Linda Needham by The Bride Bed Read Free Book Online Page B

to dispose of or collect for you or from you whatever I choose. Be it a marriage between us or selling off your herds of sheep and cattle.”
    Barely able to breathe for the power of his dizzying nearness, Talia slipped from him to the safety of the opposite side of the table. “You’re too late.”
    She’d never seen quite so thunderous a look. “For your marriage ?”
    “For my sheep and cattle, de Monteneau. My warder before Rufus sold them off. And the lambs. And everything else he could put his claws into.”
    Somehow, he’d distracted her long enough for her not to have noticed that he’d backed her around the table onto the casement cushion, giving her no choice but to sit.
    “’Tisn’t quite morning yet, madam, but it’s time that you answer my earlier question.”
    “Which question was that, my lord?” This interrogation had gotten completely out of hand. She’d come only to distract him from the evidence in the cellars and from pillaging her granary, and now he seemed bent upon pillaging her.
    He put his bare foot on the casement step, pinning her knees between the seat and his rock-hard calf.
    “Exactly what were you doing just before my attack on your castle?”
    “Me?” She felt stalked and hunted. “Why would you care about that? You were after Rufus, not me.”
    He studied her for a very long time, scrubbed at the line of his jaw with the back of his fingers, his midnight-dark, two-day beard making a raspy, homey sound that made her want to reach out and stroke him herself.
    “I was, indeed, after Rufus de Graffe. A lazy bastard of rebel, a sharp pain in Stephen’s royal backside. I also knew that his castle—”
    “ My castle—”
    “That Carrisford ,” he said, without breaking his cadence, “would be simple enough to seize. But I couldn’t possibly have expected the gates to be wide-open and the guards drunk, now, could I?”
    Talia fanned the sultry air between them with her hand. “Imagine the luck, my lord.”
    “And I certainly never expected merely to stroll in through the gatehouse, unchallenged.” He sifted his fingers slowly through her hair and came away with the stem of a wilted gentian, which he twirled between his fingers. “Now tell me, madam, what were you doing before I came?”
    Dear God, she didn’t want him to know thisabout her. A rag doll bride, handed off again and again, her life at the whimsy of a bastard like Rufus.
    The deed nearly accomplished this time but for his arrival.
    Her savior.
    It shouldn’t matter in the least that he knew about the wedding he had interrupted, and yet she felt a dreadful embarrassment begin to blossom in her chest, fueled by her thrumming heart.
    “Well, if I recall, I was…” She swallowed hard, gulping some of his soap-scented air. And noticing, for the first time, that the estate rolls were spread out on the table across the room, sending her heart in a completely different direction. “I was…we were preparing for a feast. The feast of St. Albans. Now, my lord, if you’d—”
    His smile grew slowly, utterly feral. The pleasure of the catch. “What a lovely liar you are, Lady Talia.”
    “How dare you call me that!” She spread her fingers against his bare chest and shoved, trying to slip past him, but he had her well pinned against the cushion, and bedazzled by the imprint of his heat on her palm.
    “You’ve been asked a half dozen times by your people if you were married. Why? What were you doing just before I arrived, and Rufus fled like the coward he is?”
    “I was…well.” If she could only look awayfrom his eyes, from that dangerous darkness there. “It doesn’t matter anymore, my lord.”
    “It matters considerably that you tell me everything, madam. Or should I send for your sisters, or for old Jasper or Leod or that cagey Quigley fellow?”
    She didn’t need that worry, de Monteneau scouring the castle and village, interrogating the people she loved. “Leave them out of this.”
    “What