The Maiden and Her Knight by Margaret Moore Read Free Book Online Page A

He would make it to the tent for the wounded on his own, or swoon trying.
    Â 
    Allis paced impatiently inside the tent set up at the south of the large field. There the sunlight would shine all day, warming the interior and providing illumination. The wounded would be brought here first to be assessed by Brother Jonathan and tended to as necessary. Five cots were ready for those who were unable to walk. A trestle table for Brother Jonathan’s medicines, linens and some basins for washing had been set up, and a large barrel full of fresh water was nearby. The floor beneath them was grass, kept short by the sheep that usually pastured there.
    After seeing Sir Connor’s lance shatter against the baron’s shield and his tumble from his horse, she had rushed from the tower room afraid for his life, Isabelle right behind. Her anxiety increasing with every passing moment, she had immediately sent Bob and Harry, two of their strongest, fastest soldiers who had beenassigned to help carry the injured, with a litter to find the wounded knight in the white surcoat embroidered with a red dragon rampant and return with him and Brother Jonathan, who had gone to the field to watch the start of the melee.
    â€œPerhaps he wasn’t hurt,” Isabelle suggested hopefully. “Or not much. They do wear chain mail, after all. Bob and Harry haven’t brought him yet, have they? If he were seriously hurt, they would have come back with him on the run.”
    She tried to take heart at her sister’s words, but the litter bearers might not hurry if their burden was a dead body.
    Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the flap at the entrance to the tent move. She whirled around, but it wasn’t Bob and Harry or even Brother Jonathan.
    Wearing a white surcoat with a red dragon rampant, Sir Connor of Llanstephan stood holding his left arm against his body with his right, his helmet in the crook of his left elbow. Although his long hair was damp from perspiration and his face pale, relief poured through her. “You’re not dead!”
    â€œNot yet,” he replied with the merest hint of a smile as he entered. He wore his chain mail as if it weighed almost nothing and moved as if he had been born in it. Only a strong man who had worn it daily for a long time carried it so easily. “But needing some help, I am.”
    Of course he was, and she had just sounded like a fool. “Your arm has been hurt?”
    â€œYes.”
    Trying to recover her dignity, she walked briskly toward him. “I’m glad it is only an injury. My father and I would be very distraught had one of our guests been killed.”
    â€œYour father, too, is it?” His eyes flicked up and down her body, while her heart…fluttered. That was the only word to describe the sensation.
    She couldn’t allow her heart to flutter. She couldn’t be near a man who could smile when he was in pain, who could make her body warm as if in an oven when he took her hand, who had insolently kissed her wrist and robbed her of sleep. She knew her future, and it didn’t involve such sensations. Her future was a marriage she didn’t want to a man she didn’t love because she had no other choice.
    â€œI would have been upset, too,” Isabelle added eagerly, staring at Sir Connor with unabashed interest. “Is your arm broken?”
    He smiled at Isabelle, too. “It’s not my arm. It’s my shoulder. Would you be so kind as to ask someone to find my horse? I don’t know where he went after I fell.”
    Isabelle nodded and hurried out of the tent, obviously keen to be of assistance.
    Allis tried to decide what to do. By rights, and as her previous behavior and the sensations swirling within her now cautioned, she should not be alone with this man. Her wrist still felt as if it had been branded with his kiss, marked forever by the passionate heat of his lips. Yet he was wounded and she had come to help