Free I Loved a Rogue The Prince Catchers by Katharine Ashe Page A

been a fool. From the comfort and safety of her queenly throne, she had stepped straight into the fire.
    Eleanor suspected she ought to take some lesson from this. With the memory of Taliesin’s hands on her like a wicked dream, she could not.
    Taliesin did not return in time for dinner, nor did he return by the time she changed into her nightclothes and crept under the covers of her narrow bed not unlike the bed she’d slept in for twenty years of her life. While he had slept in a barn. And elsewhere, she supposed.
    What had he done with his life since he’d left St. Petroc? Ravenna said his business trading horses was successful. Where had he made that business away from his uncle’s family? Gypsies didn’t often leave their families. And how had he the time now to escort her on this quest? Or was he simply still the wild boy she’d once known, a nomad by blood, up to a lark if it meant travel, even if it meant playing escort to an aging spinster?
    An aging spinster whose legs he had caressed with hands that made her dizzy.
    With the sounds of the sea in her ears she couldn’t sleep. Her blood pounded quick, pulsing, every moment lying abed a moment wasted. She’d wasted too many moments of her life already.
    Today she had waded into a frozen ocean, with nary a sniffle to show for it. Only a pressing need to be alive bubbled in her now.
    Donning her cloak, and once more stealing out of her shared room, she made her way down to the taproom. Betsy’s shoes were large and clomped on the stairs. No one else lodged at this inn now; she didn’t fear encountering anyone.
    The taproom was dark, not even the kitchen dog anywhere to be seen. She drew her feet out of the heavy shoes and padded to the window on bared feet, her toes exploring each floorboard like an exotic landscape. The clouds had departed. Now the moon shone brilliantly, silver-white amidst clusters of thousands of stars, illumining the cove.
    She lifted her eyes to the moon and sighed. She sighed .
    She had never sighed before in her life.
    In the morning, with a head heavy and aching from lack of sleep, she would not be sighing. She would be grumbling.
    Moonlight allowed her to peruse the bar. The innkeepers were trusting people; two bottles sat atop it. Her papa sometimes shared with her a finger of sherry as a nightcap. Not, however, since Agnes had begun to join them after dinner. A girl of Eleanor’s delicate constitution, she had kindly suggested, should not be drinking sherry before sleep. Warm milk would serve her better.
    A girl of Eleanor’s delicate constitution should not be wading into a frozen sea or daydreaming of the infidelities of a medieval queen either.
    She reached for the whiskey and a spoon.
    The first spoonful caught in her throat and made her sputter. She waited and felt nothing. She stared out at the sea in which he had held her to his body and looked down at her with eyes that had grown hot even as her feet had grown numb, and she felt no stirring of heat from the whiskey like the heat he had stirred in her that afternoon. No sleepiness either.
    The second spoonful of whiskey curled across her tongue and into her chest like a living thread of fire.
    The third spoonful worked its way into her lips and her belly, and into her head in warm clouds.
    The fourth spoonful made her eyelids droop, her head tilt back, and her heels seek the chair opposite.
    The fifth spoonful—what was left of it after she spilled some on the table—caused her fingers to unbind her braid and made her breaths long and slow and deep as she remembered his hands sliding up her calves. Then higher.
    Upon the sixth spoonful she thought, perhaps, that she was coming to understand Guinevere remarkably well indeed.
    TALIESIN FOUND HER in a pool of moonlight, her cloak cast off, her nightclothes bright like the robe of an angel, her hair cascading in ripples down her back. Bare feet propped up on a chair, hands folded over her waist, and eyes closed, she slept in