She sounded like she was pleading with him by the time she was finished, but Jareth was unmoved. “I would deal with him appropriately,” he said evenly. “It would be a small price to pay for marrying the most wonderful woman who has ever walked this earth.”
It was a sweet thing to say. Desdra was trying not to be distracted by it because she was genuinely concerned that he didn’t understand just what it meant to court her. Ciaran would try to exploit it by any means necessary. But it was difficult to keep the smile off her face as she set the stew down and went back over to the bed, pulling the coverlet to his shoulder.
“Enough of that,” she said softly, a glimmer of warmth in her eye. “This arrow wound has made you mad. You must sleep now and rest. I will come back in a short while to make sure you do not require anything.”
Jareth let her fuss with the coverlet, watching her face as she did so. He muttered under his breath.
“I will see you in my dreams,” he whispered.
Desdra didn’t quite hear him. “What was that?”
He started struggling as if it was difficult for him to speak any louder, so she leaned closer. And closer. When she came close enough, he quickly grasped her face with his right hand and kissed her gently on the lips.
“I said that I will see you in my dreams,” he said, loud enough for her to hear. “Thank you for tending me so carefully.”
The stolen kiss startled her, but then she grinned broadly. “You are incorrigible,” she said, stepping away from the bed. “Behave yourself and go to sleep.”
He just smiled at her, a triumphant sort of expression, and she simply shook her head and left the chamber. Shutting the door behind her, Desdra paused a moment, leaning back against the door as she touched her lips as if to feel the imprint he’d left upon them.
Imprint, indeed.
Perhaps something good had come out of the trip to Portbury after all.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
He was apirate, after all.
The traveling game of chance was purely a side business, but over the years, King Dagda’s main source of income was, in fact, that game of chance. It was always done in secret and usually at a tavern in a larger town, and there was a network of them all throughout Cornwall, Somerset, and Dorset. He mostly stayed to the southwest area of England because he knew every inch of the coastline, every cove, and every cliff. He knew where he could hide and he knew where he could run.
The problem was that there were many pirates in the western portion of England, Wales, and Scotland. It tended to make for crowded seas at times. Given that he was from Scotland, the English and the Irish pirates had a particular hate for him, so it was challenging to do business in the southwest of England at all. When it came to the western coast of Cornwall, he had to pay tribute to a band of nasty pirates who controlled that area known as Triton’s Hellions. They took his money and looked the other way when he docked his ships along that stretch of coastline. Some of the pirates from Triton’s Hellions even joined in his game of chance if they had the inclination to. King Dagda welcomed them all because he didn’t discriminate when it cameto money. As long as it was valid and he could hoard it or spend it, he was a happy man.
The journey to his ships at Saint Thomas Head had taken longer than he had anticipated. Rain had moved in periodically, making the roads nearly impassable in some places, so he and his seven men had been forced to ride through muddy meadows, over farmers’ fields, and any other way they could to keep their forward momentum going. He hadn’t even made it to the coast by the seventh day, as he had told Ciaran, so he hoped the man wouldn’t move too quickly in anticipation of The Guardians being removed from their post. Ciaran was the nervous sort, so King Dagda wouldn’t have been surprised if the man had simply gone on with his plan to enter Aphrodite’s Feast in spite of the fact that The Guardians were still there.
King Dagda was starting to think that this entire undertaking was foolish.
He and his men had stayed in a small village the night before his anticipated arrival to the cove at St. Thomas Head. The town itself was seedy, populated by seamen looking for jobs, pirates, and other outlaws looking for victims. No decent person would visit the village that sometimes went by the name Yatton, or Yattey. King Dagda and his men had two small chambers between them at the tavern that was missing half its roof. Fortunately, they were in the roofed section.
But it was raining again, or at least misty, on that night as a weather system moved through. King Dagda was in a chamber with his second-in-command, a man who called himself Neith, sharing a pitcher of cheap wine between them. King Dagda’s real name was Finnegan MacGann, but no one would be fearful of anyone named Finnegan. Hence the name King Dagda.
He even made his mother call him that.
“Are we truly going to lay siege to a castle?” Neith asked, swirling his cup and watching the dregs settle by candlelight.“We’ve only got one war engine and I’m not sure it’ll be stable on deck. It hasn’t been in the past.”
King Dagda knew what he was talking about. “We have the cannon we took from the Portuguese,” he said. “We simply need to balance the wheels better. But we only have two cannonballs and I’m not entirely sure we would not kill ourselves trying to launch them.”
Neith grinned. “The last time we did it, it nearly blew half the crew over the side of the boat.”
King Dagda snorted. “True. I’m not sure how we can lay siege to a castle without a reliable cannon,” he said, his smile fading. “It is not as if we have a large army, and the outpost at Portbury has a few hundred men guarding it. In fact, I’ve been thinking.”
“What about?”
“About the fact that I’ve lost my patience with Ciaran le Daire.”
Neith nodded in agreement. “I was wondering how long it was going to take,” he said. “You must face facts—he’s been trying to put us off ever since we first went to his home to collect the debt. He’s put you off again and again and you’ve let him.”
King Dagda grunted. “I know it,” he said. “But this plan with his daughter and Aphrodite’s Feast… It will never work. The more I think on it, the more I realize that Ciaran simply said those things to delay the inevitable.”
“Then what will you do?”
