Christmas At The Castle: Tarnished Rose of the Court / The Laird's Captive Wife

He moved so fast she couldn’t back away, lunging forward to seize her arm and pull her towards him.

“Tell me what you’re feeling. Tell me how I make you feel.”

How he made her feel? Anger and pain as she had never known, everything she had locked inside her for so long, rose up in her like the fiery force of a volcano. It exploded from her, and she lunged forward to slap John across the face. “You left me!” she cried, all the pain of years ago flooding out of her. “Tell me why you did that? Tell me how you felt then. Tell me …” She slapped out at him again as he instinctively stepped back.

In her blindness, she caught him low on the jaw with the flat of her hand. It wasn’t a hard blow, but he was caught by surprise and fell back a step. She reached out to hit him again, and he caught her wrist in his hand. His fingers tightened on the slender bones there and she sobbed as she struggled to break free.

The flash of fury in his eyes, of some pain that answered her own, made her sob again.

“You have no right to question me, John Brandon,” she cried raggedly. “You have no right to say anything to me at all. You left me. You have no part in my life!”

“Celia …” he began, his voice tight as if he too was on the brink of an explosion. As if he held himself tightly leashed.

“Nay! I survive however I can now. And you—you …”

His fingers closed even harder on her wrist, a manacle she couldn’t escape from, and he reeled her closer. She tried to dig her boots into the frozen mud, but he was stronger.

His stare was so glittering, so intense. No one had ever looked at her like that before—as if he knew her, was part of her. Yet he wasn’t. Hadn’t been in so long. She had been alone.

She wanted only to leave him, to run and hide, to be free at last of whatever hold he had on her. She twisted her body hard as it touched his, trying to wrench away. But she overbalanced on her uncertain feet and fell heavily to the side.

Her hand was pulled from John’s at last, yet she couldn’t right herself. She felt herself toppling to the ground.

“Celia!” she heard him shout.

As she fell heavily onto the ice her leg caught on a fallen branch and she rolled forward. She had only a dizzy glimpse of him, of the raw horror on his face, of the flat grey sky above her, and then she was tumbling down the steep riverbank. Faster and faster.

She tried to catch at the ground, at anything she could find, but it slid out of her grasp. Her head struck something and bright stars whirled around her. Her whole body seemed to go numb.

Yet she felt it when she tumbled into the water. The icy-cold waves closed over her head, and it felt like a thousand daggers plunging into her skin. She tried to scream at the agony, and water rushed into her mouth.

Celia did know how to swim, and she struggled to push past the pain and fight her way to the surface. Her heavy skirts and boots grew sodden, weighing her down. She kicked hard against them and managed to break upwards and gulp in a precious breath. But the river wasn’t finished with her yet. It caught at her again, pulling her down.

And suddenly she only wanted to live. When her brother had died, when she’d been with Thomas, she had never really wanted to die. But merely surviving, putting one day behind her and then the next, had been all she could do. Otherwise the pain and anger would overwhelm her.

But now, with her whole body numb and the rushing river carrying her away, she wanted life again. Music and colour and sunshine. She wanted to see John—to slap him properly, to find out once and for all what had really happened when he left her. Or to kiss him as she once had, with nothing held back.

That was her last thought as she was sucked under the water again. The precious air was cut off.

Suddenly a hard arm caught her around her waist and jerked her up towards the light.

She gasped and let her head fall back onto a naked shoulder as she was drawn towards the shore. It seemed so very far away, yet she wasn’t scared now. Somehow she knew it was John who held her, and that he wouldn’t let her go. He wouldn’t let the river have her.

He reached the bank and hauled her up its slippery length under his arm. Celia couldn’t stop shivering, couldn’t think. When they reached the top, he laid her on the ground and pulled up her skirt, to draw her own dagger from its sheath at her thigh.

He cut away her sodden doublet and the stays beneath in smooth, quick strokes and spun her onto her stomach, his legs straddling her hips. The flat of his hand hit her hard between the shoulderblades once, twice, until she expelled the water that choked her lungs.

She sobbed out all her fear and relief, and through her tears she felt him pull her back into his arms. He wrapped his body all around her, all his heat and strength. He pressed his lips hard to her cheek, and to her shock she felt his own tears on her skin.

“God’s teeth, Celia,” he growled. “I thought you were dead. I thought …”

“You saved me,” she sobbed through her chattering teeth. “You—you could have drowned.”

“I won’t let you go,” he said. “Not without me.”

Celia heard a shot and the pounding of running feet on the icy mud.

“John!” Lord Marcus said, and for once there was no lightness at all in his voice. “What happened? Are you hurt?”

“She fell into the river,” John answered. He still held onto her.

“Oh, sweet God, Mistress Sutton, but you will surely freeze to death!” Lady Allison cried.

Celia heard the swish of fabric and a warm, fur-lined cloak covered her icy skin.

She was drawn away from John even as she tried to hold onto him. “Nay,” she cried.

But darkness closed in on her, born of the cold and shock, and she fainted into its weighty oblivion.

Chapter Eight (#ulink_016dd3d5-c456-51d5-a298-40ee94e9e2e6)

“Shh. Be still. Rest now.” John slowly smoothed the cool, damp cloth over Celia’s brow and whispered to her until she settled back in the bed. She still frowned, and her hands were curled tightly against the sheets as if she fought demons in her sleep. But she quieted.

John sat back in his chair by the bed and ran the cloth over her shoulders and along her arms. It had been three days since she’d tumbled into the icy river—three days that they’d been alone in the small hunting lodge tucked into the woods. The chills and fever that had come upon her seemed to be subsiding, but sometimes he feared that was his own wishful thinking. His own fear of losing her all over again—for ever this time.

He balanced her hand on his palm and studied the delicate pale fingers. She had survived the fever that killed her parents and husband because her delicacy hid a fierce spirit. He had told her she was the most stubborn person he had ever seen, and she was. She would survive this. He would make certain of it. He would use all his strength to pull her back to him.

Once he had dared to begin to think of a future with someone else, with Celia. Could he afford to think of that now? What could he offer her? She was in this place now because of him. He never wanted to hurt her again.

“I should never have quarrelled with you that day, Celia,” he whispered. He should have known she would fight like the warrior she was, his fairy queen with claws. But he wasn’t willing to let her hurt herself.

He laid her hand back on the sheets at her side and went on bathing her skin. She felt cooler to his touch now. Most of the heat on her bare arms was from the fire he had built up in the grate. She wore a chemise with the sleeves cut away, a bandage wrapped above the elbow, where the physic had bled her before the others moved on with their journey. Her hair fell over one shoulder in an untidy black braid.

John slowly smoothed the cloth up her arm and over her collarbone. He saw again the shoulder that had had him so furious when he first undressed her.

It had obviously been damaged, wrenched out of its socket and then reset improperly, so that it stood out crookedly under her smooth white skin. Pale scar tissue lay in a pattern over it. There were also faint marks on her back and buttocks, thin white scars that had not been there when they’d made love three years ago.

Her bitterness and distance, her hatred of her husband and gratitude for his death, made terrible sense now. If the man hadn’t already been dead John would have killed him with his own hands, in a slow, terrible way involving red-hot pokers and dull daggers.

But torturing Thomas Sutton wouldn’t bring his Celia back. How could he do that?

“You have to fight to live now, my fairy queen,” he said fiercely. “Fight so you can go on hating me.” Go on punishing him. He deserved no less. Yet he could never bear it if Celia died. She would take with her every dream he’d ever had of a better life than the one he led.

“Fight, damn you!” he shouted.

“Oh, John, do leave me alone,” she murmured hoarsely. “I cannot sleep with so much noise.”

John’s eyes shot to her face. Her eyes were open and clear, not glassy from the fever, and she watched him as if she actually saw him, not some nightmare hallucination.