Once Upon a Castle - Jill Gregory [39]
There was something about him. He moved with great decisiveness, with authority and a quick, hard grace that was somehow familiar. There was something familiar, too, in the dark hair, the broad build…
And then, as the fire roared to life, he turned and looked her full in the face, and her heart stood still.
It was him. Dear God, it was him.
After all this time, after the frantic messages sent by Marcus’s captain, after the searches, the inquiries, the sweep of neighboring and distant lands, he was here.
The gypsy spoke true, she thought dazedly, but as she was about to murmur the words, shock rippling through her, she somehow bit them back.
You can’t be sure. Wait and see…
But it was him. Nicholas. Ten years had passed since she’d seen him, her brother’s friend, Duke Armand’s son, but she knew him. He had been a young man of twenty years the last time he’d come to Galeron—a dark, wild, impossibly handsome young man who took scant notice of the small, freckled girl of no more than ten years who had watched openmouthed beside her father’s head groom as Lord Nicholas of Dinadan galloped grandly across the drawbridge with his company of men, his fine horses, his banner.
She had known from that moment that she would never forget him.
His eyes as he studied her now in the light of the fire were the dark gray of a winter sea, chill and harsh. The lean planes of his face were harsh, too, but handsome—still ruggedly, wildly handsome, though now there was a scar, white and wicked, cutting across one lean cheek. The straight slash of a nose, the downward slanting brows as fiercely dark as his hair, as dark as night, and the long, hard jaw that now looked more weathered, more weary than when she had last laid eyes on him. But yet it was the same.
His mouth, straight and thin, appeared to be set in a permanent state of anger. Yet she had in earlier days seen him laugh, had seen those arrogant lips kiss a maid as if he would devour her…
Arianne’s thoughts flew back. As a child and a girl, she’d been excluded from the feasts in his honor, as well as the hunting expeditions that he and Marcus and her father, along with the nobles, had set out on each bright, sparkling morn. How agonized she’d been, forced to sit in the tower room spinning with her mother and the other women each day, confined to the solar or her own chambers by night, always with fat old Gerta watching her like a hawk.
But she’d glimpsed him now and then all the same. Just as she’d done when she was even younger, four or five, and visited Archduke Armand at Castle Dinadan with her family, she tagged after him and Marcus as they climbed and raced and wrestled. When they rode at breakneck speed across the lush, rolling lands of Dinadan, she ran after them demanding that they wait for her, but they only laughed and galloped faster.
She’d managed to creep downstairs on the final night of his visit the last time he’d come to Galeron. He’d been twenty then and she only ten. She waited until old Gerta was snoring soundly, then in her nightgown she slipped through the solar, and down the winding back staircase to the alcove behind the great hall. There, hiding behind a velvet curtain, she gazed eagerly out at the dancers.
She saw him dancing with one of her mother’s lovely young cousins. Marta the fair, with her pale, gleaming locks and sideways smiles, seemed to enchant him. As Arianne watched from her hiding place, her palms cold and damp, Nicholas led Marta toward the very alcove where she had hidden herself.
She dashed around a corner in the nick of time and peeked out. He pulled Marta to him and kissed her in a way that Arianne in all the years since that night had never been able to forget.
“You’re cold.” He spoke to her roughly now, interrupting her thoughts. “Go and warm yourself before the fire. Then we must talk.”
“What makes you think I have anything to say to you, my lord?” Arianne spit out angrily. Then she saw the surprise that darkened those gray eyes that missed nothing. They narrowed, and his lip curled.