The Running Vixen Read Free Page B

looked teasingly over her shoulder at him, the laughter left her face and her stomach wallowed. Her mind had been talking to the lanky, spotty boy of her childhood. Now the illusion was stripped bare, as if shed with his garments, and she found herself confronting Adam the man, a stranger she did not know. Renard had warned her and she had not listened, and now it was too late.
    The spots had gone, replaced by the ruddy glint of beard stubble prickling through his travel-burned skin. His hair was sun-streaked, the russet-brown bleached to bronze where it had been most exposed, and his eyes were the colour of dark honey. His thin, long nose was marred midway by a ridge of thickened bone where it had been broken and reset slightly askew, and a faint white scar from the same incident ran from beneath his nose into the lopsided long curve of his upper lip. Her glance flickered lower, taking in a physique that was no longer out of proportion. There were a few scars on his body too that had not been there before. One of them, obviously recent and still pink, curved like a new moon over his hip. Hastily she looked away and gestured him to step into the tub. Her throat was suddenly dry and her loins, in contrast, were liquid. Never would she have thought to apply the term ‘beautiful’ to Adam de Lacey, but the cygnet had shed its down, and more besides. ‘You have seen some hard fighting recently,’ she said hoarsely, and busied herself finding a dish of soap.
    He stepped into the oval tub and sat down. The water was hot, making him gasp and flinch, but at least it concealed the more unpredictable parts of his anatomy from her view. ‘We were attacked several times on the road by routiers and outlaws. They picked the wrong victim in me, but some of them took the devil of convincing. Am I supposed to use this?’
    She took back the soap dish she had just handed to him with a puzzled look.
    ‘I shall smell as sweet as a Turkish comfit!’ he elaborated with a genuine laugh.
    Irritated at her mistake, she replaced the rose attar lavender concoction with something less scented.
    ‘Renard told me about Ralf,’ Adam said into the uneasy atmosphere. ‘I’m sorry. He was a good man, and I know you loved him.’
    Heulwen straightened up like a warrior preparing to resist a blow. Yes, Ralf had been a good man: a fine warrior and superlative horseman, all that men would admire. But he had been a poor husband and an unfaithful one, rutting after other women the way his stallions did after mares on heat - and then there was the matter of all that unaccounted-for silver in their strongbox. ‘It is never safe to build on quicksand,’ she said with a hint of bitterness, and fetched him a shirt and tunic of her father’s, his own baggage still being below in the hall.
    ‘What about Ralf ’s stallions?’
    Heulwen shrugged her shoulders. ‘I thought I might sell them, but two of the three are only half trained and could be worth much more if they were properly schooled.’
    He returned to his ablutions. Women and warhorses. Le Chevalier had been expert in the art of taming both. Adam only had the latter skill, learned out of a jealous need to prove that he was as good as the man Heulwen had chosen to love, a skill in which, as a mature man, he now took a deep and justifiable pride. ‘I could finish Ralf ’s work,’ he offered diffidently.
    Heulwen hesitated, then shook her head. ‘I couldn’t take advantage of you when you’re so recently home.’
    ‘You would be doing me a service. I haven’t worked on a horse since leaving for Germany, and it will give me space to relax between curbing the Welsh and organising my lands. I am the one who would be beholden.’
    His eyes met hers and then he averted them. ‘Well then, thank you,’ she capitulated with a nod. ‘There are two half-trained stallions as I said, and one that Ralf was hoping to sell at Windsor this Christmas feast.’
    Adam stepped from the tub and dried himself on