Suzanne Barclay - The Champion

Walter knelt beside the bishop, felt in the folds of his neck and looked up at Crispin. “Aye, he is.” Turning back, Walter began murmuring the prayers that would ease Thurstan’s soul into the hereafter.

Crispin sent his own prayer after it. I was not here and cannot be blamed for this. The words only marginally eased the burden on his conscience.

Drusa clomped up the stairs with water and towels. “Let us see where ye are hurt, dearling.”

“It is nothing. A bump on the head, a bit of a scrape on my elbow,” Linnet insisted. “I can tend my—”

Drusa clucked her tongue. “Always did want to do everything for herself.” She smiled wryly at Simon and set to work.

Simon leaned his shoulder against the mantel and watched the woman tend Linnet with the gruff tenderness that bespoke years of caring. The old longing curled in his belly. What would it be like to be loved like that? He shook it off with practiced ease and set his mind on the present, not his troubled past.

Covertly, he studied the woman he had run down. When he’d bent over her on the dark path, something about her had seemed familiar. But now, seeing her m the light, that sense of recognition faded. Perhaps it was the scent of roses she wore that had struck a chord with him. She was certainly beautiful enough to make him wish he knew her.

Linnet’s delicate profile was so perfect it might have been carved from marble, marred only by the bits of dirt Drusa was gently washing away. The maid had also loosened Linnet’s braids, so her hair tumbled over her slender shoulders and down her back in a honey-colored river, glinting like gold in the firelight.

He guessed her age at twenty or so, which would have made her ten and six when he left on Crusade. Old enough to have attracted his eye when he’d been in town on Lord Edmund’s business, comely enough to have merited a second glance. Her brown eyes were warm and expressive. They sparkled with two things he valued in men and women: intelligence and wry humor. And when she had smiled, her whole face had seemed to glow, as though lit from within.

Linnet the Spicier was a woman he would know better.

But that was not the only reason Simon lingered in her cozy little solar. The vulnerability and the fear she could not quite hide worried him. She had been fleeing something when they collided. Or, more likely, someone. The aura of danger aroused the protective streak his friends had often teased him about.

You have problems enough of your own.

Simon shoved them aside to be considered later. Part of him, the soft side few men saw, hoped Thurstan would send word to him. The tough shell he had developed as an orphaned youth warned him not to care. He had been six when he arrived at Lord Edmund’s household as a page. Though he had not been abused, neither had he been loved. There had been no father to shield him when the older pages taunted and teased him, no mother to dry his tears when he was hurt in practice. The only true friends he had were the five knights of the Black Rose.

“There.” Drusa set her cloth in the basin. “I’ve put betony cream on those scrapes, and the bump does not look grievous.”

“Thank you,” Linnet grumbled, obviously irked at the fuss.

“I am much relieved to hear you have suffered no serious harm, Mistress Linnet. I feared you might set the sheriff on me,” Simon teased.

Linnet shivered. “That is the last thing I would do.”

Interesting. Sheriff John Turnebull was a fair man, if Simon recalled correctly. Did she fear the sheriff would ask questions she tlid not want to answer?

“If ye will sit with her a moment, sir, I will put these things away and fetch some ale.”

“You do not have to watch over me,” Linnet muttered.

“It is no hardship at all, I assure you. And the ale would be most welcome. You may have recovered, but I still feel a bit shaky,” he said dramatically. “In fact, I think I had best sit.” Simon pulled over a stool and plopped down at Linnet’s feet, stretching his boots toward the fire.

“Just so. I’ll be back in two shakes.” Drusa hurried off.

Linnet snorted and rolled her eyes. “You, a fearless knight returned from the Crusades, are shaky?”

“The sight of a woman in distress does affect me most severely. And the thought that I might have caused you grievous injury…” He put a hand over his heart and sighed mightily. It was a pose Nicholas struck. It never failed to make women melt.

Linnet laughed. The sound was musical, captivating. The merriment transformed her features from comely to striking. Firelight picked out the gold flecks in her eyes and made her hair shimmer. It was as though the sun had suddenly come out from behind a cloud to shed its radiance on the world, to banish darkness and cold.

Simon had an unexpected urge to pull her onto his lap, to kiss her breathless, wrap them both in her glorious hair and see if she could measure up to his dream. Already he could feel his body responding, his pulse leaping, his loins quickening in prelude to a chase as old as time. But he had never wanted any woman as swiftly or with as much certainty as he did this one.

She felt it, too. He measured her awareness in the widening of her eyes, the soft gasp that seemed to fill the room with possibilities. What would she do? Scream? Faint? Throw herself at him and fulfill their unspoken fantasy?

“Aiken has returned with the food,” Drusa called up the stairs. “I’ll bring it up directly.”

Linnet started, shattering the moment. Her cheeks turned bright red, and her eyes filled with such confusion Simon knew she was new to this. Perhaps even a maiden.

The notion heightened his turmoil, the craving for her warring with the need to protect her. He knew he could not be alone with her in this room and be certain he would not act on the desire that sizzled between them.

“We will come down, Drusa.” Simon smiled wryly and climbed to his feet. “There is a time for everything, they say. Our time will come.”

She ducked her head. “Perhaps it has come and gone.”

What an odd thing to say. Simon extended his arm. “Come, Linnet, we are both in need of food.” He started when she laid her hand on his arm, the tingle warming his flesh. How was it that this woman he had only just met excited him so?

Drusa and Aiken were waiting for them in the kitchen. A steaming bowl of stew sat in the middle of the table, flanked by bread, butter and a pitcher of ale.

“Drusa said Elinore would worry if I told her ye’d been hurt, so I said nothing,” Aiken remarked.

“Not even to Tilly?” Linnet asked.

Aiken’s expression turned sullen. “She was serving the sheriff and didn’t even see me.”

Linnet let go of Simon’s arm and sat on the nearest bench, but not before he had felt her shudder.

What had she done? He wondered again.

Drusa served up three bowls of stew and poured ale for all of them before joining Aiken across the table from Simon and Linnet. “How does it happen ye survived, Sir Simon?”

“It was God’s will, I would guess,” Simon replied. God’s will, a bit of luck and a lot of hard fighting.

“How did you come to be reported dead?” asked Linnet.

“Eat, and I will tell you.” Between bites of stew, Simon related the events leading up to Hugh’s capture and eventual transport to Acre, from whose stout prison they’d freed him.

“A miracle.” Linnet’s eyes shimmered with tears.

How compassionate she was to care so for a stranger, Simon thought, drawn to her even more strongly. Their gazes locked, and he felt the tension stir between them again.

“Did ye kill a host of the fiends?” Aiken asked, his eagerness typical of many who had sailed with Simon to the East.