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His hesitation cost him a victory. The soldier leaped away and in seconds had one arm hooked around Lark from behind.
“I’ll break her neck,” the burly man vowed. “Take one step closer, and I’ll snap it like a chicken bone.” Stooping, he snatched up his fallen sword.
“Don’t harm the girl!” one of the other soldiers cried.
“Divinity of Satan,” Oliver bellowed in a fury. “I should have sent you to hell when I had the chance.”
Glaring at Oliver, Lark’s captor drew back his sword arm.
“Thou shalt not kill, either,” Lark stated. As Oliver watched, astonished, she brought up her foot and slammed it down hard on the soldier’s instep. At the same time her pointed little elbow jabbed backward. Hard. If the blow had met his ribs, it would have left him breathless. But he was much taller than Lark and her aim was low, and when it connected, Oliver winced just from watching.
The man doubled up, unable to speak. Then, clutching himself, he half limped and half ran into the woods beyond the road.
Kit’s opponent, bleeding now, backed away. Swearing, he leapfrogged onto one of the horses, cut the traces and galloped off.
Oliver raced toward the third soldier. This one fled toward the remaining horse, but Lark planted herself in his path.
“No!” Oliver screamed, picturing her mown down like a sheaf of wheat. But as Lark’s hands grasped at the mercenary’s untidy tunic, he merely shoved her aside, mounted, spurred and was gone.
“Lark!” Oliver said, rushing forward. She lay like a broken bird in the path. “Dear God, Lark! Are you hurt—” He broke off.
It struck just then. The dark, silent enemy that had stalked Oliver all his life. The tightening of his chest muscles. The absolute impossibility of emptying his lungs. The utter certainty that this was the attack that would kill him.
The physicians called it asthma. Aye, they had a name for it, but no cure.
The world seemed to catch fire at the edges, a familiar warning sign. He saw Lark climb to her feet. Kit seemed to tilt as if he bent to pick something up. Lark moved her mouth, but Oliver could not hear her over the thunder of blood rushing in his ears.
God, not now. But he felt himself stagger.
“Ahhhh.” The thin sound escaped him. Shamed to the very toes of his Cordovan riding boots, Oliver de Lacey staggered back and fell, arms wheeling, fingers grasping at empty air.
Three
“I’ve never stayed at an inn before,” Lark confessed to Kit as she cut a strip of bandage.
Oliver leaned against the scrubbed pine table in the large kitchen and tried to appear nonchalant, when in fact he was doing his best to keep from sliding into a heap on the floor.
What was it about Lark, he wondered, that so arrested the eye and took hold of the heart?
Perhaps it was the childlike sense of wonder with which she regarded the world. Or perhaps her complete lack of vanity, as if she were not even aware of herself as a woman. Or maybe, just maybe, it was her sweet nature, which made him want to hold her in his arms and taste her lips, to be the object of her earnest devotion.
“Oliver and I know every inn and ivybush ’twixt London and Wiltshire,” Kit was saying. Discreetly he sidled over to the table beside Oliver.
To catch me if I fall, Oliver thought, feeling both gratitude and resentment. Cursed with his baffling illness, he had lived a peculiar and isolated boyhood. When he had finally emerged from his shell of seclusion, Kit had been there with his brotherly advice, his ready sword arm and a fierce protective instinct that surfaced even now, when Oliver had grown a handspan taller than his friend.
Kit held out his hand and clenched his teeth as Lark washed the grit from his wound. She worked neatly, her movements deft as she applied the bandage. Oliver noticed that her nails were chewed, and he liked that about her, for it was evidence that she suffered unease like anyone else.
She wasted no missish sympathy on Kit but confronted his injury with matter-of-fact compassion and an unexpected hint of humor. “Try to avoid battles for a few days, Kit. You should give this gash a chance to heal.”
“I wonder what the devil those bast—er, rude scoundrels were after,” Kit said. “They didn’t even attempt to rob us.”
“Perhaps they were planning to kill us first.” Oliver had become rather casual about his brushes with death. Long ago he had decided to defy fortune. He refused to let the weakness of his lungs conquer him. He meant to die his own way. Thus far, the pursuit had been amusing.
“Thank you, mistress.” Kit pressed his bandaged hand to his chest. “I feel much better now. But I would still dearly like to know what those arse—er, wayward marls were about. Ah! I just remembered something.” With his good hand he reached into the cuff of his boot and pulled out a coin. “I did find this when we searched the coach.”
Both Oliver and Lark leaned forward to study the coin. Their foreheads touched, and as one they drew back in chagrin.
“Curious,” said Kit, angling the coin toward the waning light through the kitchen window. “Tis silver. An antique shilling?”
“Nay, look. ’Tis marked with a cross.” Cocking his head, Oliver read the motto inscribed around the edge of the piece. “‘Deo favente.’”
“With God’s favor,” Lark translated.
Oliver discovered a useful fact about Mistress Lark. She was incapable of keeping her counsel. Like an accused criminal in a witness box, she turned pale and ducked her head with guilt.
Damn the wench. She knew something.
“Who were they, Lark?” Oliver demanded.
“I know not.” She flung up her chin and glared at him. Oliver wondered if it was just a trick of the sinking light or if he truly saw the glint of fear in her eyes.
“I’ll keep this and make some inquiries.” Kit left the kitchen through a passageway to the taproom.
Oliver grinned and spread his arms wide. “Alone at last.”
She rolled her eyes. “Take off your doublet and shirt.”
He sighed giddily. “I love a wench who knows her own mind and is forthright in her desires.”
“My only desire is to find the source of all this blood.” She pointed to the dark, sticky stain seeping through his clothing.
“Your barbed tongue?” he suggested.
“If I could inflict such damage, my lord, I’d have no need of a protector, would I?” She patted the tabletop. “Sit here so I don’t have to stoop to examine you.”
He hoisted himself up. Without hesitation, she drew on first one lace point attaching his sleeve to his doublet and then the other. His bare, sun-bronzed arms seemed to stir her not at all. Did she not see how smooth and well muscled they were? How strong and shapely?
“Now the doublet,” she said, “or shall I remove that, as well?”
“It’s so much better when you do it.”
She nodded absently and began working the frogged onyx fastenings free.
Her hands were as light and delicate as the brush of a bird’s wing. As she bent close to her task, he caught a whiff of the most delicious scent. It clung to her hair, her clothes, her skin. Not perfume or oil, but something far more evocative.
Woman. Pure woman. How he loved it.
“Why did you stop me from killing that sheep biter who tried to murder me?” he asked.
She parted the doublet like a pair of double doors. “You are no assassin, my lord.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t know for sure. But instinct tells me that you have never killed a soul, and it would pain you if you did. You seem a compassionate man.”
“Compassionate?” His doublet, finally freed, fell backward with a clunk to the table. “I am no compassionate man, but a bold and brash rogue. A brute of the first order.”
“A brute.” Her mouth thinned, and a sparkling echo of humor lightened her voice. “Who faints in the aftermath of battle.”
He snapped his mouth shut. So, she thought the asthma attack was a swoon. Should he set her straight, or should he allow her to go on believing him a coward? Worse than a coward. A high-strung, tender, emotional, limp-wristed, sentimental man. A wretch beyond redemption.
She answered the dilemma for him, bless her. She turned those enormous rain-colored eyes up to him and said, “My lord, I do not impugn your manhood.”
“Thank God for that,” he muttered. Seeing that he had irritated her, he donned a look of earnestness. “Go on.”
“Your behavior today marks you as a person of true courage. For a man who loves combat, to fight is no sign of bravery. But for one who abhors it, to do battle is a sign of valor.”
“Quite so.” The idea pleased him. If the truth be known, he loved a good sword fight or round of fisticuffs. But let her think he had been forced to drag courage from reluctance for her sake.
“This will hurt,” she said. “The fabric of your shirt clings to the wound.”
“I’ll try not to scream when you remove it.”
“Truly, you are never serious.” Gingerly she worked the caked lawn fabric from the gash in his side. He felt a burn, then a hot trickle as he began bleeding anew, but he’d be damned if he’d say anything. Compassionate man indeed!
She lifted the shirt over his head and removed it. Her exclamation was high-pitched, feminine and wholly welcome to Oliver’s ears.
“I do so love it when a woman cries out at the sight of my bare chest,” he said.
“Tis a terrible wound,” she said.
“Nay, just bloody. Clean it up and bandage it, and I’ll be good as new.”
He was hoping that as she worked she would notice his chest was broad and deep, nicely furred with golden hair a shade darker than that on his head. But the silly witling had no appreciation whatever for his physique. His male beauty was lost on her. He wondered what the devil she was thinking.
Determined to keep her wits about her, Lark concentrated on her task. But her thoughts kept wandering. She could barely keep from staring. She caught her lip firmly in her teeth and tried to think only of cleansing the wound, not of the magnificent body of the man sitting on the table.
He was right about the gash just beneath his arm. It was shallow and should heal well. His thick doublet had protected him from the worst of his opponent’s blade.
“’Tis clean now,” she said, rinsing her hands in the water basin. She pressed a folded cloth to the cut. “Hold this, please, and I’ll bind it.”
“This is such an honor.”
He was the most obliging man she had ever met. Perhaps that was why Spencer had chosen him.
“I shall have to wrap you snugly to keep the pad in place,” she said.
“Wrap away, mistress. I’m all yours.”
This proved to be the most awkwardly intimate part of the whole business. She leaned close, practically pressing her cheek to his naked chest as she passed the strip of cloth around behind him.
She could feel the warmth and smoothness of his skin. Could hear his heart beat. Its rhythm quickened.
Nonsense. She was plain as a wood wren, and he was as beautiful as a god.
A god, aye, but he smelled like a man.
In truth, the scent was as exotic to her as the perfumes of Araby. Yet some primal instinct inside her, some wayward feminine impulse Spencer had failed to suppress, recognized the scent of a man. Sweat and horse, perhaps a tinge of saddle leather and woodsmoke. Individually these smells provoked no reaction, but taken as a whole they made a heady bouquet.
She gritted her teeth and tried to keep from fumbling with the bandage. In one day she had seen and heard and felt more of the world than she had in all her nineteen years, and she did not like being thrust into such a feast of voluptuousness.
What she liked was life at Blackrose Priory. The quiet hours of study and prayer. The sober, steady rhythm of spinning and weaving. The safety. The solitude.
One day with Oliver de Lacey had snatched her out of that protective cocoon, and she wanted to go back in. To tamp down the wildness growing inside her, to deny that she had ever felt such a thing as excitement.
“Lark?” he whispered in her ear, and his breath was a tender caress.
“Yes?” She braced herself, wondering if he’d ask her again to have his child.
“My dear, you have bound me like a Maypole.”
“What?” Lark asked stupidly.
“While I’m not averse to bondage in some situations, I think several yards of cloth is sufficient.”
Startled, she stepped back. The makeshift bandage did indeed wrap him like ribbons round a Maypole. A strangled sound escaped her.
A giggle. Lark had never giggled in her life.
Oliver released a long-suffering sigh. “Had I known it was so easy to make you laugh, I would have gotten myself wounded much earlier in the day.”
She sobered instantly. “You must not say such things.” Seeking a distraction, she began to tidy the area, folding the unused bandages and removing the basin of water. “I never did thank you and Kit, my lord, for enduring such trouble on account of me.”
“What man would not lay down his life for a lady in peril?” he asked. “Happily, it did not come to that. In fact, I should thank you.”
She emptied the basin out the door of the kitchen and turned to him, perplexed. “Thank me for what?”
“As you pointed out earlier, you stopped me from killing a man. For all that he did provoke me, I should not like to have his blood on my hands.”
“My foolishness almost cost you your life. I let him grab me from behind.”
Oliver slapped his palms on the tabletop. “Ah, you did fight like a spitfire, Lark. Your quick thinking and courage are rare.”
“In a woman, you mean.”
“In anyone.” A lazy smile lifted a corner of his mouth. “When I remember that poor trot’s face…He didn’t expect to be stomped upon and jabbed by a mere slip of a girl.”
Lark absorbed his words like a rain-parched rose. Never had she been praised before, not even for doing tasks of servile duty. Oliver seemed genuinely pleased with her.
