LADY UNDAUNTED: A Medieval Romance Read Free Page B

blow to the air that nearly spun the rake out of her hands. Fingers splintered by the wooden handle, she raised her crude weapon again as the knight wheeled his horse around.
    What a sight! She had known him only by the hair of which Maynard had spoken—the Irish of him. From that, and her husband’s tales of this cruel, treacherous man, she had envisioned a far different person.
    The misbegotten brother Maynard had described had been neither so tall nor broad-shouldered. He had been older and had not possessed a handsome face beneath hair she had imagined long and unkempt, rather than groomed—cut short above the ears but longer in back where it curled over his collar. He looked more the nobleman than the knave of Maynard’s tales. Still, he was dangerous.
    Liam stared at the woman. From her flight across the manor green, he had guessed she was Lady Joslyn and that she ran to hide her son. But this could not be the woman whom Maynard had wed and made a child upon. The creature wielding a rake would have held little appeal for his brother.
    From the crooked veil atop her head that revealed strands of blackest hair, to the hem of her drab skirts, she was streaked with dirt. If she was of the manor, it was in the capacity of a servant, and she had run out of fear.
    “He is dead,” she said.
    Frowning, he searched her amber eyes.
    She tilted her smudged chin higher and, in a voice at odds with her appearance, said, “He told me you would come. That you would try to murder my child and me. Is that what you intend, Liam Fawke?”
    It was Lady Joslyn. Perhaps cleaned up, Maynard’s wife would be presentable, but there seemed little about her to attract a man. Who even knew what figure she possessed beneath those soiled, ungirded garments?
    “Is it?” she pressed.
    Ignoring the question reaped from Maynard’s warning that if Liam came he would be the bearer of death, he asked, “Where is the boy?”
    “What are your intentions?”
    She stalled. Allowing her time he could afford, he said, “To claim what is mine.”
    “Ashlingford.”
    He inclined his head.
    “Then I am correct in believing Maynard is dead?”
    “You are.”
    She lowered her lids, but when she lifted them, he glimpsed no grieving in her eyes.
    Unfeeling, then. The same as Maynard. “You do not seem saddened, my lady.” He nearly laughed at bestowing the title on one who could not look less the noblewoman. “But then, when one weds but for gain, ’tis to be expected.”  
    Her eyes flashed. “As you do not know me, your attempt to gauge my character offends.”
    He did know her, for what more needed to be told of the lady than that she had wed Maynard? Of course, she may have had little choice. Though women could not be made to wed against their will, there were ways to convince them.
    “I ask again, what are your intentions toward my son?”
    Liam prodded his destrier forward.
    She raised the rake higher. “Come no closer!”
    He turned his mount sideways and moved his gaze down her weapon. As a mother protecting her babe, she would use it—albeit in vain. “I ride to London on the morrow to put my claim before the king. Oliver shall accompany me.”
    “Why?”
    He had not planned such when Ivo had questioned him, but the more he had thought on it, the more it appealed. Let the king see the heir Maynard had named. Let him decide if a barony of the magnitude and importance of Ashlingford belonged in the hands of a child—rather, those who would make a puppet of him. “Where is the boy?”
    “Where you cannot touch him.”
    “I vow no harm will befall him.” He gestured to the rake. “Do you plan to use that?”
    “If I must.”
    Liam pondered what his father would have said of an armed and mounted knight facing off a bedraggled waif whose only defense was a rake. And nearly smiled. “Put it down, Lady Joslyn. You need not fear me.”
    “You are no stranger to me, Liam Fawke. I know the man you are.”
    Maynard had made certain of