King's Warrior (Renegade Lords Book 1) Read online

  She saw him staring at her. “The stars are up there,” she teased, reaching out to tip his face up with a set of chilled fingertips.

  He glanced up obligingly, then swung his gaze down. “We have to go back.”

  She kept looking up, as if he hadn’t spoken. “I know. Saleté de Mer is the closest port, and Sherwood will be long gone by now, hunting after you. You must get on with your journey.”

  “I must get you home.”

  Her eyes slid to his and, star shine notwithstanding, they were dull. “Yes. Of course. Home.”

  She let him fold her body into his chest. He slung his arms around her shoulders, over the thick mantle. “It is a clever plan,” she admitted, her words muffled, drifting up through the fur lining.

  “He’ll never expect us to go back,” he agreed.

  “Moreover, tomorrow is Twelfth Night. The town will be mad with revelry. We shall be one of many in the streets. It will be no matter to get through the gates: I will speak with Gustave.”

  “Again with Gustave,” he muttered, but her voice had grown excited with the planning. “And then we shall visit Baselard….”

  His eyebrows flew up in surprise. “Visiting? We’re going visiting?”

  She nodded absently. “Baselard, the blacksmith.”

  “Why would we do a mad thing like that?”

  She looked up with a distracted frown. “Do you not recall? You said you needed a whetstone.”

  He smiled slowly. “Beautiful and smart.” He ran his hands up the cloak, feeling her warm body wrapped beneath it. “So, the blacksmith is a friend of yours.”

  “Baselard used to be a friend of mine,” she replied archly. “A long time ago.”

  “And now?”

  “I have no…friends.”

  Torn as to how to feel about this, he finally shook his head in disgust. “Men are fools.”

  “Yes, they are,” she agreed.

  He laughed and slid a palm under the heavy hood, into the warm pocket between her hair and the nape of her neck. “’Tisn’t without danger, you know. There are good reasons to press on. Sherwood may have left Saleté de Mer, but he’s a dangerous proclivity for informants. They could be anywhere: the gates, the quay, everywhere in between.” He looked at her. “As he told you, he pays very well.”

  She considered this a moment, her lips pursed thoughtfully, then went up on her toes and touched her lips to his.

  “Never fear,” she whispered, and he smiled against her mouth, at her thinking to comfort him. “Messages take a long time to travel through the snow. By the time Sherwood receives them, you will be long gone. As for getting through the gates… Well, I have Gustave, don’t I?”

  He scowled.

  “He wouldn’t say a word to harm me,” she told him, and Tadhg rolled his eyes, “and as for payments….” She smiled. “Well, I have Master Edwin’s coin and a pouch of a safe passage writs, do I not?”

  “Contraband?” He shifted in front of her, spread his feet and curled his palm around the nape of her neck. “A nice lass like you? I’m shocked.”

  She leaned into his touch. “Oh yes, there is no end to the things I’ll do now.”

  “Thank God,” he said softly, and kissed her then, slowly, up against the side of the building, leaning her back and lazily stroking his thumbs down her neck, as if they were youths beside the barn door on a summer’s day, not full-grown fugitives on a winter’s night, him standing bare-assed naked in the snow.

  Her hands slid down to the region in question, and she straightened in astonishment. “Tadhg, you’re naked.”

  “Just my arse,” he clarified, taking her hand in his.

  She laughed as he pulled her away from the door. “Why are you naked?”

  “I thought you’d left. I was coming after you.”

  She smiled a little. “Naked?”

  “Saving time.” He drew her back inside the warm, fire-lit hut. She was laughing as he laid her down on their bed of hay. “We must arrive at Saleté de Mer in the deepest of night,” he said, lying down beside her.

  “When no one is about,” she agreed, rolling toward him.

  He pushed up on an elbow. “That gives us all day.”

  “And the sun has not even risen yet,” she said with a brave smile. “Let us make it a very long one.”

  “I shall make it the longest day of your life,” he promised, and she laughed as he leaned down to her.

  “Oh, I wish…” she whispered fiercely, against his lips, then nothing more.

  He whispered, “Don’t say it,” and kissed her.

  They made love again, slowly, throughout the day, several times stopping without climax, to whisper about the stakes of his terrible burden or the flowers in Ireland, sometimes to feed the fire or themselves. But finally, at some point, after the sun had set, he set her free from the piling, mounting tension, like a cloud made of steam and flame, and found his release in hers, his joy in her pleasure, when she came, watching him, her body bucking, crying his name.

  Tadhg had known many women in his life, high-born and whore, widowed and virginal. They had come to him with their arms and knees wide, come to the charming, half-tamed Irishman, to the king’s right-hand man, to the warrior and the knight.

  But he had never come to them. His heart had stood aloof, distantly watching, muddied and ambitious for more. Not one of those women had kindled his spirit the way Maggie did.

  Brave, earnest, innocent Maggie, who’d fallen in love with an outlaw who’d done nothing but use her, because she’d seen something better in him.

  He knew now that even if he never saw Ireland again, he’d still somehow found his way home.

  And tomorrow, he would leave her, for to bring her would mean her death.

  This was his fate then: to leave home, and shred his heart as he tore free.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  IT WAS SIMPLE to get back in through the gates of Saleté de Mer. The Twelfth Night revelries were at their height, and couvre-feu meant nothing. Candles and fires were burning all across the town, in the streets and inside homes, windows shining bright. Song and music drifted from homes and inns and taverns. Packs of men and boys were out, dashing through the streets wearing devilish masks.

  Gustave was alone at the gates, reinstated to his post, happy to see Magdalena and exultant to take another bribe.

  The moon swung huge and white over their heads as Gustave told them how Sherwood and his men had galloped away in a cloud of snow and mud yesterday morning after a small, almost violent delay at the gates, when no keys could be found to allow them through.

  Tadhg and Magdalena looked at each other and smiled.

  Gustave also had recommendations about sea captains who would be amendable to private transactions down on the quay, men who could be trusted to honor agreements made with cold hard cash. He was derisive when Captain Piper’s name came up.

  “He’s lives in the gutter,” Gustave said with a snort of disgust. “He is a pig. Do not have any dealings with him. You will have all your dealings with my man, Didier. Go, tell him I sent you. And for you, Dame Thread,” he added with a gallant bow, “I shall halve my referral fee.”

  She hesitated. “Gustave, old friend, I have a bit of coin, but surely Master Didier will wish for some of it.” Gustave blinked. “And so, in the matter of your referral fee—halved of course—” she smiled kindly, “I wonder…would a dozen sealed writs of safe passage settle the debt?”

  Gustave’s face slowly expanded into a smile.

  “Dame Thread,” he said warmly. “It is always the greatest of pleasures doing business with you.”

  THEY HURRIED THROUGH the moonlit, snow-clad streets, Tadhg tracking behind Maggie like a wolf, scanning alleyways and shadows as they moved between the packs of revelers, until they reached Baselard the blacksmith, whose face lighted when he saw Maggie, and hardened when he saw Tadhg.

  My, he was a large one.

  He glared at Tadhg as Maggie explained what they
needed, but nonetheless, left the festivities of his home to open up his workshop. Maggie sat softly chatting with him while Tadhg sharpened his blades to a diamond-sharp finish that hand-held stones could never do.

  Then they left, swift and silent, hurrying to her shop. They snuck down the alley and Tadhg put his spine to the wall beside the back door, pressing Maggie flat beside him, listening. Then taking her key, he unlocked it and swung it wide. Cold air and pale moonlight rushed in, then they stepped inside.

  Tadhg prepared himself for wreckage, but it had all been cleaned up. “Your apprentice?” he asked softly.

  “Yes, and she took the pouch of money,” Maggie whispered, running her hand across the mantle before spinning to him. “We can go get it—”

  “No time.”

  She hesitated, then nodded. “I will visit her in the morning.”

  The knowledge that her life would go on without him, that she would make deliveries and visit people, mayhap Baselard again, too, one day soon, sliced through him like a knife. But he had no way to staunch the wound, nothing to offer in place of those paltry things.

  “The money is for you,” he said savagely, inadequately. “All of it. Every penny.”

  She nodded, then her cool hand slid into his, and she pressed the bag of coin Edwin had given her into his hand.

  He pushed it back. “All of it.”

  “You must buy passage on that boat,” she said in a fierce whisper. “Take it.” She forced his fingers to close around it.

  They stared at each other, not speaking. Packs of street revelers passed by as the two of them stood in the dark interior of Maggie’s shop, each with a thousand things to say, neither of them saying a word.

  Then, not at all gently, he hauled her up against his body so hard and high her feet left the floor, and he kissed her. Fiercely, roughly, taking everything he could from her, giving everything he could to her, pouring everything of himself that could be poured into a kiss, trying somehow to complete every exchange of the heart that he wished to spend the next fifty years exchanging with her. But there was only tonight.

  Magdalena met every lash of his tongue, took his rampant, angry, bruising kisses and returned all the angry, rampant, bruised things inside of her, giving over her lifetime of kisses. She touched him everywhere he could be touched, lifted her knees around his hips, wrapped her arms around his shoulders, pressed her body up to his, asking wordlessly for everything hard and deep and endlessly taking in him, hoping, somehow, to be taken herself.

  Then, abruptly, he tore away. He felt as if he’d been broken. The shop was filled with their pants as they each backed up a step, then another. He raked a shaky hand through his hair. “Maggie—”

  Her eyes were bright with tears. “Go,” she whispered. “Just go.”

  He didn’t move.

  “Go.”

  He spun on his heel and walked out. He did not look back.

  “LUCKY OF YOU to be talking to me, sir,” boomed Didier, Gustave’s friend, a huge, burly sea pilot, well over six feet tall, with arms like tree limbs, a face like a smashed gourd, and a huge grin. He pocketed the bag of coin Tadhg had handed him. “You’re just in time.”

  “Aye, just in time, the tide’s going out,” Tadhg muttered, his hand throbbing from Didier’s excessively firm grip. He did not feel at all lucky. Nor as if he was in time for anything. He felt bleak. And cold. As he looked across the silky black water, and thought about putting that between himself and Maggie, his heart felt as if a frozen net had passed over it, turning it grey and icy.

  Maggie, left behind.

  Left behind, safe, he told himself sternly.

  In her cold, dark shop.

  Safe.

  Alone.

  Safe. Safe, safe, safe.

  Didier’s voice pressed on. “…not the tide. We’ve got to leave now, fast and quiet. We can push out with poles, stay close to the shoreline, cut away once we hit the trees.”

  Tadhg’s gaze snapped away from the nighttime sea. “Why would we do that?”

  “Because they’re shutting down the docks. Word came just a while ago; some great lug of an English lord is back in town, and the mayor’s letting him shut us down again. They’re swarming everywhere, searching everything. Some of his men here at the docks, some’s back in town.”

  Coldness swept through him.

  Not safe.

  He could take her now.

  Something punched through him like a fist through glass, breaking all the illusions of mission and purpose he’d clung to until now. He knew, with breathtaking clarity, what his mission truly was: to keep Maggie safe. To protect her.

  To take her home.

  At the least, he would ask her. Beg her. Plead with her to come make a home with him. Madness, no doubt, for she was too wise and smart to say yes, no matter how her heart might yearn. Too wise to agree to follow an outlaw through perils unknown, hoping to find a quiet life on the other side.

  But then, Maggie did not want a ‘quiet’ life, did she? Sweet, innocent Maggie had the heart of an adventurer. She wanted to leap off cliffs.

  His own heart leapt.

  Danger fore and aft, yet his heart was lifted, because his path was finally clear, after all these years. Maggie was his mission.

  Maggie was his home.

  And after all, he reasoned with sudden, reckless good humor, how much harder could it be to sneak two people across a hostile land, rather than only one?

  He turned to the cheerful, smashed-up face of Didier. “How long will you give me?”

  Didier frowned. “Give you? For what—?”

  “I must go back.”

  “Well God’s truth—”

  “How long?”

  Didier regarded him, his bottom lip thrust out, then swung his tree-limb arm up and pointed at the sky. “When the moon hits the spire of St. Germaine’s, I leave.”

  Tadhg positioned himself where Didier stood and looked up. A church spire, sharp-edged and black, poked up into the night sky, half an inch to the right of the huge, round, mottled white moon.

  “I’ll be here,” he vowed, turning.

  “I’ll not wait,” Didier called after softly.

  Tadhg was already running.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  MAGDALENA SAT in her bedchamber, staring blankly at the wall. She hadn’t undressed, or lit a fire, or thanked God yet for her safe return. Surely in the morning she would be able to do such things again.

  In the morning, she would be able to return to everything that was proper and mundane and grey. Right now, though, it seemed to be requiring all her strength simply to sit on the edge of the bed and breathe.

  Her eyes felt red but dry, as if they’d been rimmed in sawdust. Her hands were shivering as if they were cold, but she didn’t feel it. She stared without seeing or feeling or thinking.

  Then, dimly, she heard the door downstairs click open.

  No…. It couldn’t be.

  She heard the low tread of boots on planks. Her heart hammered, lifting in her chest.

  It could not be.

  The buoyancy that lifted her heart also lifted her to her feet, her heart tumbling then leaping. Reckless happiness expanded inside her, a hot bubble of hope.

  The boots came softly up the stairs. She closed her eyes, as if she couldn’t bear to watch herself hope so ardently.

  “You came back,” she whispered.

  “That I did, Magdalena,” replied a cold voice. “I came back for you.”

  Fear broke and ran down her spine like ice melting. She looked up to see Lord Sherwood in her doorway.

  Behind him stood the mayor.

  Shaking, she got to her feet. Sherwood smiled. She realized bravado was her only hope now.

  “You,” she said coldly. “I thought you were done aggrieving me.”

  “Not yet,” he replied softly.

  “My lord mayor.” She turned to Albert with haughty dignity. “I must protest these constant intrusions. Perhaps this English n
obleman can see to his own business, and you can begin seeing to the town’s?”

  The mayor glanced at Sherwood nervously. “Mistress, his business is the town’s business, on the order of the king.”

  She looked back at the baron. “’Friends with the law’ indeed.”

  He gave the faintest imitation of a bow and stepped into her bedchamber. “I shall keep this as simple as possible, mistress. Where is Tadhg?”

  Her blood ran cold, but she said in a flat, disinterested voice, “I do not know what your words mean, sir.”

  “Do you not?”

  At her doorway, the mayor fluttered like a fat little bird. “Now, my lord, please. You cannot go in her bedchamber— I—I cannot countenance this molesting of my townsfolk—”

  “Can you not, Albert?” asked the baron softly. “Are you quite certain of that?”

  The mayor fell silent. Maggie’s heart simply fell.

  From downstairs the sound of more boots moved through her shop, then a voice called up the stairs, “My lord, we found nothing.”

  “He is here somewhere,” Sherwood called back, never taking his eyes off Magdalena. “Search the outbuilding and outhouse.” He took another step into the bedroom. “Tell me where he is.”

  She couldn’t help herself. She backed up a step in fear. “Where is whom?”

  “The outlaw Tadhg.”

  “Your outlaw again?” she tried to scoff. “You think I am hiding an outlaw? There is only one outlaw here, sir, and I am staring very hard at him right now.”

  He smiled. “Edwin Needleman thought you two in love.”

  At this proof he knew everything, that he’d been on their heel, so close, so cunning, her heart dropped and dropped and dropped, tumbling into a cold pit in her belly.

  “I’d wondered if he spoke true. Did he, mistress? Were you such a fool as to fall for Tadhg?”

  She kept her chin up, but turned her face away.

  Sherwood’s gaze traveled down her face and neck, then arrested. He stilled, then slowly unsheathed a knife from his belt.

  She stared at him. Time slowed down. The mayor’s mouth, at the doorway, moved slowly. He was making some sort of sound, talking, protesting perhaps, but it was muffled and far away as the baron reached out with the knife and gently, slowly, touched the tip of it to Magdalena’s neck.