Page 10

He turned, and the torchlight found me, and for the first time in three years the Ghost of Sherwood and the Sheriff of Nottingham stood within speaking distance of one another.

Neither of us raised a weapon. I could not honestly say why I didn't, and by the look that crossed his face, he could not have said either. We simply studied each other across ten paces of bracken, and I watched him take my measure the way I took his, thoroughly and without hurry. He was bigger than I had guessed from a distance, built like the door of a keep, and his eyes were not the dull instruments I had expected of a Crown enforcer. They were quick and dark and disturbingly patient, and his scent reached me across the space between us, cedar and iron and clean winter air, and my body noted with deep disloyalty that he was an Alpha and that he smelled like one.

"Ghost," he said at last.

I tilted my head. "Sheriff."

"You disappoint me." His voice stayed level, conversational, as if we had met over wine rather than the wreckage of his trap. "Forty men, a fortnight of planning, and you didn't even take the bait."

"I usually have that effect on men who work for the Crown."

His mouth almost twitched. Almost. I watched him strangle the expression in its crib, and the effort it cost him pleased me more than open laughter would have.

Then his weight shifted, and I knew the conversation had ended.

I spun for the trees as he lunged, and he was fast, faster than any man that size had a right to be, and his fingers closed around my wrist like an iron band.

Everything stilled.

The night went narrow and strange around the fact of his hand on my skin. Heat rolled up my arm from the point of contact, and my pulse stuttered against his grip in a way that had nothing to do with fear, and I felt more than heard the low sound that started in his chest, felt his fingers flex as something ancient in him surged toward something ancient in me. His eyes darkened, and for one suspended heartbeat the Sheriff of Nottingham looked at me the way no one had ever looked at me in my life.

Then his jaw locked, and I watched him crush his own instinct back down with a control that was its own kind of frightening.

I twisted through the gap in his grip the way my father taught me, borrowed his hesitation, but this time he recovered too quickly. His free hand snared my other wrist before I could fully break away. We crashed together in a sudden, vicious scramble, bodies colliding hard enough to drive the air from my lungs. I drove a knee toward his ribs; he blocked it with his thigh and spun us both, using his greater weight to force me down. Roots and damp earth met my back. I bucked, twisting, trying to roll him, teeth bared, but he followed every motion, pinning my wrists above my head with one large hand while his hips settled heavily between my thighs.

For a single stunned second neither of us moved.

Then he shifted, just slightly, and the hard, unmistakable ridge of his dick pressed against the soft juncture of my legs, thick and insistent through the layers of clothing. Heat punched through me. His eyes flared wide, the same shock mirrored in my own face as the contact registered unexpected, electric, impossible to ignore. A rough sound tore from his throat, half curse, half groan, and his hips jerked once, grinding that rigid length more firmly against me before he could stop himself. The friction sent a sharp, unwanted pulse of pleasure through my core. My breath caught. His did too. We stared at each other, locked in that raw, trembling moment, both of us equally startled by the sudden, hungry evidence of what the struggle had done to him…and by how my body answered it.

His jaw locked again, harder this time. I watched him crush the instinct back down with a control that was its own kind of frightening, though the pressure of his dick against me remained, throbbing once more as if in protest.

I twisted through the last gap in his grip the way my father taught me, borrowed his hesitation, and vanished into the dark of Sherwood with my heart slamming and his warmth still branded around my wrist…and lower, where the memory of that hard grind still burned.

He didn't notice what my free hand had taken until I was long gone.

By the time I reached the ridge, I had composed myself enough to smile, and I sat on the overlook in the gray hour before dawn, twirling his signet ring between my fingers while the forest breathed around me. The gold still held the heat of his hand. I told myself I only kept it as a trophy.

"Still too slow, Bisbane," I whispered.

But my wrist remembered otherwise…and so did the rest of me.

6

GUY

Irode back to Nottingham with my men behind me, irritated beyond reason by a woman who should have been nothing more than another outlaw in Sherwood.

The trap had failed, and failure I could use. Because failure was information. She had read the bait for what it was, which taught me to respect her caution, and she had chosen to dismantle my net rather than avoid it, which taught me something far more important. I had learned that the Ghost of Sherwood didn’t simply want to survive me.

She wants to beat me.

By morning, every tavern in the shire would be singing about the sheriff's forty soldiers chasing smoke while their horses wandered loose through Sherwood. Even that I could bear, because legends grew careless, and careless legends got caught.

No.

What sat in my chest like a swallowed coal, all the way down the dark miles of the forest road, was simpler and far more humiliating than any of that.

She’d laughed.