Page 248

She startled as he shed his shirt and sat on the bed, back to her.

They’d done this a dozen times, and yet the sight of his strong straight back, webbed with scars, made her throat go dry again.

The man was all muscle, strengthened by his recent physical labor.

He’d been working hard in support of St. Sefin’s. For them all.

“He called me filth.” His voice held hurt and outrage.

She unscrewed the jar of camphor liniment and dipped her fingers into the balm. “Of course, you’re not. None of us are.” She needed him to remember that when the time of reckoning came.

“Just because I had a wheelbarrow of manure.”

She smoothed the ointment over his injured shoulder and side.

The treatment was working; he was healing from the attack at the wharves, and she wondered if he were finally healing from his war injuries too.

At St. Sefin’s his days were spent in active labor, his nights in rest. His food was simple, not at all like what rich folk ate, and his alcohol consumption was less.

He’d been an absolute bear to live with in the first days of withdrawal, but he’d stopped demanding rum.

With a return to health would come the return of memory. She had to be prepared for that to happen.

“I hope I’m more important than he is in my real life. I’ll cut him down to size.”

Pen still sounded affronted, though his voice was muffled.

He dropped his head and she massaged his neck, the muscles warm and pliable.

All this strength and power beneath her hands, but leashed for the moment, and quiet.

Even without his name and title, he was a powerful man.

A twist of something—apprehension, perhaps—snaked low through her belly.

The candle on the shelf flickered in a small draft.

“Why has no one come looking for me?”

Now he simply sounded baffled. And hurt.

Guilt bit at her heart. Barlow, a man he employed, had likely never met the current Lord Penrydd in person, given he’d looked him in the eye and didn’t know who he was.

Who else in his own life might not recognize him, lowered as he was?

And he was at this disadvantage—as much at Barlow’s mercy as any of them, really—because of her. Because she continued to lie to him.

The snaking feeling twisted and hissed.

“Maybe no one misses me. Maybe they’re happy I’m gone. Maybe my wife and children are relieved to be shot of me, and—” He paused. “Though I’m certain I don’t have a wife or children. Yet.”

Her stomach turned over as she moved to his ribs, gently rubbing ointment over his old scars. “What about Arwen?” The woman he’d called for from the depths of his first nightmare, though he hadn’t asked for her since.

A long silence unspooled. Gwen moved back to his shoulder and started working down his arm.

“I lost her.” His voice was low and tense.

“I don’t know how. I can see her face—small and pale, like a pixie.

I can feel that I cared for her, and when she died, I was in a rage of guilt and grief—but I can’t remember her last name, or what she was to me, or how she died.

Nothing.” His voice switched to outrage, the cornered animal again. “How is that possible?”

Gwen worked a thick scar on his upper arm that extended across his shoulder and chest. “Did you know the ancient Celtic bards memorized hundreds, if not thousands of verses? Histories, genealogies, tales of valor and war and romance, and they could sing any one of them on command.”

“Blah blah blah, the Welsh are wonderful, blah blah,” Pen grumbled. “The English have long poems, too.”

“Yes. But the druids believed their knowledge and teachings were too sacred to write down, and as for our Cymric literature—well, you know how you Saes feel about us using our language. So the bards preserved the old books by memorizing them, piece by piece.”

“So did the Greeks. That’s why we have Homer.”

“But how did they do it?” She slid her hands down his forearm and started kneading the tendons in his hand.

“The same way I learned my Latin. Endless recitation and having it beat into me. I can’t tell you my own bloody name, but if you ask nicely, I’ll bet I can give you one of Cicero’s speeches in its entirety.”

“No doubt you could. It’s a trick of rhythm, and meter, and other poetic devices that help you memorize long passages,” Gwen said, concentrating on his fingers.

“At least, that’s how I was taught. But the great poems are also a matter of finding the connections.

The way one piece relates to the next.” She lay his hand on his legs.

“Your memory will come back, Pen. You’ll find the connections. ”

She could only hope, when the time came, he would not want to kill her in his rage for having deceived him.

“Why aren’t you sickened by my scars?”

She met his eyes. His gaze was clear, steady and curious, the pupils wide and dark.

“Because they were earned in combat for an honest cause. They are badges of honor.”

He snorted. “I’m not so certain it was honest. Or worth anything, in the end. But you don’t pity me, for all that.”

“We all have our scars. Some earned in different ways.”

“Then you’ll do my leg as well?” He patted his left thigh, giving her a look of invitation.

He was still clad in his breeches, but she knew the scar on his leg was thick and deep, still an angry red after all this time.

His limp emerged at the end of the day, when he was weary, or when the weather was damp.

“Do it yourself.” She thrust the jar of camphor liniment at him.

“You’re not going to give me anything, are you?”

She stared. “We’ve given you a roof, and food, and?—”

“ You ,” he whispered, his eyes kindling with a slow heat. “You’re not going to yield an inch of you.”

Her breath whirled out of her throat, wisping away like a fog. “I’m giving you a rub for your scars. Here it is.”

She held out the jar. He closed his hand over hers, and, like a fool, her eyes fluttered shut at the warm strength of his fingers curling about hers. He felt safe . And that was the most dangerous thing about him.

“I’d swear I knew when a woman fancied me,” he said, his voice a low rasp.

She couldn’t meet his gaze, focused so intently on her face, examining every feature as if she were a perplexing piece of art.

Her cheeks heated—she couldn’t fight the blush—and he chuckled.

The sound stirred her like the scrape of his hand over her skin.

“You do . But you won’t take what I offer.

Unabashed, uncomplicated pleasure.” He left her hand and drew a fingertip over the inside of her wrist. The delicate skin flamed to life.

He drew his finger upward, trailing his rough fingertips along the sensitive skin, and a fiery current raced up her arm and arrowed into her breasts.

She shifted, uncomfortably warm, and tried to draw away. He didn’t let go.

“Mindless pleasure,” he purred, rubbing a thumb along the crease inside her elbow. Sensation pulsed to her nipples. “The kind that will make you forget who you are for a minute. What’s the harm with a bit of—cavorting?”

The word was the dash of ice water she needed. She uncurled her fingers, letting the jar of liniment drop onto his bed. She looked away from his bare chest, the layers of heat and muscle.

“It doesn’t bother you?” she blurted. “The mindlessness.”

His smile tensed. “I’ve already had my mind blotted out, remember?”

“But you don’t know if you can trust me.

” He couldn’t. She was lying to him, keeping him away from his business, his estates, his friends.

His family. “I could be tricking you. I could be out for something. I could try to rob you, or—” She bit her lip on the guilt breaking through. She was supposed to make him trust her!

He dropped her arm. “Rob me? I have nothing. These aren’t even my clothes.” He scooped up the jar of ointment, clenching it in his fist. “You can’t blame a man for wanting a bit of human comfort when he has nothing else.”

Comfort. She hadn’t thought of it that way. She’d assumed his impulses were purely primal, a man who wanted a conquest for the sake of conquest, or a man who liked his pleasures varied and continuous, and would take them from whoever was near at hand.

Had he been seeking comfort with his offer back in the Bristol tavern, when he invited her to be his mistress? Did he want companionship, warmth as well as pleasure—from her?

“A woman pays a dear price for her comforts,” she murmured. “We are not allowed to— cavort .”

She didn’t take her leave, and he didn’t acknowledge her departure. She left him the candle and the camphor, making her way down the broad night stair and through the hall to the narrow turret where she and Dovey kept their rooms.

She wouldn’t be so foolish again, coming to his room alone and at night. He could tend his own damn scars. She couldn’t afford to be this upset by him, by what he wanted of her. By what she wanted of him.

For it was more than St. Sefin’s that he held over her. And she couldn’t meet his price.