Free Never Love a Lord by Heather Grothaus Page B

laughter. “You can’t be serious! I have the choice of seeing where sheep do tawdry things in the presence of grown men, or I can view the legendary Foxe Ring myself? Fallstowe’s very beginning?” he said with a shake of his head. He laughed again. “This way, you say?”
    Sybilla barely had time to nod before Julian Griffin kicked his horse’s sides and was galloping toward the Foxe Ring and a darkening sky full of emerging stars . . .
    And the faint, round outline of a ripe moon peeking through the sheer curtain of a solitary cloud.
     
     
    Julian reined his mount to a hard stop when the bones of the old Foxe keep and monolithic ring stood up suddenly in the night, like a mythical giant-king who had surrendered his crown of stones and laid it on the ground before him.
    He huffed out a breath and smiled behind his foggy exhalation, trying to burn these first impressions into his memory for all time. The Foxe Ring. The legend come to life. The site where the biggest con in the history of England would be initiated, almost completely successfully, and Julian Griffin was close enough to touch it.
    No sooner had that thought entered his head than he was swinging down from his horse and striding up the slight rise to the ring, marching into it as if it were a long lost lover to be captured in a running embrace. He reached the first stones—two uprights capped by a massive horizontal slab—and he placed both palms flat against the stones with a happy sigh. They were oddly warm and smooth despite their cold appearance. The comparison caused him to remember the woman riding behind him and he turned his head to look over his shoulder.
    She was walking up the hillock with long, slow strides, leading her horse by limp reins, and Julian couldn’t help but think that she appeared to be a woman walking to her own execution. If Sybilla Foxe knew the entirety of her family’s sordid history, perhaps the Foxe Ring was not the fantastic place for her that most took it to be. His hands slid down and away from the stones and he turned to watch her unstrap the leather satchel from her horse’s saddle. She paused by her mount’s head, grabbed the bridle and whispered something into his cheek, then walked toward the ring.
    She was simply beautiful. Unearthly so in the moonlight, and Julian could not help but feel a stab of jealousy for the man Sybilla Foxe had wanted to marry. He knew that tens of men had sought her hand, some even going so far as to petition Edward with the promise of bringing her to heel. The king had given his permission more times than Julian could remember, but not one had ever returned with any inkling of hope to win the lady. She was singular. Autonomous. Choosy about those with whom she kept intimate company, and the rumor was that once she had allowed a man into her bed, she refused to see him again in a personal capacity.
    Julian wondered then just how many men that had been. And how a man went about joining that particular queue.
    Sybilla stopped just beyond the ring, and her gaze went past Julian to the ruin behind him. After a moment, she looked at him. “My sister Cecily nearly died here, only days ago.”
    Julian frowned; all sporting thoughts of casually gaining Sybilla Foxe’s bed vanished. “In the ring?”
    “The ruin,” Sybilla answered. “The floor’s rotted out of the hall, and she was pushed into the dungeon by a jealous ex-lover of her husband’s.”
    “My God. Has the woman been apprehended? Shall I send men to detain her?”
    Sybilla stared at him oddly for a moment. “That won’t be necessary. She’s dead.”
    “Dead?” Julian felt his brows draw together. “Sybilla . . .”
    “Again you flatter me, Lord Griffin,” she said, a smile in her voice. “Rumor is that she leapt to her death, quite of her own volition. From a chamber at Hallowshire Abbey where she’d sought asylum. Strange, isn’t it? I suppose the guilt of it got to her.”
    Julian wasn’t convinced, but then