The Maiden Bride Read Online Free PDF Page A

returned from the endless bloodletting on endless battlefields. He'd been damned arrogant to have believed he could so easily make amends for the hundreds of churches he'd sacked, for the lives he'd claimed with his insatiable blade.
    For that beggarly boy he'd nearly run his sword through in the nave of St. Justin's, when the full meaning of his life had come crashing down on him.
    And in the end, for the most selfish motives of all: to finally claim his bastard son and shore up his darkened soul with good works.
    But God had devised a more pointed penance for his lifetime of brutal sinning, a retribution that had laid waste to all who'd had the misfortune to come near him, innocents and devils alike. Though he'd tried to protect them with his life, they'd all been struck down—by plague and famine and a sunless winter—until he was left finally, utterly alone.
    Until now. Until Eleanor—wild-haired and unbending in her impossible dreams. And he feared her most of all.
    Separation was the only way.
    And so you are annulled, wife. Dismissed by me, here and now, witnessed by the sea and the hissing rocks. If not in the eyes of the law, then surely in the stark impossibility of a marriage between them. He would see the matter closed in secret: one last indulgence purchased with his plunder. After all, a marriage never begun was no marriage at all. It was—
    Impossible.
    The sterile coolness of distance had always served him well in the past, had muted the metallic stench of blood on his sword and armor, had deafened him to the shriek of steel through living bone, had allowed him to see past the carnage to the numbness.
    Yet that distance had failed him completely when he needed it most of all.
    I'm so cold, Papa. Hold me.
    He would keep his distance from the lady of the castle. It was for the best. He would set immovable boundaries around their dealings and look upon her merely as another charge against him, a penance to be quickly done with forever.
    The Lord of Faulkhurst was no more.

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    Chapter 3

    « ^ »
    A fter dinner, Dickon had stationed himself in the portico with all the pomp and pride of the king's own bodyguard. "Not beast, nor thief, nor anyone else shall pass me and live, my lady."
    But he was fortunately fast asleep in his threadbare blanket now, which was far safer than having the quick-tempered lad meet up with the prowling night shadow named Graystone.
    Possessive beast! This is my great hall, not yours.
    Eleanor had sensed him in the gallery earlier, had felt an unsettling sense of being studied from afar, of her eyelashes ruffled, her nape sniffed and blown hot.
    Graystone. Her gargoyle.
    Or her husband's wicked, restive ghost.
    Trouble in either case—and unfinished business, for no amount of bellowing or chest beating was going to evict her.
    Or keep her from her bath.
    Though the kitchen was dusty and dark and nearly empty of pots and utensils, it contained one true blessing: a hot spring that bubbled and steamed unchecked through a pipe that jutted out of the wall near the outside door. The water swirled merrily around inside a long limestone trough and then drained out through another pipe into the kitchen garden.
    She'd thought of little else through supper: a steaming, skin-pinkening soak and blissfully scented solitude.
    When all was finally quiet, with Pippa and Lisabet snoozing on pallets in front of the hearth, Eleanor filled the half barrel in the pantry with water from the spring, barred the door from the inside, then stole a quietly magnificent half hour to wash her hair and soak herself to wrinkles, steaming away the memory of too many baths taken in near-freezing streams, wondering all the while how a gargoyle-infested, tumble-down old castle way out here on a forgotten spit of land had so quickly become a part of her breathing.
    "Because it's mine."
    There. She'd said it. Felt it all the way through to the marrow, as thickly hot as the lavender-scented steam rising off the