“That my wife-to-be decided she preferred my best friend after all. It’s time Thierry had a little reward and he will certainly welcome her dowry.”
He was giving all that up for her. Tears pricked the back of her eyelids.
“Besides,” he continued softly, “the lost daughter of the Eaorl of Wexford has been found again. It is my duty to marry her. It is the honorable thing to do.”
Heart pounding, she stared up at him.
He drew the beast to a halt. “Wexford is not a hundred miles from here, Saxon hussy.”
“I don’t…”
“It is not even a mile from here.”
She swallowed, gazing at his lips. “Well, I was six. I told you. It felt like a hundred… How do you know where it is anyway?”
He smoothed a lock of hair away from her brow. “Because it is mine. Just as you were meant to be. It is here. Beneath us now.”
Slowly she understood. The skeletal trees on the far hill. The screaming ravens. She’d seen them before and not just in her nightmares.
“King William granted me this confiscated land. Your father claimed he had no daughter, or I would have married you when I took the property.” How odd that blue eyes could be so warm, she mused. “It seems your father tried to save you from your hated enemy by denying your existence.”
And left her to a life of misery in that convent, she thought crossly.
“But fate brought you to me in any case,” he added, thoughtfully smiling.
Wexford. She couldn’t believe it. What had become of her father’s great hall and the village? Her memories of the old place were slight and foggy. Closing her eyes tight she saw the ravens again, causing a ruckus, rattling the bare, twisted branches. She gazed upward, mesmerized. Terrified. Was she on her feet or on horseback with her brothers?
She remembered a pair of hands and then a fleece coat, shielding her.
It was Raedwulf. He’d found her staring up at the tree, where a hanged man—a poacher executed by her father—swung in the wind, his flesh slowly decaying, pecked at by the birds. The gruesome sight had stayed with her all these years, embedded in her mind like an infected sting from a wasp. It was not a nightmare, or an omen; it was a memory.
“What is lost will be found again,” she murmured.
“What?”
“It is something an old fortune teller told me before I came here.”
Guy reached under his mantle, feeling for something. He brought it out to her, enclosed in his big fist. “Would this be yours perchance?” He unfurled his fingers slowly and there she saw her little stone which she lost when she was six. The carving of her favorite pony, made for her by Wulf.
Her sight misted with tears.
“Deorwynn of Wexford has come home,” he said, slipping it into her trembling palm and gently curling her fingers over it. “She is lost no more. I found her.”
She sniffed, wiping her tears away impatiently so that she could see his face again.
“And I’m keeping her,” he added with a smile that melted all her bones. Not to mention her warrior heart.
“But you won’t have a virgin on this wedding night,” she said.
His grin widened. “Oh yes I will. There is something I saved for tonight.”
Her cheeks warmed. Anticipation trickled down into her nether regions. She thought of his fingers stretching her and imagined his cock doing the same.
“Must we wait for tonight?” she whispered.
He feigned shock. “Of course, my lady. This will be done properly.”
Yes, she was in no doubt of that. Deorwynn just didn’t know if she could restrain herself that long from touching her rotten, villainous Norman again. In all likelihood, she reasoned gladly, Deorwynn of Wexford would do something bad to warrant punishment again, before too long.
* * * *
Eight months later
She waited as his horse cantered to the gates and he dismounted.
“Deorwynn!” he exclaimed. “Can it be you?” He looked down at her belly, full with her husband’s child. “My little sister. You have changed much.”
Yes she had. Once she was the unluckiest girl in the world and now she was the luckiest woman. She embraced her brother with both arms and then looked back to where Guy waited, watching from the battlements, the sun shining on his black curls.
“The Norman forced me to marry him,” she said. “In exchange for your freedom.”
Raedwulf laid one hand to her belly. “And this?”
“It was all his fault, Wulf. I didn’t do it. It wasn’t me.”
“Ah.” He chuckled. “I see not everything has changed.”