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Even his own mother struggled to look him in the eye any more—but that might not be solely down to the scars covering his face and have more to do with her disappointment over the way life had turned out for their family. She was not living the way she would have expected when she’d married his father, an eminent and wealthy landowner.
If women showed him any interest he knew it was his reputation as The Beast that drew them to him, and he’d long since tired of achieving pleasure on that basis.
The tavern door closed sharply behind him and the sounds were immediately muted. He breathed a sigh of relief and stepped away from the inn. A fine mist coated his hair and beard and he turned his face to the heavens, relieved to be outdoors once again.
The sun had set and the streets of Nerdydd were quiet and cool. A lone man scurried past, his head bent and his cloak wrapped tightly around him. Braedan watched him as he made his way down the street but he didn’t once turn towards the inn so he was probably harmless.
Even so, Braedan kept a tight grip on the hilt of his sword as he slowly made his way around the inn. At the side he glanced up at the window he knew to be Ellena’s chamber. The shutters were tightly clamped together but he thought he could just make out the flicker of a candle burning somewhere deep inside the room. He wondered fleetingly whether she had finally shed the veil that covered her hair; he was almost desperate to know whether it was the same dark colour as her long eyelashes.
He pushed the thought aside.
His job was to make sure she arrived back at her father’s estate in one piece. He should not be thinking about how beautiful she looked, even when she was fixing him with that haughty gaze she used whenever she wanted to put him in his place.
Thoughts of trailing his fingers over the soft skin of her neck kept pushing into his mind when he was least expecting it. It was irritating, because not only was she above his touch but she was also the most stubborn woman he’d ever met. He’d prefer not to think of her at all.
He was returning her to her father so that the Earl could find her a suitable husband and keep her away from his sworn enemy, Copsi. It was nothing to do with Braedan who she married—although he was glad it wouldn’t be Copsi.
His hand tightened on the hilt of his sword and he thought of her horrified expression when he’d told her that Copsi was determined to wed her before she reached her father’s fortress. Copsi was a man no woman should be subjected to. Braedan’s spies in Copsi’s court revealed a man who took pleasure in tormenting women. He thought women existed solely to give him pleasure, and thought nothing of taking a woman against her will.
Braedan would fight tooth and nail to make sure that Ellena stayed out of Copsi’s hands while she was in his care. And once she was married to someone else she would cease to be of use to Copsi, who would turn his attention to some other poor woman.
He hoped for Ellena’s sake that the Earl of Ogmore would choose someone who matched her in intelligence and strength. Almost anyone other than Copsi would be a better partner for the elegant Lady Swein, whose light blue eyes watched him with a mixture of regal disdain and intelligent understanding.
The one emotion he’d never seen cross her face was fear. Unlike most people, she wasn’t afraid of him. Yet.
Braedan smiled. Ellena had made no secret of her desire to remain widowed. But the fact that his wilful daughter didn’t want to marry again wouldn’t matter to a man like Ogmore, who was keen to spread his influence across the country and not averse to using his family members to achieve his aims.
He would like to be a fly on the wall when father and daughter met again. Both were as stubborn as each other, although he was fairly confident Ogmore would win in the end. He usually did.
It was nothing to do with him whether or not she remarried.
Braedan knew he was a bully for taking her away from her home, but she had to remarry anyway, and a new husband would allow her to have children of her own. What woman didn’t want that? And there were plenty of contenders for Ellena’s hand. Many men wanted to form an alliance with her influential father, and marriage to his daughter was one of the best ways to secure his protection.
The most likely contender was the Earl of Borwyn, whose land was close to Ogmore’s. He was reportedly a decent and handsome man.
Braedan’s fists curled as the urge to punch someone rushed over him. He took a deep breath and loosened them—what was wrong with him?
The stables were at the back of the inn and he made his way towards them. He would check that Stoirm was settled for the night before turning in himself. He had scheduled his watch for the early hours of the morning. He found it hard to sleep for more than five hours anyway, and he preferred to be busy rather than just lying there remembering all the people who depended on him and were now waiting for him to let them down—as his father had done before him.
Soft, whispered noises were coming from deep within the stables. He paused on the threshold and tilted his head, listening.
A grunt which sounded suspiciously like Merrick reached his ears, followed by a soft, feminine moan, and he smiled ruefully. Perhaps the barmaid had persuaded his friend to sample her delights.
From his vantage point at the stable entrance he could see that Stoirm was contentedly munching through the hay provided for him, and that was enough for him. He’d leave without intruding.
He quietly stepped backwards, so as not to disturb the lovers, but before he could go much further the woman giggled.
He knew that sound. It was Ellena’s tiresome maid—the one who had been making eyes at his second-in-command all day.
If she wasn’t with Lady Swein then Ellena was all alone.
Someone was supposed to be with her constantly.
He raced back to the inn and practically ran over a stable boy who got in his way.
The two guards he’d stationed outside her room were still there.
‘Has anyone been in or out of this room?’ he demanded.
‘No, sir,’ they both replied as one.
Without pausing to knock, he pushed open the door and strode inside.
There was a squeal and a flurry of bedclothes as the door slammed shut behind him.
‘What...?’ spluttered Ellena as she struggled to untangle herself from the bedcovers.
Braedan stood frozen in the centre of the room. He’d been right about Ellena’s hair. It was a rich chestnut colour and her locks fell in waves loosely around her face and down to her navel.
His eyes followed the tresses and he realised she was wearing only a white chemise. Although this was tied up to her neck, he could still make out the curves of her figure beneath it.
‘What are you doing barging into my chamber?’ she demanded.
Heat flooded his face as he realised he was staring at her like some sort of young page who was seeing a woman other than his mother for the first time.
He cleared his throat. ‘Aldith isn’t with you. Anyone could have barged in here and taken you. Why were you so foolish as to let her go?’
She frowned, and he fought the urge to rub the crease away with his thumb.
‘You have men guarding my chamber and the shutters are locked from the inside. What on earth did you think would happen?’
‘You are not meant to be left alone,’ he repeated stubbornly.
Why must she always question what he said or did? His men obeyed him out of loyalty and others did so out of fear. But she never backed down from him. Her response was both an annoyance and a thrill.
She threw back the covers and slipped from the bed. For a moment he was treated to a glimpse of a slim, pale ankle before she dragged on her long cloak, robbing him of any sight of her skin.
He tried hard not to feel disappointed.
‘I’ll be honest,’ said Ellena. ‘I was quite happy for Aldith to go out for a bit and enjoy some company in the tavern. We don’t have much in common, and after five minutes of talking to her I realised that I should have chosen anyone else in the castle to accompany me on this journey. I was enjoying spending some time on my own.’
‘It is not the company in the taproom she is enjoying,’ said Braedan.
He didn’t know why he had said that. It wasn’t right to talk about pleasures of the flesh in front of gently bred ladies, and it would have been kinder to everyone if he’d let Ellena carry on believing Aldith was sharing a cup of ale with the men downstairs.
‘What do you...? Oh, I see.’
A pink blush stole across her high cheekbones and Braedan took an involuntary step towards her. She didn’t seem to notice, and he managed to halt himself from moving any further before he did something inappropriate.
As the daughter of an eminent earl, and niece to the King himself, she was so far above his touch that to reach out to her would surely be his downfall in more ways than one. Besides, he had enough dependants relying on him. He didn’t want or need another one.
And even if neither of those problems existed he was pretty sure she couldn’t stand the sight of him—and for once it was nothing to do with his many scars. She didn’t like taking orders and she seemed to think she had the right to give orders to him.
He supposed he didn’t blame her—despite his irritation at her refusal to take his instructions seriously. He’d taken her from a comfortable existence at Castle Swein and thrust her into a dangerous situation with an unknown outcome.
‘Do you think she’ll be long?’ Ellena asked, breaking him out of his thoughts.
He chuckled in spite of himself. ‘I guess that depends on Merrick’s stamina.’
She turned an even deeper shade of red and turned slightly away from him.
He realised he could see her toes peeking out from under the hem of her chemise and his gaze became locked on that tiny piece of skin. He wanted to slide his hand along the length of her foot and let it continue further up her long legs...
‘I don’t understand why she’d bother,’ was her unexpected response.
Braedan felt his own skin begin to burn with embarrassment—or perhaps it was the overwhelming lust that had hit him out of nowhere. He wasn’t sure.
He opened his mouth to respond, but then clamped it firmly shut before he could say any more to offend her. It would be best for him to wish her goodnight and leave. But for some reason his feet were refusing to obey his mind’s orders and they stayed exactly where they were.
She’d inadvertently revealed something of her marriage that perhaps it would have been better if he hadn’t known. She hadn’t enjoyed intimate relations with her husband.
That wasn’t entirely surprising. The man had been thirty-four years older than her when she’d married him at sixteen. No young woman would enjoy lying with a man older than her father. But that could not have been the whole reason. The revulsion on her face spoke of experiences worse than just lying with a man she didn’t find attractive.
He clenched his fists to stop himself from taking those final steps towards her and showing her exactly why Merrick and Aldith had taken themselves off to the stables.
As if finally realising what she’d revealed, he saw her back stiffen and her neck lengthen as she stood taller and gave him the regal look she always used when she wanted to remind him of her status.
‘When you return downstairs please ask someone to send up some warm water. I asked Aldith to fetch it, but it appears she has forgotten.’
And that put him in his place.
Here he was, imagining running his fingers through her thick hair and over other parts of her body, and she was treating him like the errand boy she clearly thought he was.
‘I’ll see it’s done and I’ll return Aldith to you,’ he growled.
She pulled a face of displeasure before masking it under a cool nod.
He left without saying another word.
Pulling the door firmly shut behind him he glared at her two guards. ‘Do not let Aldith leave her alone again. Not even for Merrick,’ he barked at them.
The two men had the grace to look shamefaced.
He stomped back downstairs and found someone to take warm water up to Ellena. Then he went in search of his friend.
But tearing a strip off Merrick for following his cock instead of his training still didn’t make him feel any better, and it took a while for sleep to come to him that night.
Chapter Three
Ellena didn’t know what was worse: the pain in all her muscles or the damp, soggy weight of her hair, which was causing water to soak through her cloak and freeze her to the bone.
After three days of riding this was the first night they were going to sleep in tents, and the weather couldn’t have been worse. A fine mist this morning had turned into a downpour as the afternoon had dragged on. She began to long for a pair of shears to hack the weight of her waterlogged hair off.
As a child, she’d waited impatiently over many summers before her hair had reached the coveted waist length. Whenever she had been allowed to, she had unplaited her hair and revelled in running her fingers through the rich strands, loving the way the sunlight picked out the different shades.
She hadn’t done that in years.
After her marriage her hair had been another way in which her husband could hurt her, using its thickness to pull her about whenever she displeased him. Before illness had taken over his life she’d displeased him almost every day. Her failure to get pregnant had been the worst of her transgressions, and his increasingly violent efforts to make her so had given her a desperate fear of the marriage bed.
Using her hair to drag her to his bedchamber had been one of his most humiliating punishments. After his death she’d tried hard to find joy in its thick length again, but the urge to cut it all off still pulled at her every now and again.
The horses squelched through rivers of mud as they followed Braedan through a densely packed forest. Ellena frowned at his broad back, the hard muscles encased in chain mail. Since he’d barged in and out of her room three nights ago they’d barely exchanged a word. She’d heard him yelling at his man Merrick and at Aldith before Aldith had slunk back into the chamber they’d shared, but apart from some sullenness on Aldith’s part the incident might never have happened.
After an interminably long time they finally reached a patch of land, surrounded by trees on all sides, that appeared to meet Braedan’s satisfaction and the horses pulled to a stop. Ellena allowed her body to slide off Awen, rejoicing when her feet hit the floor with a thud. For a long moment she clung to the side of her horse, allowing the animal to keep her upright.
She closed her eyes and tried to imagine the hot bath that would be awaiting her at her father’s castle in only five days’ time, but ice-cold rain dripped down her face and seeped beneath her clothes, chasing the fantasy away and making her shiver.
The sounds of men moving about gradually penetrated her musings and she opened her eyes to see everyone busy at work. Everyone, that was, apart from herself and Aldith. Aldith was still sitting atop her horse, surveying the scene before her, her lips twisted into a grimace of horror.
Ellena looked around. They were sheltered by the trees but the ground was still a boggy mess. It was not going to be a comfortable night’s sleep.
Aldith had barely spoken to her apart from the occasional, ‘Yes, my lady,’ since the unfortunate incident of Merrick and the stable, so she didn’t bother to address the maid. She wouldn’t be a great deal of help in this situation anyway—it was an experience outside their usually comfortable living standards—but at least Ellena was willing to try and improve their situation. Aldith would wait until somebody helped her.
It wasn’t Ellena’s fault that Braedan had been so monumentally angry at her being left alone for a brief period. She’d heard the row he’d given the two lovers through her shuttered window—although why he hadn’t yelled at them before he came to check her room was beyond her. Surely he could have sent Aldith up to her and spared them both that embarrassing scene? She’d practically discussed her sexual relationship with Lord Swein and for the life of her she couldn’t fathom why she’d done it.
There was something about Braedan’s dark eyes that drew her in and made her say things she wouldn’t say to another person. But really—what had made her talk to him about intimate relations with her late husband when that was something she was very keen to avoid thinking about at all costs? The humiliation and the pain were things she never wanted to revisit.
She wished she could take back the comment she’d made about sex not being worth the effort. He’d probably thought her ridiculous.
She gave herself a little shake. It didn’t matter right now. All that concerned her was getting out of the relentless deluge of water. She led Awen over to the rough shelter where the other horses were gathering. She made sure the mare had her share of oats before leaving her in the capable hands of Nilson, one of Braedan’s men, who seemed to have a gifted touch when it came to horses.
All around the clearing shelters were being erected with a speed that suggested they’d done this many times before. Very little was being said as the men concentrated hard on their tasks.
Out of the corner of her eye she could see Aldith sliding off her horse, and she wondered whether she would expect someone to deal with it for her. She snorted. Aldith sometimes acted as if she was royalty.
‘Your tent has been erected, my lady,’ said Braedan from behind her.
She turned towards him. He was pointing to a circular structure in the centre of the enclosure but he was looking directly at her. Rain ran down his face and dripped off the end of his nose. She smiled at the sight and for a second he smiled back at her. Her heart stuttered strangely at the sight.
‘Where’s the food tent?’ she asked, pulling her gaze away from his face and focusing instead on a point just behind his head.
With that, his smile vanished and his customary scowl appeared.
‘Eluard is dealing with the food, my lady, but it will be awhile before it is ready.’
He stalked away from her, his boots making large prints in the mud.
‘I guess I’ll have to find the food tent by myself, then,’ she muttered under her breath.
She squelched around the clearing until she found Eluard attempting to light a fire under a sheet of canvas, its sides held up by thick wooden poles. The youngest of Braedan’s men, Eluard seemed to be given less physical jobs than the others, and she found it quite sweet that the men, for all their gruff exteriors, seemed to treat him like the son of the group.
He jumped up when he saw her approach and a deep blush spread across his ruddy complexion.
‘I’m...sorry. It...it’s not ready yet, my lady,’ he stuttered.
Ellena glanced at the bag by Eluard’s feet, which appeared to hold a lump of unidentifiable red meat.
‘I can see that.’ She smiled. ‘I’ve come to help.’
She couldn’t have startled him more if she’d told him she’d grown an extra arm.
She suppressed an amused smile; she didn’t want to upset him by laughing at his expression. She sensed it would hurt his feelings.
‘You see to that fire,’ she said, ‘and I’ll see what other provisions we have.’
They might be far away from anywhere, but she wasn’t about to eat a lump of meat with nothing to go with it. She’d been riding all day and she was starving.
She rummaged around in a large canvas bag and found a few sad-looking carrots and a couple of leeks. She set about chopping them into a large stewing pot.
‘I don’t suppose there’s any wine?’ she asked as she neared the end of the vegetables.
‘No, my lady.’
‘That’s a pity. This is going to be very dry otherwise.’
‘There is some ale...’
‘You fetch that, then, and we’ll add it to the pot.’
‘I’m not sure Sir Leofric will like—’
‘Let’s not tell Sir Leofric,’ said Ellena, and was rewarded with a shy smile.
‘Don’t tell me what?’ demanded a deep voice from the edge of the shelter.
Eluard’s face flooded with colour again and he immediately turned his attention back to the carcass he was attempting to chop.
Braedan looked curious rather than angry, so Ellena said, ‘We’re attempting to make this stew edible. I thought a slug of ale might improve the flavour. That is all.’
Braedan couldn’t move. Of all the things he’d been expecting to see when he’d found that Ellena wasn’t in her tent, the sight of her chopping carrots into a stewing pot hadn’t featured once.
He’d thought when she’d asked where the food tent was that she was demanding to be fed, but he should have known better. Over the last three days she’d ridden long hours and not complained once. He’d known men who couldn’t last as long as she could in the saddle.
Instead of hiding away in her tent, like her irritating maid, she had made herself useful. How many other highly born ladies would know what to do with a bag of uncooked vegetables past their best?
‘I don’t mind a drop of ale going in,’ he commented.
Anything to make the food more edible was good in his eyes, although he did wince when he saw how much ale she was pouring into the pot. He hoped she knew what she was doing and was not wasting precious drink.
Eventually the rest of the men were trudging in, and helping themselves to ladles of the rich-looking stew. Ellena sat on an overturned log and spooned food into her mouth. Her maid stayed on the other side of the food tent—relations between them seemed strained—but young Eluard sat near her, speaking shyly to her now and then.
Braedan was pleased she’d found someone to keep her company, because her maid wasn’t much good, and of course he was pleased it was Eluard. It wasn’t as if Braedan could keep her company himself...
It was essential he maintained a certain distance, because he was the one in charge and all his men looked to him to set an example. If he appeared to be over-familiar with her then the rest of them would follow, and the Earl of Ogmore would not be pleased.
It was annoying, though, the way his gaze kept seeking her out, and how a hard knot of jealousy seemed to be forming in his stomach because he wanted to be the one to make her smile.
He threw another log on the fire. ‘Move closer to the warmth, Lady Swein,’ he said. ‘It will help to dry your clothes.’
She raised one of her arched eyebrows at him.
‘Please,’ he added.
She smiled then—the first proper smile that had been directed solely at him.
His heart stumbled and he took a quick step backwards. She was beautiful, but her smile made her breathtaking, lighting up her blue eyes and making him want things he would never get from her.
He strode quickly from the tent and back out into the rain. Breathing heavily, he made his way to the edge of the camp and leaned against a tree.
She was forbidden. He knew that. In fact it was probably because she was denied to him that he was finding her so damn attractive and muddling his mind. He’d always wanted things he couldn’t have, and she was no exception.
But if she didn’t hate him now then she definitely would when she found out about his reward for returning her to her father.
He rubbed his eyes and pulled himself upright. Enough of this distraction—he would find his men on watch and see if they had anything to report.
The woods were silent, apart from the rustling of creatures in the undergrowth and the cawing of a bird overhead. He trod softly around the encampment but found nothing untoward. He returned to find that Ellena and her maid had retired to their tent.