talked easily together for the rest of the evening, about Scotland and the situation they would find there, about their lives in England, drinking ale as the room became louder around them, the air hotter.
Celia suddenly felt tired. The voices around her were turning chaotic, and she shook her head when Lord Knowlton offered her more to drink.
“I think I should find my bed, Lord Knowlton,” she said. “The hour grows late. But I am glad we had this chance to talk together again.”
“As am I, Mistress Sutton. Very glad indeed.” He raised her hand to his lips, and the look he gave her over their joined fingers was suddenly intense. His mouth opened on her bare skin.
A shiver of disquiet ran over Celia’s back, her earlier quiet pleasure in his company dissipating. What had happened to change things? She couldn’t fathom what he was thinking about her, and it made her think strangely of her dead husband.
She drew her hand out of his and edged away from him until she could stand up. “Goodnight, Lord Knowlton.”
“Goodnight, Mistress Sutton.”
Celia turned and hurried away from him, making her way through the crowd. She didn’t like the atmosphere in the room now. She only wanted to find her bed and be alone for a time.
But her foot had barely touched the bottom of the staircase leading up to their lodgings when she heard a shout.
She whirled around just in time to see a massively burly man grab Lord Darnley by the front of his doublet and shove him to the wall. Darnley’s cronies leaped on the man, tables flew as crockery shattered, and women screamed. The strange tension Celia had sensed snapped into a full-blown fight.
She hurried up the stairs to a point where she could see the fray but not be in danger. Her stomach lurched in fear at the violence, and she pressed her hand to her mouth.
She felt even sicker when she glimpsed John in the swirling melee, a tall figure throwing out his fist to catch a jaw, jabbing his elbow into a midsection, kicking with his booted foot to make a foe go down. There was a terrible grace to his movements, a power, and she wanted to scream his name. To dash into the fray and drag him to safety.
He seized the man who was pounding Darnley’s face and threw him backwards. Darnley crawled away, but his attacker bellowed in rage and dived for John instead. John fended him off with a neat sidestep, and ducked under the man’s raised arm to drive a fist into his belly.
He didn’t see the other man behind him, who lashed out with a splintery log and hit John on his thigh. Blood bloomed on his leg and Celia screamed. Raw, heated emotion and fear overwhelmed her. She raced into the crowd, ducking around the brawlers even as the landlord and his henchmen came to break it up. She reached John just as Marcus did.
“John!” she cried, reaching for his arm as he reeled.
He pushed her away gently, bending to press his hand to the wound. “It is merely a scratch.”
“Nonetheless, let’s get you out of here,” Marcus said, winding his arm around John’s shoulders to haul him upright. “Before someone decides to ruin your pretty face. Mistress Sutton, if you would find us a chamber?”
Ignoring John’s growled protests, Celia got the landlord’s wife to show them to a small room where a fire was lit. Marcus followed her closely.
“Put him down here,” Celia said, clearing a pile of mending from the bench by the fire.
Lord Marcus unceremoniously slid John from over his shoulder onto the bench, where John promptly let free a string of colourful curses.
Marcus merely grinned and stepped back. “Whatever she does to you, my friend, you deserve it for jumping into a brawl like that.”
“I quite agree,” Celia said. She knelt on the floor beside the bench, trying to ignore the hot, angry glare of his eyes as he watched her. That fear she’d felt for him when she’d seen him hit still hummed through her veins and made her tremble. “Why would you do that to save a looby like Darnley?”
“Because it is my task at the moment,” he ground out. “If I had my way I would have left him to what he so richly deserves.”
“But why?” Celia said. Slowly, cautiously, as if she feared the wolf might snap and bite, she peeled the torn breeches away from his wounded leg. “Why are you meant to be his protector?”
John hissed between his teeth, and his hands curled over the edge of the bench, but he did not pull away from her touch. “He has to get to Scotland in one piece somehow.”
“I don’t know why,” Celia murmured. She delicately examined the bleeding gash on his leg while studiously not looking at the smooth, warm skin, the masculine roughness of the dark hair that curled there. “I think it would be no terrible loss if someone did remove him from the situation.”
John and Marcus looked at each other over her head. “Unfortunately that is not our decision to make,” Marcus said lightly.
“Not yet,” John added.
Celia didn’t really want to know what they meant by that. She didn’t want to be involved in these secret matters of crown and families at all. She had enough to worry about on her own.
Such as ignoring what happened to her when she was close to John.
She almost sighed aloud in relief when a maidservant delivered her valise. Celia opened it and dug through the contents for the herbal salves and tinctures she had packed.
As she laid them out on the floor, Marcus said, “I will leave you to your task then, Mistress Sutton. I should make sure all is well out there now.”
He bowed to her and turned on his heel to go, the door clicking shut behind him. For an instant Celia could hear sounds from the public room, cries and quarrels and the landlady demanding payment for the destruction. Then she was closed in firelight and flickering shadows, alone with John.
She bit her lip, trying to press down the nervous trembling inside her, and peeled the cloth back further.
The log had caught him halfway between the knee and the groin, leaving a long cut. The bleeding had mostly stopped, was clotting around the edges. She could smell the coppery tang of it, but blood no longer had the power to make her swoon. She had seen too much of it.
But the smell of John—that made her feel light-headed. Leather and wine, the faint whiff of spicy soap, the darkness of his skin and sweat. The musk of his manhood. It was heady, alluring. It made all the old memories of a time when they had been as close as two people could be return to her, so strong.
Celia sat back on her heels, away from the too vulnerable position of kneeling between his thighs, and reached into her valise for a clean rag. She soaked it with lavender water.
“There are splinters caught in the wound,” she said. “I have to clean it before it can be bandaged.”
His fists curled even tighter into the edge of the bench, and she saw the knuckles were bruised. He had certainly left his opponents in worse shape than he was. But it could have been so much worse. If the log had caught him higher …
“You’re fortunate the wound is where it is,” she said. She set her jaw in a determined line and leaned forward to dab at the raw edges of it with her cloth. His thigh tensed, but he said nothing. “A bit higher and all the Court ladies would be in mourning.”
He laughed. “And would you have been disappointed, Celia?”
“Certainly not,” she snapped. “I would have sung a hosanna—womankind safe again.”
“I don’t believe you.”
He uncurled one hand from the bench and reached out. She felt his soft touch on a strand of hair that had fallen free in the tussle. He ran a caressing touch down its length.
Celia ground her jaw tighter, determined not to jerk