Defiant Read Online Free

considered the question before.
    “You should taste the wine from the duchy of Burgundy,” she said firmly.
    One of those dark, curved eyebrows lifted. “Ought I?”
    “Assuredly.” She folded her hands and leaned into them, pressing her ribs against the thick edge of the table, calling the image up in her mind. “I could tell you of a valley where the grapes grow—we could climb through the vineyards—and the air, ’tis ever hot, and the dirt cool between your toes, and at the top of the hill, the land bumps away below you as if there is something living beneath the crust of the fields. Like a pie. No, a giant stretching under his sheets, shifting his bones. Ah, and the grapes. They are a most rare thing.”
    He was watching her, his eyes shadowed. The candle flickered on the table between them. “Rare,” he echoed. “What is your name, mistress?”
    “Chivalry requires you speak first, sir.”
    “I am not chivalrous.”
    She waved her hand. “With me, you shall be. You will find it inevitable.” She arched an eyebrow. “Your name, sir.”
    “Jamie.”
    “Jamie. Jamie,” she whispered.
    It felt like years since she’d spoken a person’s name. Perhaps it had been. There had been no one but her and Father Peter and her charge, Roger, all these years.
    And now this dangerous man, dangerous not only because of the blades strapped across his body, which of course made him mightily dangerous, but because of what happened to her belly when his mouth curved into a faint, lopsided smile as she repeated his name two times.
    “And yours, mistress?”
    She hesitated. “Eva.”
    “Eva, Eva,” he murmured, just as she had done with his name, except there was absolutely no way she’d infused such latent sensuality into two murmured words.
    The same two words.
    Oh, shivers and shifting bits of land.
    “Do you not,” she asked, “find it most odd that here we are, wanting both the thing that is the same—that only one can have, so of course we will fight—and yet we talk of little nothings?”
    His bench came tipping forward, four wooden legs onto the floor. His hand, gloved in leather midknuckle, dropped to the table near hers, by the candle, the brightest thing in the whole dingy tavern, his scarred hand beside her pale one.
    “Most odd,” he said. “I haven’t a little nothing in my life.”
    “Well. Now we have this.” She patted the tabletop between them, the bare inch between their fingers, the hot candle, and the cold air.
    “Now, this,” he agreed in a low voice. He was looking at her hands. “What have you done to your fingernails?”
    “They are painted.” She curled her fingertips into her fist, withdrawing them from view. “It is naught. A habit that passes the time.”
    “They looked like drawings.”
    “That is because they are.”
    “They looked like vines. Let me see.”
    She slid her fisted hand off the table entirely. “Vines. And flowers.”
    He looked up. “How?”
    “With little brushes no wider than a grass blade.”
    “That is . . . remarkable.”
    She peered at him. “I do not wish to shock you, sir, but with your interest in little vines, you do not seem the sort to hunt priests.”
    He might have been crafted from marble, for all he moved or showed response. “No?”
    She shook her head. “Let me be clear: to look at you, one could hardly think you did anything but hunt for priests.” Something shifted on his face faintly. A smile. “But hardly do you feel like a priest ought to worry.”
    “That would be a foolish priest.”
    She nodded, absorbing. “Then I cannot let you have him, you must know this.”
    Again, the marble response. She did not like speaking with marble.
    “You think I jest,” she said sharply.
    “I think nothing of the kind,” he said in that low, rumbly way he had. She already knew the sort of way he had. “I think you resolute and dogged, and when you do a thing, Eva, I suspect ’tis a thing forever done.”
    She caught her breath as