Fairest of Them All Read online

  She clamped her lips together, driven to mute shyness by her appearance for the first time in her memory.

  “So your name is Holly, eh?” he asked, wiping the mud from his own face with the damp kerchief.

  “Aye. ’Tis whispered that I was conceived beneath the hollyhocks in the castle garden.”

  Austyn grinned at his wife’s prim bluntness. It seemed he hadn’t been the only man to succumb to the garden’s enchantment. “From your prickly disposition, I thought it might have been the holly bushes.”

  She shot him a sullen glance. “Better to be spawned from thorns than hewn from unfeeling oak.”

  The beauty of her eyes startled him to silence. It was like tipping over a moss-encrusted rock to find a diamond beneath. He doubted she even realized it, but she had kept one arm draped around his neck for balance and was now toying with his hair, twirling first one strand, then another, about her slender fingers. The intimacy of the act sent a strange shiver across his nape.

  “Why do you find me unfeeling? Because I didn’t drag you out of the water, bend you over my knee, and give you the sound thrashing you deserve? Or is it simply because I haven’t granted you the attention you’re so desperately craving?”

  She stared straight ahead, her delicate jaw set at a mutinous angle. “You are a most churlish man. I care nothing for your attention.”

  “And you are a most dishonest girl.” Something odd flickered in her eyes. “Now why don’t you tell me what made you so wretchedly unhappy?”

  She bowed her head. Austyn almost wished she hadn’t. With her face hidden, he had only her naked nape to contemplate. Unlike the blotchy skin of her cheeks, her nape was pale cream dusted with baby fine hair. He was distracted by the overwhelming desire to feather his lips across it. He shook off the disturbing urge, making a mental note to order some fine silks for wimples and veils.

  “I was unhappy because I wanted my mother,” she confessed softly.

  Austyn frowned. He could hardly fault her for grieving at being wrenched so abruptly from her mother’s arms. “I saw no sign of the countess yesterday. Was she ill?”

  “No. She was dead. She’s been dead since I was five.” Holly fixed him with those stunning eyes again. “So you must find me utterly ridiculous to be carrying on so over nothing more than a ghost.”

  Austyn found her much less ridiculous than he would have conceded. “Do you remember her?”

  “Not as well as I’d like. Sometimes it seems as if time were melting my memories.”

  “Time hasn’t been so kind to me. My mother’s been dead for almost twenty years yet I remember everything about her. Her voice. Her smile. The angle at which she tilted her head when she was singing.” He lowered his eyes before they could betray the full measure of his bitterness. “Would to God that I could forget.”

  Holly continued to weave her fingers through his hair, her touch dangerously near a caress. “She was unkind to you?”

  There were some delusions Austyn could not allow himself, no matter the solace they would give. He met Holly’s gaze squarely. “Never.”

  He would have found her pity abhorrent and her compassion suspect, but he could hardly resist the offhand grace with which she drew the kerchief from his hand and dabbed a missed speck of mud from his temple. He found himself gazing not at her ravaged hair or sparse lashes, but at the pursed temptation of her lips.

  He had believed there to be no surer cure for his unabated ardor than his bride’s presence on his lap, but at the tenderness of the wifely gesture, his loins surged as if galvanized by a jolt of lightning.

  Austyn scrambled to his feet, catching her elbow before she could tumble back into the brook.

  Fearing his conflicting urges would attract her notice, he started toward the horses at a brisk stride, hauling her along beside him. “Let us dawdle no longer, my lady. We must make haste if we are to reach Caer Gavenmore before nightfall.”

  “Very good, sir,” she replied, the haughty bite restored to her voice. “Perhaps we shall yet reach your keep before I waste away to skin and bones for lack of sustenance.”

  If anyone was surprised when Austyn and Holly emerged from their private parley with Holly mounted behind her husband and the mare plodding after them on a rope, they were wise enough to keep their opinions to themselves. Since twilight was fast approaching and they’d left the shelter of the forest for a windswept slope, no one thought it unusual that Nathanael would draw up his cowl to shield his face.

  Holly discovered that her husband’s broad back provided shelter from any number of unpleasantries. Since she rode sidesaddle behind him, her arms secured around his lean waist, she no longer had to fret about revealing her padded skirts. Her papa had forbidden her the pleasures of hunting, hawking, or simply cantering across the countryside, and the rustic charm of the breeze ruffling her cropped hair was impossible to resist. She found she could even allow herself to doze by resting her cheek against Austyn’s back.

  She awoke to discover the soothing rocking of the horse had ceased. She sniffed the air, intrigued by its metallic bite. They must be nearer to a river than she realized. The sun had dropped, tinging the air with a violet haze and mellowing both shadow and substance to muted shades of gray.

  She leaned around Austyn’s shoulder for a clearer view, realizing that it was not the river’s ripe tang that had jarred her from sleep, but the tension flaying her husband’s body. His dark hair whipped in the wind, revealing an expression as remote as the crag of stone on which they stood.

  She followed his gaze to a jagged promontory jutting out over the silvery belt of water. She widened her eyes, then blinked rapidly. Surely only a dream could conjure such a majestic vision! She might have sought to rub the Stardust of sleep from her eyes had Elspeth’s astounded expression not echoed her own.

  A castle crowned the promontory, separated from thin air by a vast curtain wall of mortared sandstone. Crennelated towers flanked its mighty ramparts with a lithe grace that belied their defensive purpose.

  “Your home?” she croaked, her throat inexplicably dry.

  “Aye,” he replied grimly. “And yours as well, my lady.”

  Holly swallowed, dumbfounded anew. ’Twas hardly the crude fortress she had expected.

  “My God,” Nathanael breathed, too awestruck to repent or even notice his lapse into blasphemy. “ ’Tis one of the concentric castles the king’s father ordered built a generation ago in the vain hope of taming the muleheaded Welsh savages—” He subsided beneath Austyn’s level gaze, possessed by a sudden compulsion to polish his crucifix with the hem of his cloak.

  Holly could not fathom how a lowly knight had come to possess such a wonder. Snatches of gossip from the tournament floated back to her ears on wings of malice—once incredibly wealthy … stripped of their earldom … murder.

  “Hie!” Austyn cried without warning, driving the destrier into a gallop with a dig of his golden spurs.

  Holly clung to his waist, petty gossip forgotten in her consuming desire to remain mounted. The others were forced to break into a jarring canter to match their pace. She would have almost sworn ’twas not eagerness that spurred her husband toward home, but the resolve to have done with something distasteful.

  Unexpected exhilaration seized her as they thundered through the gathering twilight. Perhaps ’twas only the intoxicating hint of mist in the air or the stirring cadence of the beast’s gait, but Holly found it difficult to imagine being anywhere else but pressed to her husband’s back, her hands locked over the cool steel links of his hauberk. With Austyn to shelter her, she could turn her face to the wind without fear.

  They descended the slope, approaching the promontory from the landward side. The wind stung tears from Holly’s eyes, but she blinked them away, reluctant to tear her gaze from Caer Gavenmore, perched like a celestial palace on a cloud of limestone.

  Halfway around the promontory, she realized something was wrong. Terribly wrong. Rather than circling to protect its t
reasure, the massive curtain wall tapered into rubble at the fore of the castle, leaving it defenseless to attack. Half a tower jutted in ghostly silhouette against the darkening sky.

  It seemed the castle was not an impregnable fortress after all, but a dreamer’s folly, abandoned long before completion. Holly’s heart wept at its wasted beauty.

  Austyn slowed their party to a walk as they traversed the long hill toward the hollow maw that should have housed an iron gate. A lopsided half of a gatehouse watched them pass over a drawbridge that spanned a parched moat, its empty windows gaping like sightless eyes. Chilled by its abandoned air, Holly tightened her grip on Austyn’s waist without realizing it.

  ’Twas only fitting that the first thing she should see after they passed into what should have been the inner bailey had the outer bailey been completed was a grave. A mantle of weeds and ivy choked the stony cairn. Austyn did not spare it even a glance, but Holly twisted to stare, curious as to who might have been buried in such a prominent spot, yet denied eternal slumber in the family chapel.

  She longed to ask Austyn, but his rigid posture made him seem as forbidding as their surroundings. He bore little resemblance to the man who had cradled her on his lap and tenderly sponged the tears from her face.

  She was gathering her courage to ask him anyway when an arrow whizzed past her ear and something slammed her to the ground with the force of a catapulted stone.

  CHAPTER 12

  Holly snatched in a wheezing breath, her mind too foggy to determine if she’d been impaled by a falling timber or trampled by a herd of elk. Stars twinkled in her vision, fading slowly to a firmament of patchy grass. Only then did she realize the massive object pinning her face down to the ground was her husband’s body. It was a testament to both his keenly honed reflexes and his judgment that he had executed such a maneuver without crushing her fragile bones to dust.

  The beguiling mint of his breath singed her nape. Her first desperate instinct was to squirm out from under him. That urge was stifled by the implacable press of his lean hips against her backside. It was then that she realized her skirts had twisted in the fall and there was nothing to separate his loins from the naked swell of her rump but her delicate chemise and the thin skein of his hose. Her eyes widened with shock. Not only did Austyn not wear a padded codpiece; he had no need of one. She pressed her cheek to the cool grass, afraid to so much as breathe.

  She flinched as a quavering roar descended from one of the towers above them. “Goddamned leeches! Cursed whore-mongering tax collectors! You can trot right back to your bastard whore’s son of a king and tell him I’ll not contribute a ha’penny to fatten his English coffers. This is Welsh land, and Welsh land it shall remain as long as this old man has a gust of breath left in his body!”

  Austyn lifted his head and called out, “Stay your arrows and your tongue, old man! I—”

  Another arrow whistled past. Austyn pressed his mouth to Holly’s ear, warming it with his breath. “Stay down. No matter what happens, stay flat on your belly.”

  Had it not been such an absurd fancy, Holly would have almost sworn his lips brushed her nape in the ghost of a caress before he sprang to his feet in one lithe motion. She barely resisted the urge to jerk him back down. For his protection or her own, she could not have said. She felt naked without his body shielding hers, but he looked even more vulnerable as he strode boldly to the center of the courtyard, offering his heart as an unguarded target to the bowman in the tower.

  “Father, it’s Austyn,” he shouted in an irrefutable tone of authority. “I’ve come home.” He jerked one of the gold-laden panniers from the pack horse Nathanael was cowering behind and held it triumphantly aloft. “And I’ve brought enough gold so that you’ll never have to fear Edward’s tax collectors again!”

  The courtyard hung on tenterhooks of silence. Holly held her breath, surprised by the depth of her fear that the next arrow would make a widow of her.

  But from the tower came only a sheepish “Harrumph,” then the clatter of retreating footsteps. Nathanael crept out from behind the pack horse while Carey helped Elspeth up from her kneeling position. Austyn lowered the pannier to the ground, the sudden slump of his shoulders betraying his relief.

  “Does your father greet all of his guests with such enthusiasm?” Holly could not resist asking as she climbed to her feet. Nathanael shot her a frantic glance, and Holly wrestled her rebellious skirts into submission before Austyn could turn around.

  “Just be thankful I hid the oil for boiling before I left.” Austyn ran a hand wearily over his beard.

  They appeared to be standing in the main courtyard of an ancient stone keep ringed by wattle-and-daub cottages and outbuildings. The master architect of the concentric castle had plainly hoped to preserve the keep as the bustling heart of his creation. Now it slumbered beneath the same tragic spell of unfulfilled promise that enslaved the entire promontory.

  Full dark had descended and bats flitted from merlon to parapet. At least she didn’t have to fret about them getting tangled in her hair, Holly thought ruefully, edging a few steps nearer to Austyn.

  An iron-studded door creaked open to reveal a hesitant huddle of castle denizens. Several of them gripped torches in whitened fists. As they crept forth from the keep, shuffling their feet in unison like some timid dragon with twenty-four legs and twelve swiveling heads, torchlight flickered over their faces, revealing expressions of chilling dread.

  Holly took an involuntary step away from her husband, shying away from his grim profile. How was she to survive being wedded to a man who evoked such terror in his own retainers? A frisson of primal fear danced down her spine.

  A man whose scalp was as hairless and pink as a newborn’s rump separated himself from the quivering mass. “Welcome home, master. It seems your journey was a successful one.”

  Austyn clapped him on the shoulder without eliciting so much as a flinch. “Aye, Emrys. I’ve brought you a new mistress. ’Tis far past time, wouldn’t you say?”

  Holly’s confusion mounted. The servants clustered around Austyn, almost as if seeking his protection. Each of them seemed only too eager to touch him or offer some word of welcome or encouragement. She was the one receiving the fearful looks, the poorly concealed glances of dread. Why they weren’t afraid of Austyn, she realized with a start. They were afraid of her!

  Her suspicion was confirmed when Austyn reached to draw her out of the shadows. Several of his minions took hasty steps backward, stumbling over their own feet. One old fellow even dared to wiggle two fingers at her in the universal sign to ward away evil.

  As the ruthless torchlight struck her face, nearly blinding her, Holly resisted the urge to shield its desolate condition with her hands. Instead, she forced herself to stand straight and tall, bracing herself for the repugnance they were sure to express at her appearance. Austyn slipped one brawny arm around her waist.

  A collective gasp went up.

  “Oh, my,” breathed a female voice. “She’s precious!”

  “Aye,” said a man, drawing off his feathered cap in tribute. “I’ve never seen a more perfect lady. Why she’s like a little doll!”

  Holly could only blink in shock, utterly mystified by their reaction. Austyn was nudged away as they swarmed around her, touching her hacked-off hair, her mud-spattered gown, her blistered nose with coos of awe and delight. The old man who had shaken his fingers at her even dropped to his knees to bestow a kiss upon the damp hem of her skirt. Nathanael and Elspeth gaped in openmouthed astonishment.

  Holly had graciously accepted more than her share of adulation in her short life, but she’d never been worshiped with such childlike rapture. She could not comprehend their curious behavior. Were they all blind?

  She shot Austyn a baffled glance. His cheeks were taut with what might have been chagrin, but his eyes sparkled with some secret amusement. “May I present to all of you my bride and the new mistress of Gavenmore—Lady”—he hesitated, glancing about as if to ensure t
he area was free of potential missiles—“Holly.”

  The teasing intimacy of his smile coaxed an unbidden flip from Holly’s heart. A bemused ripple of laughter escaped her.

  “Gwyneth? Gwyneth, is that you?”

  At the plaintive query, a shadow passed over Austyn’s face, fading his smile. A tense hush claimed the courtyard. The servants parted as a wasted figure crept out of one of the corner towers and made his way toward Holly. The blustering bravado their assailant had exhibited upon their arrival seemed to have melted away.

  He lifted a trembling hand to touch her cheek. “Gwyneth?” he repeated. “Is that you?”

  Holly found herself gazing into gray-lashed eyes that might have been twins of Austyn’s had their frosty flame not been extinguished by shadows of the past A mane of silver hair framed the man’s furrowed face.

  Austyn rested a hand on his shoulder. “Nay, Father, ’tis not Gwyneth. ’Tis my bride.”

  “A bride,” the man echoed wistfully, aged beyond his years by his shrunken posture and the quavering note in his voice. Holly realized in that moment that Austyn’s father was not just eccentric; he was mad.

  Austyn’s wary gaze rested not on his father, but on Holly’s face. He plainly feared she would slap the impertinent stranger away with some scathing rebuke.

  She caught the old man’s chilled hand, warming the frail parchment of his skin between her palms. “My name is Holly, sir,” she said, bestowing a gentle smile on him. “If you will allow me to call you ‘Father,’ perhaps in time you’ll come to think of me as your own daughter.”

  This time when Holly met Austyn’s gaze over his father’s stooped shoulder, the mysterious regard in her husband’s eyes wrenched her heart with a violence that was almost painful.

  “Aye, our master is a sly one, he is. Frighting us all half to death by running off to woo the most beautiful damsel in all of Britain. Why I’d box his ears as I did when he was a lad if he didn’t outweigh me by five stone. Still might if he gives me cause!”