Free The Maiden Bride by Linda Needham

at all times."
    "From… ?" Her mouth glistened, pouting as though he'd just kissed her and she was asking for more.
    From me—from your husband's outrageous lust for you, for it is hot and close by.
    He sighed. "Your bloody outlaws, my lady."
    "And the bloody king."
    Oh, she was very good, this wife of his. Forbearance became her, and generosity of heart. So very tolerant of an interloper's arrogance, as masterful in her mercies as she was in her unwitting malice.
    "My husband may have been a neglectful monster, but we'll make amends for his wickedness, you and I. We'll finally put Faulkhurst aright."
    "Fine. Good." Damned little else he could say, outside of "So glad the bastard's dead."
    "We'll meet in the great hall in the early morning, if you will, sir. The seven of us. Do sleep well."
    God help him, he craved the choking sting of the battlefield as he never had in all of his life—it was far safer there than here beside his wife. He'd been arrow-shot and sliced through to the bone a dozen times; he'd suffered broken limbs and festered wounds, had been stitched up with catgut and rusted needles in the thick of a brawling fray.
    But he'd never felt so mortally wounded, so dazed and confused as he did now at the end of this interminable day.
    "Good night to you, madam."
    "And to you, Nicholas." Her voice was pillowy and warm, and he feared she would cup his jaw with her hand and leave a kiss on his cheek. She was that kind of woman, and he was just the kind of sinner to let her.
    But he could never stop there—not at a kiss. He'd gather her into his embrace, and meet the dawn all tangled up in her skirts and in the lushness of her arms.
    He stood unmoving as she turned away, feeling coarse-muscled and slow. Then she stopped, studied the floor beside his chair for a moment with that keenly tender brow of hers, then stooped and picked up a partially carved block of pine—the upper half of the standing bear he'd been working at with his knife.
    "Is this your carving, Nicholas?" She turned it in the lamplight, raptly studying the details, unaware that his heart had stopped for more reasons than he cared to admit: fear and flattery and the desolate yearning for a better man's life.
    "It is mine." He could hardly deny it. There were bits of shavings on the floor, and, he suddenly noticed, on the sleeve of his tunic. He brushed at them, stark evidence of his melancholy distraction. That tenuous connection with his son.
    "Why, it's—" she laughed in pure delight, lighting the room with the lilt of it "—oh, Nicholas, it's absolutely wonderful." She sent a quick, assuring glance to him with those clear, painfully lovely eyes, then she went back to studying the bear from all its angles, caressing the small nose and the back of its head and neck as though it pleased her as nothing ever had.
    "Whoever is it for?"
    My son, Liam. Your son, wife, if I'd been a better man, a better father.
    His mouth went as dry as the wood shavings, leaving him feeling exposed, lacking an explanation for the very simplest, the truest, the purest, part of his life. Though he burned to confess it, he could never tell her this particular truth either—because she might understand, might absolve him, and ask more of him than he could give her.
    He'd crammed eight years of fatherhood into a single, astonishing summer of joy, when all around him had been collapsing. He'd found the boy abandoned to poverty and neglect and had courted his trust, carving dozens of animals for his son, his heart filling up, spilling over with every chip he'd cut away.
    A clumsy, aching attempt at making amends. Toys and trifles to catch his son's fancy and rest his fears—not much to recommend him after years of absence and deliberate denial of the boy. But Liam had fallen for the carvings.
    For the badgers and the bears and the kennel full of hunting hounds.
    I like the pony best of all, Papa.
    Nicholas could hardly breathe for the memory of all the grinning, the skipping