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Chapter Fifteen

“ I was wondering how you would avoid being caught.”

Christopher didn’t move when the feminine voice cut through the silence of the night. Had he hoped Sian would dare come to his tent? Yes, of course he had. Had he lost hope of seeing her when the sun had set and, much later, the moon had come up? Yes.

And now, with dawn starting to gray the horizon, here she was at last.

He took his first real breath since he had arrived at Clearfield Hall three days ago.

“Quite a masterful stroke, was it not,” the voice carried on, “to lose to Lord Spelling on your last contest and allow him to send you to the ground, then claim the dent in your helmet prevented you from removing it?”

A corner of his lips curled. Little Lamb …

still as sharp as ever. Not only had she recognized him despite the armor and all-encompassing helm, as he’d thought, but she had also seen through his ruse.

There had been no other choice. Going to collect his prize from the lady of the castle’s fair hand would have exposed his real identity to everyone.

Alexander would be furious when told Christopher had impersonated him to take part in a tourney he had no right to compete in, of course. He could almost hear his friend. The knight was the proudest man he knew, and he would not like to hear that Christopher had purposefully lost his last contest.

“If you had to compete under my name, couldn’t you at least have won, like I would have done in your place?” he would argue. “Now everyone will think Sir Alexander Rathbone an incompetent fool.”

“Worry not. Your reputation is safe,” Christopher would assure him.

He had not been incompetent—far from it—and, fortunately, Lord Spelling had been skilled enough to make his victory appear genuine.

Christopher was confident no one would suspect anything.

He had intended to plead an injury of some sort to disappear into the background while everyone else was celebrating the victor and then ride away before questions could be asked.

But an even better solution had presented itself when his helm had been damaged by Lord Spelling’s lance.

It had not exactly been pleasant to have the blacksmith hammer away to free him from the metal prison, but it had meant he’d then been able to fake a cut to the head and wrap half of his face in heavy bandages.

With only his right eye showing—Blaidd, as he secretly called him in his mind—no one would guess his other one was a different color.

And with his most distinctive feature hidden from view, no one should be able to identify him as the former Lord Ashton.

The temptation to stay the night at the camp had been too strong to resist.

And the gamble had paid off because Sian had come.

“How do you know I ‘allowed’ Lord Spelling to unhorse me?” he asked, keeping his back to her. “Perhaps he was simply the better contender?”

Was it possible to know someone was rolling their eyes without looking at them? Apparently, it was because he knew that was exactly what Sian was doing.

“Please! Do you take me for a fool? Lord Spelling was good, but you could have beaten him three times over had you wanted to.”

“I’m flattered.”

“Don’t be. I was not trying to flatter you, merely stating facts.”

Yes. And she was right. He had been the best contender that day, but his aim had not been to win money he didn’t care about since it could not buy him what he wanted the most, the woman standing on the platform at the end of the field—next to her damned husband.

There was a pause, then a whisper, which was somehow loud enough to penetrate all the way to his bones, causing warmth to spread through his body.

“You know you shouldn’t be here.”

“No.”

In all senses of the word. As plain Christopher Harrison, he shouldn’t be competing in a tourney reserved for lords. As the lady of the castle’s former lover, he shouldn’t dare appear in front of her husband. As a man whose pride had been hurt, he should have stayed well away. But there he was.

He turned to face her at last—and almost swooned.

Dear God, with her hair in disarray, her eyes huge in the light of the brazier, her hooded cloak wrapped around her shoulders—the same one she had worn that day in the clearing—she was a vision.

A vision from the past sent to torment him.

This afternoon at the joust, in her formal attire, complete with veil and precious jewels, she had been every inch the married English lady.

Right now, she was once again his mischievous little lamb, his wild Welsh girl, his Sian— not Lady Cantle.

“You shouldn’t be here either, in my tent,” he breathed, wishing he had his two eyes to look at her. “And yet you are. But then again, we’ve never been the kind of people to do what was requested of us, have we?”

There was nothing she could say to that because it was the truth. Of course, being the woman she was, she didn’t let it deter her. And true to form, she said the last thing he had expected her to say.

“Why did you choose a gold caparison for your horse?”

He couldn’t help a smile. What did her elderly husband make of the unusual way her mind worked?

“It reminded me of honey rather than gold, if you must know.”

Honey. Like her hair. Like the honey he had pretended to lick from her fingers in the meadow. Like the honey he was dreaming of tasting between her thighs. It had been an obvious choice, and he was surprised she had not guessed it herself. Or perhaps she was shying away from the fact.

“Why are you asking?” he asked, coming a step closer. “Would you rather I had chosen another?—”

“I prefer nothing!” she roared, finally breaking her unnatural stillness. “How dare you show your face here, in my husband’s castle!”

“I did not. My face was hidden all the while, as you pointed out. It is still hidden.” He gestured at the bandage. As he could have anticipated, she was not impressed by the taunt.

“You lied and pretended to be someone else, usurping another man’s identity yet again.

First, you pretend to be Lord Ashton, then Sir Alexander Rathbone.

Whose place will you take next? What is wrong with your real identity that you keep changing it?

Are you so ashamed of who you are?” She came to stand right in front of him, her face tilted upward.

“And who are you going to seduce now, I wonder, only to abandon her when she finds out you are not the man you claim to be?”

Christopher’s nostrils flared. Dear God, he had not posed as Alexander so that he could fuck his way through the ladies present at the tourney! And how dare she even suggest that he had pretended to be Lord Ashton?

“It wasn’t like that, and you know it,” he shouted, his own temper finally erupting.

“Do I?”

“Well, yes. I can hardly be blamed for being kept in the dark about my ‘real identity,’ as you call it. Believe me, I would have preferred to know where I stood from the start, but my bastard of a father only ever cared about himself, as usual! It’s hardly my fault.”

“W-what do you mean?”

All the anger in Sian’s voice had vanished. Even in the dim light, Christopher could see she had become deathly pale. What was going on? Knowing her spontaneous nature, he doubted her reaction was feigned. She looked about to swoon.

He steeled himself against the impulse to draw her into his arms. She wanted to know what he meant? Well, she would.

He decided to explain the situation as if she hadn’t heard it all from Thomas before.

There was no knowing what the man had told her exactly, or rather how .

When Christopher had heard from his uncle that he was not alone but had the brother he had always dreamed of having, he had hoped to find someone with whom he could enjoy a relationship such as Connor and Matthew Hunter enjoyed.

He now knew it would never happen. Barely a day after their first meeting, he’d understood that Thomas was just as self-serving and pompous as the other Harrison men had been.

Such a man would not have missed the opportunity to make himself look good in front of Sian.

Perhaps it would help to present his own version of the story.

“What do I mean? Let’s see.”

He started at the beginning, with his arrival in Kent and his uncle’s deathbed confession. As he spoke, he could see something in Sian’s eyes die, like a candle slowly extinguishing itself from lack of air. When he stopped, all that was left of the flame was the smoke of her last illusions—and his.

She hadn’t known. Somehow, and though he could not understand why, she hadn’t known what had happened in Kent.

“I … I had no idea.”

“How? You said you knew what had happened,” he said in a whisper, appalled by the turn of events. That day, by the river, he’d asked her whether she’d heard, and she had said yes.

And now he was being told she hadn’t known.

She swallowed and started her explanation.

“Well, I knew that the man we saw in Throckmorton’s solar was the real Lord Ashton.

A man, who would have been his squire, I guess, led us to him when we asked to see Lord Ashton.

There was no question in his mind who we meant, no indication that they had just arrived at the castle, no trace of you.

And then the man called you a usurper.” She paused, looking ill at ease.

“It was all clear enough, or so we thought.”

Christopher blinked. That was her explanation? That someone had called him a usurper? And she had thought it sufficient?

“After this extraordinary declaration, you didn’t ask Thomas for any explanation?

” He was incredulous. “You just accepted a stranger’s word that I was a usurper and assumed I had impersonated a nobleman from the age of four, which was the moment I came to live at Throckmorton Castle?

You really believed I had fooled everyone for two decades, with no questions asked, until the rightful lord decided to come back? ”