Forever His(106)

“And you will leave me here to wed Lady Rosalind?”

Celine glanced up at him from beneath her lashes. She wasn’t sure what answer he expected. Or why he had even asked that question. She had to leave. And he couldn’t go with her to the twentieth century. She couldn’t believe the thought had even crossed his mind.

She considered blurting out the complete truth: that he was going to fall in love with Rosalind, so much so that one day he would carve her initial with his above every door in his castle. Gaston and his Lady R were going to have not only a bold son, but love. A legendary love. The kind of love people would still be talking about centuries later.

The kind of love Gaston did not and never would feel for her.

Fighting tears, unable to say any of it, she shrugged. “I don’t see that I have any choice. I’m sure you’ll be very—” Her voice broke, but she wrestled it back under control. “—happy married to Rosalind. You’ll forget me before you know it.”

That muscle in his cheek flexed again. “You can say that, after what happened in this bed last night?”

Celine felt her composure slipping. “Can we please not talk about that anymore?” she asked a bit too quickly. “In fact, I think it would be better if we just declare the entire subject off limits. And we should probably think about taking some escorts with us when we leave, in case it’s necessary ... t-to prove ... to have witnesses that we didn’t—”

“To verify our lie that we have not touched each other?”

Celine felt her cheeks burning. “Right.”

“Fear not, milady,” he said sardonically. “None will ever guess our secret. I will leave my men here to guard Avril, but Etienne can accompany us, and young Remy. They shall be escort enough.”

“Then we’re agreed,” she said lightly, crossing to the bed to put her things back in her purse. “We’ll do what we have to do.”

He stood watching her for a long moment, intent and silent, before he echoed softly, “We will do what we have to do.”

***

“Milady, Sir Gaston will have my head for this,” Etienne whispered plaintively, pacing the room. “And whatever else is left of me after he finishes beating me to a pulp.”

“Don’t worry, Etienne. I told you, he’ll understand after I explain it to him.”

Celine rubbed her arms, feeling a chill, though the room they had been shown into was quite warm, with a fire blazing on its huge hearth. The keep, larger than any she had yet seen, was everything Avril had said it would be.

Avril was the one who had given her directions here, without asking questions. The chateau lay along the winding route Gaston had been following south for the past two weeks, and it was no more than a few hours out of the way.

A few hours Celine thought absolutely necessary to spend on this little mission.

“I do not know why you could not have explained it to him before we left camp,” Etienne muttered. “He will not be pleased that we snuck away into the night. Like a pair of outlaws.”

“I left a note,” Celine said with a sleepy yawn. “Besides, I couldn’t tell him where we were going, because he never would’ve let me leave. I didn’t have to bring you along, you know, Etienne. I could have ridden off by myself. But I probably would’ve gotten lost.”

“Which is why I agreed to accompany you at all,” the young man grumbled.

“Very kind of you,” Celine said cheerfully.

He scowled at her, looking every bit like the threatening knight he would become someday soon. Celine’s tentative smile faded. She didn’t feel as cheerful as she was trying to sound. She had told herself that she needed to come here, for the sake of future history.

But deep down she knew her real motive: an illogical, emotional need to meet her rival face-to-face.

To see the woman who would so completely steal Gaston’s heart.

A brief conversation with Avril had already uncovered a positively nauseating list of glowing attributes: Lady Rosalind was so beautiful that poems had been written about her; so intelligent that she corresponded with leading Sorbonne scholars on matters of the day; so rich that she would soon inherit all the lands that lay between Gaston’s chateau and Avril’s. The lands it had taken four weeks to cross on the way north.

“Rich” was too small a word for it. In this time, Celine was a pauper compared with Rosalind. Even in her own time, she would be a pauper compared with Rosalind.

To top it all off, the lady was apparently gracious, too—because she didn’t keep her unexpected guests waiting more than five minutes before she came into the room to greet them, despite the early morning hour.