The Taming Read online

  Rogan stopped his thoughts and looked at the shirt again. She’d not wanted to wash his clothes. What she’d wanted was a good tumble in the grass. When she didn’t get it, she’d had her revenge on him, and revenge was something Rogan understood very well.

  In spite of his anger, in spite of the fact that he was now going to have to go to the expense of new clothes, he looked at the sunlight shining through the holes in his shirt and he did something he rarely did: He smiled. Saucy wench, she wasn’t afraid of him. She had risked a well-deserved beating when she’d pounded holes in his clothes. If he’d caught her, he would have…He would probably have given her the tumble she wanted, he thought, still smiling.

  He tossed the shirt into the air, caught it, then began to dress. He felt better now about marrying the Neville heiress. Perhaps after his marriage he’d find the blonde beauty and see if he could give her what she wanted. Maybe he’d take her with him and maybe he’d fill her belly with the nine brats she claimed to have.

  Once dressed, he mounted his horse and rode up the bank to where his brother and his men waited.

  “We’ve waited long enough,” Severn said. “Have you built your courage now? Can you face the girl?”

  Rogan’s humor left his face. “If you want to keep that tongue of yours, you’ll hold it still. Mount and ride. I go to marry a woman.”

  Severn went to his waiting horse, and as he put his foot in the stirrup, something blue in the grass caught his attention. He picked it up and saw that it was a piece of yarn. He dropped it again and gave it no more thought as he rode after his hardheaded brother.

  “My lady,” Joice said again, then waited. But Liana made no response. “My lady!” she said louder, but still no response. Joice looked at Liana staring out the window, her mind far away. She had been this way since yesterday, when she’d returned from her ride. Perhaps it was her impending marriage—the messenger had been sent to Lord Stephen this morning—or perhaps it was something else altogether. Whatever it was, Liana was not telling anyone. Joice eased out of the room and closed the heavy oak door.

  Liana hadn’t slept during the night and she’d given up all attempts at work. She just sat on the window seat in her room and stared at the village below. She watched people scurrying, laughing, cursing.

  The door opened with a bang. “Liana!”

  There was no possibility of ignoring the angry, hate-filled voice of her stepmother. Liana turned cool eyes to her. “What do you want?” She couldn’t look at Helen’s beauty without seeing Lord Stephen’s smiling face, his eyes shifting to the gold salver on the mantel.

  “Your father wants you to come to the Hall. He has guests.”

  There was a bitterness in Helen’s voice that piqued Liana’s curiosity. “Guests?”

  Helen turned away. “Liana, I don’t think you should go down. Your father will forgive you; he forgives you everything. Tell him you have seen this man and do not want him. Tell him you have given your heart to Lord Stephen and want no one else.”

  Now Liana was indeed interested. “What man?”

  Helen turned back to look at her stepdaughter. “It’s one of those dreadful Peregrines,” she said. “You probably don’t know of them, but my former husband’s land was near theirs. For all their long line of ancestors, they are poor as a honey-wagon driver—and about as clean.”

  “So what do these Peregrines have to do with me?”

  “Two of them arrived last night and the oldest one says he has come to marry you.” Helen threw up her hands. “It’s like them. They don’t ask for your hand—they announce that one of the filthy beasts is here to marry you.”

  Liana remembered another filthy man, a man who had kissed her and teased her. “I am pledged to Lord Stephen. The acceptance to his proposal has already been sent.”

  Helen sat down on the bed and weariness made her shoulders droop. “That’s what I’ve told your father, but he won’t listen. These men brought two huge hawks as gifts for him, two big peregrine falcons like their name, and Gilbert has spent all night with them recounting one hawking story after another. He is convinced they are the best of men. He doesn’t notice the stench of them, the poverty of them. He ignores the stories of their brutality. Their father wore out four wives.”

  Liana looked steadily at her stepmother. “Why do you care who I marry? Isn’t one man as good as another? What you want is for me to get out of your house, so what difference does it make who I marry?”

  Helen put her hand on her growing belly. “You will never understand,” she said tiredly. “I merely want to be mistress in my own house.”

  “While I must leave and go to some man who—”

  Helen put up her hand. “It was a mistake for me to try to talk to you. Go to your father, then. Let him marry you off to this man, who will probably beat you, a man who will take every penny you have and leave you without so much as the clothes on your back. Clothes! Clothes are nothing to these men. The oldest one dresses worse than the kitchen boys. When he moves, you can see holes in his filthy garments.” She heaved herself off the bed. “Hate me if you must, but I pray that you do not ruin your life merely to do what I say you should not.” She left the room.

  Liana wasn’t much interested in this new man who had announced he planned to marry her. Men like him had been coming night and day for months now. For her part, she couldn’t see a great deal of difference in them. Some were old, some were young, some had brains, some did not. What they had in common was a desire for the Neville money. What they wanted was—

  “Holes in his clothes?” Liana said aloud, her eyes wide. “Holes in his clothes?”

  Joice came into the room, “My lady, your father—”

  Liana pushed past her maid and ran down the steep spiral stairs. She had to see this man, had to see him before he saw her. At the bottom of the stairs she ran out the door and through the courtyard, past knights lounging about, past horses waiting for riders, past spitcock boys resting in the sun, and into the kitchen. The enormous open fireplaces made the rabbit warren of rooms feverishly hot, but Liana kept running. She pulled open a little door near the slophole and went up the steep stone stairs to the musicians’ gallery. She put her finger to her lips to silence the fiddle player as he started to address her.

  The musicians’ gallery was a wooden balcony at one end of the Great Hall, with a waist-high wooden rail blocking the musicians from view. Liana stood in one corner of the gallery and looked down into the Hall.

  It was him.

  The man she’d seen yesterday, the man who had kissed her, sat at her father’s right hand, an enormous falcon on a perch between them. Sunlight streaming through the windows seemed to make the red in his hair catch fire.

  Liana leaned back against the wall, her heart pounding. He wasn’t a peasant. He had said he was off to do some courting, and he’d meant her. He had come to marry her.

  “My lady, are you all right?”

  Liana waved the harpist away and looked back at the men below, not sure of what she’d seen. There were two men with her father, but to her eyes, she could see only one of them. The dark man seemed to dominate the hall with his sprawling way of sitting and the intensity with which he spoke and listened. Her father laughed and the blond man laughed, but her man did not.

  Her man? Her eyes widened at the thought.

  “What is his name?” she whispered to the harpist.

  “Who, my lady?”

  “The dark man,” she said impatiently. “There, that one. Below.”

  “Lord Rogan,” the musician answered. “And his brother is—”

  “Rogan,” she murmured, not caring about the blond man. “Rogan. It suits him.” Her head came up. “Helen,” she said, then flung open the door and started running again. Down again through the kitchens, past a dog fight the men were laying odds on, across the cobbled yard to the south tower, then up the stairs, nearly knocking over two maids who had their arms full of laundry, and into the solar. Helen sat before a t