“So I’ve heard. Terrible luck, that.”
“Yes, it is actually. He thinks our mother was a spy and that after my father died, she held Fallstowe illegally. So of course, now that Mother is gone, he is outraged that Sybilla—a lowlydaughter,no less—refuses to surrender the castle to the crown.”
“Your mother was a spy?” He shook his head with asnort. “Obvious now where you get your tenacity from, then. And your recklessness.”
Alys drew her head back and smiled. “Why, thank you, Piers.”
“It wasn’t a compliment.”
“I shall take it as one any matter.”
The day was only the faint sliver of a memory now, night’s blanket lying orange and pink and soft on the faraway hills as Fallstowe came in sight. Its towers and walls rose solidly in black relief out of a gentle purple and indigo mist, and a group of riders rode toward the keep on the road ahead of them, their figures as black and muted as the stones.
The thought crossed her mind that, if they hurried, she and Piers could gain entry along with the mounted party before the portcullis was lowered. Alys’s mood soured. Yes, she had lived at Fallstowe all of her life, but now that her mother was dead and Sybilla was at the family helm, the grand castle had lost that comforting feeling of home. Alys felt almost adrift on the waves of rolling hills surrounding the keep, as if she was being sucked relentlessly closer to a certain and deadly whirlpool. That whirlpool was her cold, demanding sister, ready to sacrifice Alys to the depths.
Perhaps the enigmatic man who accompanied her would somehow become an anchor. So far though, there had been no sign that he would remain steadfast.
The harker called out from the watch, his words little more than a whisper from such a great height. “Who approaches? Declare yourself under threat of death!”
Piers came to a halt well before the road leading to the drawbridge, and turned to look expectantly at Alys. Even in the gloom of evening, she could see the look of wariness on his face, and sense the change in his posture.
“Would they fire upon us?” he demanded.
Alys stopped as well, setting Layla’s conveyance on the ground. She’d let the monkey out in a moment, now that she wasn’t being forced to practically run to keep up with Piers.“Wouldthey? If we were both strangers and proceeded, then certainly, yes. I doubt he’s even noticedusyet at such a fair distance, let alone expects to hit one of us with an arrow. His warning was for the riders ahead of us.”
She cupped her hands around her mouth, readying to shout up to the wall to hold the gate for them, but before she could announce herself, another voice called out of the night from the mounted party already before the drawbridge.
“Lady Judith Angwedd Mallory of Gillwick Manor, and her son!”
Alys rolled her eyes with a groan and was turning to lament the visitors to Piers when he snatched her around the waist from behind and threw her to the ground. She started to cry out that Piers was crushing her, but his hand came up to clap over her mouth, and then his lips brushed her ear.
“Unless you wish me dead in the next pair of moments, lie absolutely still, Alys.”
The rumble of chain and wood soon shook ground beneath Alys’s smashed bosom, and she could feel Piers’s shallow breathing against her back. He really was taking this secret mission of his seriously, to be worried about such lesser nobles as the Mallorys. Why, Judith Angwedd hadn’t even been invited to the winter feast!
And although he truly was a weighty man, Alys began to enjoy the feel of Pier’s body atop hers. She wiggled a bit to test him and, to her delight, his hold on her tightened.
“Shh,” he breathed into her ear. “Alys, please. I’m trying not to hurt you.”
Her stomach clenched and she closed her eyes to savor the sensations his body and words were creating within her. One thick forearm was pinned between the ground and her navel, while his opposite hand now cupped the back of her head, ensuring that she remained completely prone. His face pressed against the side of hers through the window his arm created, and his legs were to either side of hers, holding her tightly. Alys struggled against the temptation to ease her bottom upward. She’d experienced more excitement and adventure since meeting the man atop her than she had the entire eighteen years of her life before him.
“That’s it,” he whispered. “Easy now. Almost over.”
Alys gave a disappointed little whimper—she didn’twantit to be over. But a moment later, the ground shook again as the portcullis lowered on the hoof beats that were fading away into the barbican. Piers lay very still atop her for several more breaths before whispering in her ear once more.
“Our deal is off.”
Then, in a blink, his weight was gone from her, and she was alone on the cold, wet ground.
From within the sack still on the ground an arm’s length away, Layla gave a questioning little coo.
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” Alys sighed.
Then she gathered her limbs beneath her and pushed up from the ground. Snatching the sack up, she turned and fled from Fallstowe’s wall toward the blackened wood once more.
Chapter 6
Sybilla had no earthly idea what Judith Angwedd of simple and bucolic Gillwick Manor wanted from her, and normally she would have had Graves play the go-between for the unsavory lady and her strange son, but after an entire day of placating Etheldred Cobb and the vapid Clement, any distraction was heartily welcome.
