

“I didn’t see how I could have stayed after what you said. I still think you’re wrong to be ruled by this vendetta. But I’m not part of it, Rufus.” She half rose from the stool and then remembered her ankle. Her eyes raked his face.

Rufus stroked his chin, his eyes narrowed as he stared into the fire. Then he looked up, his bright gaze resting on Portia’s pale countenance. “So, if you think I’m so wrong, tell me now why you risked your life, abandoned the only home you have, to help me. I should think you’d be delighted to see me swinging from Granville’s battlements.”

“One would think so,” she returned smartly. “Believe me, I fought the impulse. But for some unfathomable reason, I lost.”

Rufus grinned. Pure delight fizzed in his veins. Delight and immeasurable relief that she was truly unscathed. “Oh, gosling! Nothing blunts that hornet’s tongue! So, tell me about this trap.”

“I overheard Cato and his second in command, Giles Crampton. I used to wander around the castle at night.” Portia offered the partial explanation with a little shrug. He didn’t need to know about ancient privy chutes. She told him what she’d overheard and he heard her out in silence, drinking his whisky, his expression now impassive.

“I had gathered that Cato and his peers were collecting around the countryside,” he observed when she had finished “There should be quite a treasure trove by now.” Rufus’s smile was grim. “It’ll fatten the king’s treasury nicely.”

Then his expression changed. He stood up and came over to her. He lifted her chin on his palm. His eyes were now grave as they looked down into her own. “I am very glad you came back. I don’t know what I can offer you, but since you’ve been reckless enough to abandon Cato’s hearth, then I fear you must accept mine.” He ran the pad of his thumb over her mouth.

“I don’t need your charity,” Portia said, turning her head
slightly away from him. She wasn’t certain quite what he was saying. The invitation, if it was one, lacked something. If he was offering her a home just because she had nowhere else to go, just as payment for her information, she knew she wouldn’t accept it. “I didn’t come here expecting it.”

Rufus’s hand dropped from her face. He stared down at her.
“Charity!”
he exclaimed.

“I can manage alone,” Portia persisted. “I’ve always managed alone.”

“Dear God! If you weren’t in such a pathetic condition …!” He spun away from her and took one quick turn around the room. Then he came back and stood foursquare in front of her. “Do you
wish
to stay here?”

“Not if you’re always going to think of me as a Granville,” Portia said. Suddenly there was so much at stake. More than she could yet fully grasp.

“You are,” he said flatly. “I don’t see how I can forget it.”

“But how important is it?”

Rufus sighed. “I have missed you, Portia. Not a Granville. But
you
.”

Portia smiled slowly, feeling the warmth seeping through her veins. “That’s all right, then,” she said.

Rufus had the strangest feeling that he’d just been routed in a battle he didn’t know he’d been fighting.

Then Portia said softly, “I missed you too. I kept looking around for an old man with a humpback, lurking in some corner of one of the courts.”

Rufus stroked her face lightly with his palm, feeling his unease fade. He was aware once more of her pallor, of her weakness, of his need to look after her. “I’m going to fetch you some food from the mess. I won’t be long.”

“Bring something for Juno too.”

Alone, Portia sat drowsily in front of the fire, the ache in her ankle dulled by the whisky. She felt for the first time in her life as if she had come home.

Rufus returned within ten minutes, shaking snow off his cloak, stamping his boots in the doorway. A lad carrying a laden tray came in after Rufus. He glanced curiously at Portia as he set the tray on the table and seemed inclined to linger.

“Thank you, Adam,” Rufus said pointedly, putting a lidded jug down on the hearth.

“Right, sir.” The boy cast one more glance at the figure by the fire and with obvious reluctance went back into the snow.

Portia sniffed hungrily. “What is it?”

“Soup, braised ox tongue, and sack posset.” Rufus filled a bowl with vegetable soup, his movements swift and efficient. He gave it to her and stood watching as she ate, like a mother hen with a wounded chick, Portia thought, stifling a smile. There was something wonderfully comforting about that close, concerned regard. It told her that in some way she belonged again. She belonged enough that the most trivial aspects of her well-being mattered to Rufus.

She drank the soup greedily. It tasted like manna from heaven. Rufus replaced the soup with the ox tongue and set a saucer of chicken giblets on the floor for Juno, who attacked it with something remarkably like a growl. Rufus poured himself more whisky and stood before the fireplace in his habitual pose, one arm resting along the mantelpiece, one foot on the fender. He watched, amused by his own possessive satisfaction, as his patients ate with steady concentration. Color was returning to Portia’s cheeks and a little bounce to her hair, he noticed.

At last Juno abandoned her dish and came to the fire. She lay at Portia’s feet, rolling blissfully onto her back, exposing her distended belly to the warmth, her legs flopping in the air.

Rufus took away Portia’s empty platter and took up the covered jug from the hearth. “Drink this and then I’ll put you to bed.” He filled a tankard with the hot spiced milk curdled with wine and Portia curled her hands around it, burying her nose in the fragrant steam.

“Where’re the boys?” His choice of words had reminded her of his unruly and ramshackle pair. She glanced toward the curtained corner with a little start. “They aren’t out in the snow, are they?”

“No, of course they’re not. I don’t let them out in a blizzard.” Rufus sounded indignant at such an implication. He was filling a warming pan with embers from the fire. “They’ll sleep with Will tonight.”

“Do they often do that?”

Rufus shrugged, setting down the tongs. “Quite often … if they’re with him when they get sleepy.” He picked up the warming pan and went upstairs.

Portia drank her sack posset. It seemed a remarkably haphazard way to bring up children, but who was she to talk? She who’d never known a moment’s routine in her own upbringing. Not that she’d trumpet Jack’s parenting as a model.

When Rufus came back down again and lifted her to carry her upstairs, she felt the most glorious relaxation, a warm and sensuous languor. Lying back in his arms, she lazily lifted a hand to touch his face.

“Don’t get any ideas,” he said, supporting her against his upraised knee as he turned back the quilts on his own big bed. “Necrophilia has never been a passion of mine.”

“I’m not that tired,” Portia said hopefully.

“Believe me, you are,” he stated, deftly divesting her of the fur-lined robe and inserting her neatly into the bed. The warming pan had been passed over the sheets, and the bed was blissfully cozy.

Juno whined from the bottom of the stairs. The flight might just as well have been a sheer mountain for all her ability to scramble up it on her short legs.

“The dog may sleep below by the fire,” Rufus said firmly, seeing Portia about to plead for the puppy. He looked down at her, thinking how pitifully frail her shape seemed under the covers. And yet he knew how robust she really was—at least, when she hadn’t trekked for twelve hours through snowdrifts to save his neck.

“I have to talk to George about posting pickets. Will you be all right alone for a little?”

“Mmm.” Portia yawned, waves of sleep breaking inexorably over her. “But can’t Juno sleep up here?”

“No. She’s filthy and probably flea-ridden,” Rufus declared. “She’ll be warm enough by the fire. Now go to sleep and don’t argue.” He bent and kissed her, his lips lingering for a minute on hers. He’d forgotten how deliciously soft her mouth was. Soft and sweet and wonderfully responsive.

“More.” she demanded, when reluctantly he raised his head.

“Later. You may have as many kisses as you wish,” he promised with a light laugh, then left her before she could sing more of her siren songs, and went downstairs, quietly letting himself out of the house.

Juno whined and scratched at the stairs. When Portia didn’t come down to fetch her, she began to bark, incredibly annoying little yaps that made it impossible for Portia to sleep even through her exhaustion.