Midnight Eyes Read online

  Imogen’s sudden laughter was as spontaneous as it was unexpected.

  The silliness of his answer seemed to instantly evaporate all of her anger. To Gareth, her carefree laughter appeared a little like a rainbow after a storm.

  “I like that. It has a certain vestige of dishonest honesty,” she said, the laughter still bubbling up inside her. “I would like to know the name of one so skilled in survival.”

  “Sir Gareth de Hugues, your husband’s second-in-command.” He remembered to bow correctly but his mind was becoming muddled by a dawning admiration. He had heard rumors about Lady Deformed and it was those rumors that could be blamed for his unusually slow-witted inability to identify this small, beautiful sprite as the Lady herself. This woman could be thought of as deformed only if exquisite beauty was considered a deformity first.

  Robert had been frustratingly tight-lipped about his new bride and after a fortnight of conspicuous absence, Gareth had come to expect the worst. Any woman who was too ugly to come and eat with the rest of the household, Gareth had concluded, was in a very bad way indeed.

  However, instead of a repulsive gargoyle, Lady Imogen was a small, delicate woman who possessed the kind of beauty that wasn’t the least diminished by the fact that she was dressed a little like a vagrant. The body he had felt draped over his shoulder had been a very tempting one indeed. He hadn’t been only flirting when he said he’d enjoyed the manhandling.

  Mere flirting had stopped altogether, however, when she had laughed.

  With that joyous laughter she went from being a pretty little baggage to being the most beautiful woman Gareth had ever seen. It had taken his breath away and, for the first time in his life, Gareth found himself envying Robert.

  And how the man had managed to fritter away a fortnight pottering around the Keep when this woman waited for him was entirely beyond Gareth’s comprehension. The man must be using dung for brains!

  If he ever had such a wife, and Gareth prayed silently that one day he would, then he would spend every day, no, every moment of every day, basking in the radiance of her smile. He’d devote his life to being her jester just to hear the music of her laugher. And to think he had always admired Robert’s intelligence!

  Not anymore. It would take many acts of raw cunning on Robert’s part to make up for this total lapse of sanity.

  “Sir Gareth. It is my pleasure to meet you,” she said softly as she dropped into a very proper curtsy.

  Gareth bowed again over her hand with a small flourish, “No, my lady, I can honestly say that the pleasure is all mine.” He kept hold of her hand, enjoying the texture of her soft hand in his larger one.

  Imogen couldn’t stop a small giggle from escaping. “I suspect, Sir Gareth, that you might be something of a rogue.”

  “One does one’s humble best.”

  “I’m sure one does,” she murmured. “Well, thank you for the entertainment, it really has been most enjoyable. Sadly, however, I have need of that hand you are holding so tightly, and must be on my way with it.”

  “May I enquire as to your destination?”

  “Certainly you may enquire, and I may even answer.” She paused a moment, her cheek dimpling with humor. “Lucas was escorting me to the tower. I have a pressing desire to see it,” she said finally, carefully avoiding any mention of any similar desire she might have to see Robert. Gareth heard the need there all the same, and was a little surprised by the small grief it caused. He quickly shook it off, not prepared to waste time dwelling on impossibilities.

  “And they send a boy to do a man’s job?” he scoffed.

  “Actually, they send a boy to do an old woman’s job. Mary normally acts as my eyes but she thought the journey might be too great and cold for one of her advanced years, so she nobly nominated Lucas in her stead.”

  Gareth paused a moment. “Act as your eyes?” he asked gently.

  She smiled again, but this time her earlier easy amusement was missing. “To act as my eyes, as my eyes can no longer act on their own.”

  His own eyes narrowed on her, hoping for a moment that what he thought she meant was a lie. Instead, her empty eyes just missed meeting his.

  He recovered from his shock quickly. Well, there had to be something wrong, he told himself rationally, the rumors about Lady Deformed had to have come from somewhere. That it was a gross exaggeration didn’t stop it from being some kind of twisted reality.

  And what did it matter? Why dwell on such a thing when in everything else she was beyond such sterile concepts as mere perfection?

  “Well, let me offer you the use of my own, rather attractive, sky blue eyes. Not only are they exquisitely beautiful, they are also exceptionally keen and you can consider them at your disposal.”

  “Very prettily said,” she murmured, enjoying his easy acceptance of her problem very much.

  He leaned confidentially closer, trying to ignore the fact that he liked a little too well just being near this woman. “For you, I will even be pretty. Of course if anyone else said such a thing, I would slice them in two.”

  “I must remember that. It would make you interesting to clean up after, I must say.”

  Gareth opened his mouth to reply in kind but was stopped by Lucas’s piping voice from the doorway. “But I was told to look out for my lady.”

  Imogen found it strange that she had nearly forgotten his presence. Normally she kept very firm in her head the mental map needed to see her world. Perhaps, it had been so long since she had last been able to just be silly that she had forgotten all else in the pursuit of it. There was no denying that she also enjoyed the man who shared his silliness with her.

  Gareth might not produce in her the rush of strange emotions Robert did, but his simple, easy manner was a balm to her badly battered pride.

  “Lucas, you must learn to give up a lady gracefully,” Gareth said with mock severity. “Especially when your rival is several times your size.”

  “But Mary said I was to go with her.”

  “Well, now I say I have to.”

  “I’ll tell Mary on you.”

  “Well, I’ll tell Robert on you,” Gareth countered, flourishing the winning stroke with relish.

  “Stop teasing the boy,” Imogen said sternly, but a smile gentled the words.

  “Who was teasing?” Gareth growled threateningly. “The boy certainly wasn’t when he threatened to set that harpy on me.”

  “Mary’s not a harpy,” Imogen said with a smile, “anymore than I am, despite how we both might appear from time to time.”

  She turned toward Lucas’s voice. “Of course you can come along if Mary said you must. How about carrying the basket and making a path through the snow for us to follow?”

  “Making a path?” he pondered. “That’s kind of like being a scout, for an army, isn’t it?” He was still deeply suspicious, but his excitement at the thought of being near food and having a status was evident.

  “You bet it is,” Gareth said, with the authority of many wars behind him.

  “And you can feel free to liberate a titbit or two from what I suspect is one of Mary’s overstuffed baskets,” Imogen said coaxingly, reluctant to be parted just yet from a man who simply made her smile.

  Lucas considered every aspect of the deal for a moment. “All right,” he said, then ran to see what exactly Mary had put in the basket.

  Gareth smiled as he hooked his arm through Imogen’s and they followed slowly.

  “Do I get to sample from the basket too, even though I don’t get to be a scout? Or do I just get stuck with the beautiful lady?” Gareth asked innocently, his voice full of guile.

  “You may sample the delight of the basket only if you are a very good boy,” she said with mock hauteur.

  “Oh, I’m always a good boy,” he said nicely, his face splitting into a decidedly wolfish grin. “Always.”

  Chapter Six

  Robert stepped gingerly over yet another fallen stone.

  “…or we could always ju
st paint it in your colors and stuff your banner on top…” Matthew said gleefully.

  And while his face might have appeared serious and earnest, Robert was only too well aware that his eyes were dancing. When he had first suggested this excursion, Matthew had grumbled loud and long at the earliness of the hour, then at the cold, then at the riding required.

  Robert had shrugged his shoulders and ignored him just as he usually did when Matthew got into one of these moods, but he had also known that Matthew would manage to extract his revenge at some point, both for being dragged from his warm bed and for being ignored.

  Matthew didn’t like being ignored.

  Robert sighed loudly and cast a puzzled eye over the tower. Matthew’s revenge had been too easy, really. No matter from which angle you looked at it, this derelict stone tower in the middle of nowhere was an absurdity, and Matthew was relishing pointing out that fact as the two of them walked slowly round it ostensibly to see if there was any logic to be found on the other side.

  “…and I really think it is a marvel for a tower to have no entrance, but to have windows near the top. Had you noticed that, Boy? Extremely clever, I think,” Matthew yelled, by now almost jogging to keep up with Robert’s lengthening stride.

  “I can’t say that it had entirely escaped my notice,” Robert muttered in reply, hoping against hope that that would be the end of it.

  “Clever lad!” Matthew beamed with expansive pride. “We will make a builder out of you yet, what with that eye for detail and all. The next observation that I really think you should take note of is the fact that it seems to be falling down,” he said as he daintily sidestepped one of the larger boulders.

  Robert stopped and turned on the old man, his gauntleted hands crossed over his chest.

  “Come on, Old Man, spit out all the rest of your spleen and have done with it. Just what are you getting at?”

  Matthew raised an innocent twice-gloved hand to his narrow chest. “Oh, great master, what do you accuse me of?”

  “You mean accuse you of besides being a meddlesome pain in the rear?”

  “Yes, besides that.”

  “You’ve been laughing at me ever since we got here, yet, for the life of me, I can’t see what you find so funny.”

  “Don’t suppose you do,” Matthew murmured. He looked up at the stone tower, his face suddenly serious. “I just find it strange that you rose at the goddamn crack of dawn from a perfectly warm bed, a bed containing, I hasten to add, a beautiful woman, and found yourself with an overwhelming desire to cover miles of snow-covered ground to see a tower that we already knew was falling down before we got here. A falling-down tower that doesn’t even seem to have a door, on closer inspection. Call me crazy, but I find that extremely funny. It’s either that or tragically sad.”

  “It’s not as odd as all that,” Robert said defensively.

  A raised brow was all the answer he got.

  “Well, you didn’t have to come,” Robert said, irritatingly aware that he was beginning to sound like a petulant child, but he seemed unable to be anything else.

  “My boy, I wouldn’t have missed this for the world. There is nothing I love more than freezing my balls off at sunrise and blistering my arse on a horse’s back. It’s very good for your soul, I’m sure, if of dubious worth for your manhood.”

  That drew a reluctant smile from Robert. “Well, if we hurry in our inspection of this tower, then the men will have got the fire started by now.”

  “That’s another thing I find odd,” Matthew continued as if Robert hadn’t even spoken. “Why the hell do we need to light a fire when there is a perfectly warm Keep just over the way? A Keep that you can quite confidently call your own.”

  Robert shrugged his shoulders, a red flush rising up his neck, “Just seemed like a good idea if we were going to spend the whole day here we will use it to cook at least one meal.”

  He braced himself for the explosion, and Matthew delivered on cue.

  “All day!” he spluttered. “What the hell would we want to spend all day out here for?”

  “I thought we could see if anything can be done with the tower, and then perhaps we could do some hunting for the Keep’s stores.”

  “For God’s sake, Boy, I’ve never heard such a load of nonsense. And it’s a lie. Can’t you at least tell me the truth when you’re so determined to freeze me to death?”

  “That was the truth.” Robert couldn’t quite meet Matthew’s eyes and was embarrassed to find himself shuffling his feet like a naughty schoolboy.

  Matthew’s snort was almost elegant in expressing his patent disbelief. “Robert, you’ve been like a bee in a bottle for two weeks. Running from sunup to sundown, longer some days, I expect, though I’m not entirely sure. I can’t watch you all the time, as at my age you actually need sleep.” His eyes narrowed knowingly. “It’s clear as day to me that you’re running from something. Today you have just managed to get a little farther than normal.” Matthew stepped up and placed a hand on Robert’s shoulder. “Can’t you at least tell me what the hell is going on here?”

  The gentleness in Matthew’s usually brisk tone burnt away the last of Robert’s defenses. He turned and walked a few steps away from the old man, staring unseeingly at a chunk of stone.

  “The truth is, Old Man, that I don’t know any longer what is going on.” He threw his hands into the air and turned around. “I’m being tied in knots. Everything is so…complex. It used to be simple. So damn simple. I wanted land and title, so I slaughtered my way across the country to get them.” His mouth twisted into a bitter smile. “And I was very good at it. No one could have been a better murderer than me.”

  “I always knew that you weren’t a warrior, not at heart,” Matthew said quietly. “A true warrior never looks on such things as murder. You always had a gentle soul underneath that rusty armor.”

  “You should be careful how you bandy around words like gentle, Old Man,” Robert said wryly. “Another warrior might take it into his head to prove to you how gentle they aren’t. It could get messy.”

  Matthew shrugged his shoulders. “If they would slice an old man in two for saying something they didn’t like, then I hope I have the intelligence not to call them gentle in the first place.”

  Robert raised a brow. “There is a certain logic to that nonsense that I wouldn’t dare try to unravel.” He walked slowly over to one of the fallen stones and sat down, his face turning serious once more. “Gentle or no, I did what had to be done and did it damn well.” His eyes locked with Matthew’s. “Simple.”

  Matthew pulled his furs more tightly around his thin shoulders and found a boulder of his own. He grimaced as he sat on the cold, unforgiving surface, but resigned himself to the fact that it would be a while before he would be warm again.

  “And, I take it, it’s not so simple now?”

  “No,” Robert said and lifted his face to the gray and blue sky. “I have what I have always wanted, and it’s not enough. Nowhere near.” His hands clenched impotently by his side.

  “And what will be enough?” Matthew asked, but he already had a good idea what the answer would be.

  Robert’s black eyes leveled to Matthew’s. “I’ll only know enough when I see it.”

  Matthew let out a low whistle through his teeth. “Boy, you have got it bad.”

  Robert didn’t even have to ask what “it” was.

  “Old Man, you don’t know the half of it.” He paused, then surged to his feet and began to pace restlessly.

  Matthew shook his head and stood slowly. “Well, my boy, it would seem that you have managed to make a simple thing complex in the extreme.”

  Robert stilled his pacing for a moment and shrugged his shoulders helplessly. “The complexities were there already, I’m just an inheritor of them. I manage to fight one off and another seems to grow in its place.”

  “So what do you intend to do?”

  “I intend to keep running, Old Man, till it’s time to turn and fig
ht.”

  As they started off around the tower once more Matthew said gently, “Don’t think much of that as a plan, Boy.”

  “Nor do I,” Robert agreed amicably, trying to roll some of the tension out of his shoulders as he walked. “I may end up improvising and improving on it as I go.” They walked on in silence for a moment and then a grin broke on Robert’s face that was almost boyish. “Actually I’m beginning to find I’m quite good at improvisation. Take this little jaunt. Pure, unadulterated spur-of-the-moment improvisation.”

  Matthew hunched his shoulders. “And you think this a good example of your skills, do you?”

  “Compared to some of the other ideas I had, I think it was a stroke of pure bloody inspiration.”

  “Just goes to prove, too many blows to the head really can addle a man’s wits.”

  “It’s a fine line between addled and inspired,” Robert said loftily, drawing slightly ahead of the older man.

  Matthew grunted. “There is also a fine line between smug and insane, my boy,” he said to himself, “and, to my thinking, you are a unique combination of the two.”

  Robert looked round. “Did you mutter something, Old Man?”

  Matthew opened his eyes wide. “Would I dare mutter in the presence of my glorious leader?”

  Robert thought for a moment. “Yes.”

  Matthew buried his chin in his furs and muttered about a lack of respect for one’s elders and Robert’s laughter on the wind was almost carefree.

  “Careful,” Gareth said as Imogen stumbled yet again. He placed a steadying arm around her shoulders. “Maybe we should stop for a moment?” he asked softly, the worry plain in his voice.

  “If you say that again, I may decide to poke one of your eyes out,” she said through labored breaths. She knew she was behaving like a shrew and for a second it felt good. Unfortunately, guilt quashed the slight triumph to be found in being horrible.

  “Sorry, Gareth,” she mumbled. “I guess Mary was right when she said I’d gotten too soft and lazy for this.”

  “She actually said that?”