promise to Cristiane’s mother either to wed her or to see her safely escorted to her uncle in York. Since he’d already decided he would not wed her, lust had no part in this.
When he looked at Cristiane Mac Dhiubh again, she was standing. She had taken the tin plates from Raynauld and Elwin, and was coming toward him.
The stride of her legs, and their movement against the coarse cloth of her kirtle, aroused him in ways he refused to consider. She was just a young girl, he told himself. Inexperienced, untried. His masculine appetites may have suddenly returned unbidden, but Adam knew he had no business centering them on Cristiane Mac Dhiubh. She was not at all the kind of wife he needed or wanted. Nor was she some cheap strumpet….
He would set Charles Penyngton the task of finding a more appropriate wife—an English lady—as soon as he returned to Bitterlee.
“Your plate, m’lord?” Cristiane asked quietly. “I’ll rinse it with the others in the stream.”
The setting sun was at his back, and it illuminated her eyes as she spoke. Her lashes were thick, dark near the roots and sun-kissed gold at the ends. Though her gaze was direct, she looked at him almost shyly, as if she knew how unsatisfactory he considered her, while she waited for him to reply.
He stood and handed her the plate, then stalked away with his ungainly gait into the woods. He had more important things to consider than the length of Cristiane’s eyelashes or the berry-red softness of her lips.
As Penyngton had repeatedly said over the last few weeks, Bitterlee needed a mistress. Little Margaret needed a mother. Adam knew that no one could replace his wife in that respect, even though Rosamund had never been very attentive to their daughter.
However, common sense told him that the little girl needed someone who would care for her in the manner of a mother—accepting her faults, disciplining her with kindness and tolerance. And until he found the right person, Adam intended to become more of a parent to his child.
He knew that Margaret’s life depended upon it.
She had become little more than a silent skeleton since Rosamund’s death, with wide, hollow eyes. Her nurse, Mathilde, could not seem to draw the child out of her cocoon of grief. Little Margaret scarcely left her chamber, except to venture into the castle chapel to spend excessive amounts of time in prayer.
Adam did not need to know much about children to understand that this was not typical behavior for a five-year-old child. He would do something about all that when he returned to Bitterlee.
Preoccupied, Adam limped back to camp, where the men were setting out their bedrolls near the fire.
“Has Lady Cristiane returned from the river?”
“Nay, my lord,” Sir Raynauld replied. “I was just thinking of going down there to see if all is well.”
“Never mind,” Adam said. “I’ll go.”
He walked quietly down the path toward the river, caught up in his thoughts about his daughter and his unwelcome attraction for Cristiane Mac Dhiubh, until he caught sight of Cristiane near the water. She stood perfectly still, facing the sunset, the skirt of her kirtle rippling slightly in the breeze. One hand held back her hair; the other was outstretched.
And at the end of that hand stood a red deer, touching Cristiane’s fingers with its nose.
Chapter Three
Adam did not move.
Stunned by the sight before him, he stood stock-still and watched as the doe sniffed Cristiane’s hand and then licked it. Cristiane said nothing that Adam could hear, but soon turned her hand and gave the deer a gentle rub on the underside of its chin.
The animal suddenly looked up and saw Adam. He watched as panic spread through the doe’s body and it dashed away.
He let out the breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.
“Ah, m’lord,” she said, turning to see what had frightened the deer. “I was just about to—”
“Lady Cristiane,” he said, flustered, “that was a deer just now. A—a deer standing next to you, touching your…”
“Aye.” Cristiane nodded as she crouched down to wash her hands in the stream. “Too young to know any better, though she’s a bonny one.”
Adam was thunderstruck. The doe had known well enough to flee when it had seen Adam. Besides, young or old, he’d never heard of a wild deer approaching a person in this manner. How had Cristiane done it?
“My lady,” he said. But then she stood and looked at him with those clear blue eyes and he forgot what he was going to say. Or ask.
’Twas ever so pleasant to have a man—a handsome, well-bred man—come to escort her back to camp. The knights had set up a lovely, spacious tent for her, and Lord Bitterlee explained that they had expected to be escorting both her and her mother to Bitterlee, then to York.
And so it was that Cristiane Mac Dhiubh settled down for the night, comfortably, with thoughts of her mother and better times running through her mind.
Morning dawned bright and sunny. They rode again as they had the day before, with Cristiane seated sidesaddle ahead of Lord Bitterlee. She was certain that every time he looked down, he noticed her bare feet protruding from the edge of her kirtle. At least they were clean now, she thought, still embarrassed to be without shoes.
They’d been taken from her in St. Oln, along with most of her other meager possessions. Cristiane would not have cared, except that now she would arrive in Bitterlee looking no better than the poorest villein. She had never thought of herself as overly proud, but this lack of shoes was one thing she could not abide. Yet there was no way to remedy it.
The day passed uneventfully, though rain threatened as they traveled farther south. Part of the time they rode along the cliffs above the sea. Sometimes the track took them through wooded lands, where Cristiane made note of the new green growth everywhere, and the small animals that darted and scurried to hide from the human intruders.
When dusk approached, she wondered if they would soon stop to camp, for she was weary and it had begun to drizzle. Her back and legs ached from the long hours on horseback. Eventually they came upon a village of sorts. Nay, she amended, ’twas not quite a village, but merely an inn with a few cottages nearby.
She hoped Lord Bitterlee intended to spend the night here. They rode into the yard and saw that a number of horses were already tethered there. Voices carried from the inn, and by the sound of it, the place was crowded. Lord Bitterlee dismounted, then turned to help Cristiane down.
“Shall I go inquire about rooms, my lord?” Sir Elwin asked as he tied his horse to a post.
Lord Bitterlee nodded. “Stay close to me,” he said to Cristiane. “While we’re so near the border, there are risks. Especially for you, but for us as well.”
Cristiane nodded. Hostilities ran hot along the Scottish border, and though they were actually on English soil, she assumed that strangers would not be trusted. She almost wished they’d stopped somewhere along the road, where she could spend the night in the tent they’d brought along for her. She would have
