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“Duke’s men, are they? Seems he’s sent enough of them.”

The stranger’s deep voice spoke wryly in her ear.

“Quick, there’s not much time.” Scarcely thinking, Arianne grabbed his powerful arm and tugged him outside into the misty darkness.

As one, they melted through the night and edged around the stables into the brush. Suddenly he seized her and dragged her down behind a tangled thicket.

One big gauntleted hand covered her mouth, while the other held her helpless against a lean male torso that was as strong as an oak.

Arianne had never been held in any fashion by a man before.

She’d had suitors, but none she cared for, and she’d kept them all at arm’s length.

A rush of heat spiraled through her at this stranger’s intimate nearness, the pressure of his large, strong body against hers.

But there was little time to ponder her reaction, for the next moment a trio of guards stomped by, holding blazing torches aloft.

“Since yesterday sunset we’ve searched from the seacoast to the forest, and all the main roads, and there’s been not one sign of Lord Nicholas,” one man grumbled, his boots crunching less than five paces from where she and the stranger crouched.

“The duke’s own astrologer claims he’s dead.” The soldier beside him spat in the dirt.

“Well, I saw the gypsy woman’s eyes when she prophesied,” the third soldier muttered, glancing left and right, his eyes shining warily in the wildly flickering torchlight. “She knows more than you or I…something strange is afoot.”

They hurried on.

It was several seconds more before the stranger eased his hand away from Arianne’s lips.

“Don’t you dare touch me again,” she whispered furiously in the darkness. “How dare you…”

“Quiet. Do you want them to find us?” There was steel in his voice and in his sudden grip on her arm.

Arianne was certain that later there would be a bruise.

He yanked her up as abruptly as he had tugged her down, then pulled her after him through the woods, ducking beneath the low-hanging branches.

She kept up with him as best she could. There was nothing else to do at this point but continue fleeing through the darkness. Despite the stranger’s rough, even arrogant, conduct, she felt safer with him than she would if she were surrounded by Duke Julian’s soldiers.

For such a large man he moved with uncommon stealth, and they made little noise as they tore through the night, leaping past rocks and twigs and fallen logs, scrambling down ravines, plunging along twisting paths beneath overhanging boughs.

The frigid wind bit through Arianne’s cloak like the teeth of a wild beast, and her hair came loose from its snood, streaming freely behind her, bright as copper coins.

Still they ran. On and on through the Great Forest.

At last, when they were deep within the black heart of the forest, the stranger slowed his pace. Glancing down, he noted Arianne’s flushed face and tortured breathing, loud in the hushed quiet of the wood.

“This way,” he told her curtly, drawing her past a trickling stream. “There’s a place I used to go as a boy. If it’s still deserted, we’ll be safe for now. We can spend the night there. I wish to talk with you.”

Arianne was almost too weary to hear his quietly spoken words. Her chest hurt, and the muscles in her legs throbbed as if they were on fire. Her one thought now was of the dead guard, Galdain.

Her plan was ruined.

Her despair showed in her drooping shoulders. How would she ever free Marcus from Castle Doom before Julian had him hanged?

She did notice, though, when the cottage came into view.

It huddled, nearly hidden, at the bottom of a shallow valley, not far from the stream.

Sheltered by great oaks and a thick stand of silver birches, it was a crude but sturdy little box, built of stone and mud, with a chimney and a door, but no window.

It was dark as a cave inside.

The stranger at last let go of her arm as they entered. In silence, he set about striking tinder. When a weak yellow glow beamed out across the shadows, revealing no occupants, human or otherwise, he kicked the door shut.

“What we need is a fire,” he remarked almost cheerfully and went to the hearth.

While he busied himself stacking and lighting the remains of several split and scarred logs and then lit a tallow candle set in a holder on a small table in the center of the room, Arianne shivered in her cloak and watched him, trying to gather her scattered thoughts.

There was something about him. He moved with great decisiveness, with authority and a quick, hard grace that was somehow familiar. There was something familiar, too, in the dark hair, the broad build…

And then, as the fire roared to life, he turned and looked her full in the face, and her heart stood still.

It was him. Dear God, it was him.

After all this time, after the frantic messages sent by Marcus’s captain, after the searches, the inquiries, the sweep of neighboring and distant lands, he was here.

The gypsy spoke true, she thought dazedly, but as she was about to murmur the words, shock rippling through her, she somehow bit them back.

You can’t be sure. Wait and see…

But it was him. Nicholas . Ten years had passed since she’d seen him, her brother’s friend, Duke Armand’s son, but she knew him.

He had been a young man of twenty years the last time he’d come to Galeron—a dark, wild, impossibly handsome young man who took scant notice of the small, freckled girl of no more than ten years who had watched openmouthed beside her father’s head groom as Lord Nicholas of Dinadan galloped grandly across the drawbridge with his company of men, his fine horses, his banner.

She had known from that moment that she would never forget him.

His eyes as he studied her now in the light of the fire were the dark gray of a winter sea, chill and harsh.

The lean planes of his face were harsh, too, but handsome—still ruggedly, wildly handsome, though now there was a scar, white and wicked, cutting across one lean cheek.

The straight slash of a nose, the downward slanting brows as fiercely dark as his hair, as dark as night, and the long, hard jaw that now looked more weathered, more weary than when she had last laid eyes on him. But yet it was the same.

His mouth, straight and thin, appeared to be set in a permanent state of anger. Yet she had in earlier days seen him laugh, had seen those arrogant lips kiss a maid as if he would devour her…

Arianne’s thoughts flew back. As a child and a girl, she’d been excluded from the feasts in his honor, as well as the hunting expeditions that he and Marcus and her father, along with the nobles, had set out on each bright, sparkling morn.

How agonized she’d been, forced to sit in the tower room spinning with her mother and the other women each day, confined to the solar or her own chambers by night, always with fat old Gerta watching her like a hawk.

But she’d glimpsed him now and then all the same.

Just as she’d done when she was even younger, four or five, and visited Archduke Armand at Castle Dinadan with her family, she tagged after him and Marcus as they climbed and raced and wrestled.

When they rode at breakneck speed across the lush, rolling lands of Dinadan, she ran after them demanding that they wait for her, but they only laughed and galloped faster.

She’d managed to creep downstairs on the final night of his visit the last time he’d come to Galeron.

He’d been twenty then and she only ten. She waited until old Gerta was snoring soundly, then in her nightgown she slipped through the solar, and down the winding back staircase to the alcove behind the great hall.

There, hiding behind a velvet curtain, she gazed eagerly out at the dancers.

She saw him dancing with one of her mother’s lovely young cousins. Marta the fair, with her pale, gleaming locks and sideways smiles, seemed to enchant him. As Arianne watched from her hiding place, her palms cold and damp, Nicholas led Marta toward the very alcove where she had hidden herself.

She dashed around a corner in the nick of time and peeked out. He pulled Marta to him and kissed her in a way that Arianne in all the years since that night had never been able to forget.

“You’re cold.” He spoke to her roughly now, interrupting her thoughts. “Go and warm yourself before the fire. Then we must talk.”

“What makes you think I have anything to say to you, my lord?” Arianne spit out angrily. Then she saw the surprise that darkened those gray eyes that missed nothing. They narrowed, and his lip curled.

“Insolent child, I’ve just saved you from a fate worse than any other, unless I mistook the intent of your friend back there in the stables. I thought you might wish to thank me by providing me with some useful information.”

“I am not a child.” Arianne surprised him again by focusing on the first portion of his speech. She saw his eyebrows go up, then his features quickly took on an iron impassivity, and she could read nothing more there but a hint of harshness and of anger kept rigidly in check.

“Very well, my lady,” he responded coolly, his tone flirting with mockery.

She remembered with a shock that he had no idea who she was.

No doubt from her dull brown homespun gown and thin, plain cloak he thought her only what she had been pretending all these months to be: a simple tavern wench who had hidden from the soldiers out of fear, who was no doubt eager to go home to her own family and bed.

“So you are not a child, but you are behaving like one.” He advanced on her and gripped her by the arms so firmly that she gasped.

“Now, I have done you a good turn, my girl. It is incumbent upon you to do one for me.” He scowled suddenly, noting how her delicate cheeks were still red from the cold, how thoroughly she was shivering.