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  “My lady,” the priest said, and it took Alyx a while to understand that he was speaking to her. “It is not the church’s place to encourage unwanted marriages. Is it your desire to marry Lord Raine?”

  She looked up at Raine’s profile, furious that he wouldn’t look at her. With two steps, she planted herself in front of him, his eyes focused somewhere over her head. Slowly, she reached out and took his hand, held it in hers. His hand was cut in several places, bloody, bruised, and as she looked down at it she knew he’d been hurt saving her. She raised it to her lips and kissed his palm, and when she looked up, his eyes were on her. For a moment they seemed to soften.

  “She will marry me,” he said as he glanced back at the priest.

  Alyx wanted to curse at him for his self-assurance and for his refusal to weaken in his anger at her. Silently, she moved back beside him and the marriage was completed, a gold ring slipped onto her finger.

  Raine gave no one time to congratulate her. “Come, Lady Alyx,” he said, fingers digging into her upper arm. “We have a great deal to discuss.”

  “Leave her alone, Raine,” Gavin said. “Can’t you see she’s tired? And besides, this is your wedding day. Rail at her some other time.”

  Raine didn’t bother to even look at his brother as he ushered Alyx from the chapel back through the courtyard and into her room. The moment the door was closed, Raine leaned against it.

  “How could you, Alyx?” he whispered. “How could you say you cared for me then put me through the last few months of hell?”

  It was very frustrating not to be able to talk. She looked about for a pen and paper but remembered Raine couldn’t read.

  “Do you know what it’s been like the last few months?” He tossed his helmet on the bed. “For years I’ve searched for a woman I could love. A woman with courage and honor. A woman who wasn’t afraid of me or after money or land. A woman who made me think.”

  He began unbuckling the leather straps that held his armor in place, tossing piece after piece in a heap on the bed. “First you drive me nearly insane in those tight hose, flipping about in front of me, looking up at me with big eyes so full of hunger you frightened me.”

  With one movement, he pushed all the armor to the side, sat down on the edge of the bed and began unfastening his leg coverings. Alyx knelt before him and helped. Raine leaned back on his elbows, never stopping his tirade.

  “When I found you were a female I had a fever and wasn’t sure I wasn’t dreaming, yet that night I found more joy than I ever had. There was no coyness about you, no holding back, just exuberance, pleasure given, pleasure received. Later I was furious at you for having played such an ugly trick on me, but I forgave you.”

  He said the last as if he were the most magnanimous person alive, ignoring Alyx’s look of disgust as he raised his leg for her to unbuckle the second leg sheath.

  A knock on the door made him pause. Several servants, dressed more costly than Alyx had ever been, entered the room bearing a large oak tub and several buckets of steamy hot water.

  “Put it there,” Raine said distractedly.

  Standing, Alyx watched the procession with disbelief. A tub full of hot water, brought by servants and set before them as if they were royalty. Never in her life had she had a full, hot bath. In Moreton she’d bathed from a basin and in the forest there’d been the icy stream.

  “What is it, Alyx?” Raine asked when they were alone again. “You look as if you’d seen a ghost.”

  Silently, she pointed at the steaming tub.

  “You want to bathe first? Go ahead.”

  Cautiously, she knelt by the tub, put her hands into the water and smiled up at Raine as he began to remove the leather padding he’d worn under his armor.

  “Don’t try to distract me,” he said a little too sweetly. “I am still considering blistering your behind. Do you know how I felt after I found you with Jocelin?”

  She looked away from him, remembering the hurt in his eyes that night.

  “It took me years to find you, then to have you tell me your . . . your music meant more than I did. Close your mouth! You did in effect say that. You know, Alyx, I rather like your not being able to talk. My brother wouldn’t believe that a little thing like you could outshout fifty grown men. I offered for him to put some money on his big mouth, but he declined.

  “Alyx,” he warned, “don’t look so offended. You have no right to be offended. No! I am the one who’s gone through hell these last months. I never knew where you were, how many men you were sleeping with.”

  At that, she sent him a look of blackness.

  “You were the one who made me believe you lacked virtue—that is the kindest way I can say it. At camp I drove the people nearly insane. Some of them rebelled and refused to go near the training field.”

  He frowned for a moment at the way she was pointing at him. “I spent a great deal of time there, if that’s what you mean. I was trying to wear myself out so I wouldn’t remember you and Joss.”

  Alyx narrowed her eyes at him, used her hands to form a large curving mound over her chest.

  “Oh, Blanche,” he said, understanding so easily that Alyx hissed at him. “It would serve you right if I had invited her into my bed, but after you I wanted no other woman. Damn you, Alyx! Stop looking so pleased with yourself. I was miserable while you were gone.”

  She pointed at herself and all her love showed in her eyes.

  He looked away and his voice was hoarse when he spoke again. “I nearly killed Joss when he came to me. I refused to see him and the guards wouldn’t let him pass, but he knows his way about the forest too well. One night I’d had a little too much to drink and when I woke in the morning Joss was sitting on a stool by my bed. It took a while before I would listen to him.”

  Alyx heard the understatement in his words and rolled her eyes so exaggeratedly that Raine pointedly ignored her.

  “I can tell you that it didn’t help my sore head any to hear of Pagnell’s capture of you, nor that the loathsome man planned to set a trap for me.”

  Alyx, sitting by the tub, reached up and grabbed Raine’s hand. He wore only a loincloth now. To think that he had risked his life for her.

  “Alyx,” he said softly, kneeling before her. “Don’t you realize yet that I love you? Of course I’d come for you.”

  She tried to show him, with her hands and expressions, how she’d worried about Pagnell harming him.

  “What?” Raine said, standing. “You thought I didn’t know about the trap?” He was obviously insulted. “You thought some mosquito like Pagnell could maneuver a Montgomery into his clutches?”

  With a swift gesture, he tore off the loincloth and stepped into the tub. “The day a bit of filth like that—Alyx, you didn’t really believe that Pagnell—?”

  She threw up her hands, bowing before him with mock humility.

  “Well, perhaps you should be forgiven. You don’t know what the man is like. Maybe to you all noblemen are alike.”

  Now she was the one insulted. By “you” he meant people of her class, lowlings who believed in witches and the goodness of the King, who thought the trials were honest and fair and other stupid things. She slammed her fist into the water, splashing it into Raine’s face.

  He grabbed her wrist. “Now what was that for? Here I’ve forgiven you for leaving me, saved your skin from a fire and married you and you aren’t even grateful.”

  Oh how very, very much she wished she could talk. She’d tell him in a voice that’d pin his ears back that she left him to keep him safe from the King’s wrath and she was facing being burned because she carried his child. As for marrying her, he’d no doubt done it out of his stupid sense of honor.

  “I don’t like what you’re thinking,” he said, pulling her closer to him. “Gavin laughed at me when I said you’d be grateful for what I’d done. He said women never reacted the way they should, I mean with logic. Now what have I done?”

  She’d doubled her fist and t