Page 20 of A Knight for Gwenllian

He waited to see if the scheme would work. Would the old man accept her departure? At first, he seemed too stunned or distraught to react, but when Gwenllian disappeared from view, he started to get agitated, looking around in panic.

“Isobel, no, come back!”

“Hold him!” his son called out. “There’s no accounting for what he will do if he gets to her.”

Alexander did not wait for the man to reach his father himself, he did as he was told. He didn’t want the old man, who still looked strong despite his age, to run at Gwenllian and hurt her. If he really thought she was his wife, come back to him, he would understandably want to hold her, and more.

He closed his arms around the man, who instantly went limp, defeated. He was muttering his dead wife’s name under his breath.

“There,” Alexander said, more gently than he had spoken since he had appeared. The man’s anguish was hard to ignore. Still, something about the whole situation made him uneasy, and he could not completely relax.

“Excellent.” The son said, coming to him.

“Now what do we do?”

“We wait. He will calm down, eventually. Just keep holding him, so he doesn’t escape. He’s a wily old bastard.”

Bastard? The choice of words seemed odd, but Alexander did not have time to think about it. There was a move from somewhere behind him, like someone raising a stick in the air.

And then everything went dark.

Footsteps. At last, Alexander was coming back. Gwenllian couldn’t hear the horses, though. But perhaps he was only coming to tell her that Old John and his son had gone, and she could come out of hiding.

She shook her head. Poor man… The confusion in his eyes when he’d looked at her had been painful to see. How awful it must be to spend one’s life looking for the love one had lost, to ache every day from the pain of that loss. No wonder his mind had been unhinged. At least, Gwenllian reasoned, if she didn’t marry, she would be spared from this fate. Was it a consolation? She wasn’t so sure. In any case, now was not the time to worry about that. She should just enjoy her adventure and her time with Alexander.

The bushes opened on the tall frame of John’s son. Alexander was not with him. Her heartbeat inexplicably increased.

“Where is S—Alexander?” They were supposed to be cousins, so she might as well call him by his name, eschewing the use of his title, which sounded wrong in her mouth anyway.

“He’s still with my father.”

Well, yes, this much she had guessed. What she wanted to know was why he had sent the man instead of coming himself. He had seemed reluctant to let her go earlier. But the man offered no more explanation as to this change of plan. Instead, he leaned against the birch behind him.

“So you’re a lady, then?”

Should she admit it? Was it even necessary? Alexander had called her a lady, and the man seemed to be already aware of her status. Something about this conversation and Alexander’s absence was making her intensely uncomfortable.

“Excellent,” the man said before she could utter a word. “I’ve never had a lady before.”

“Had”? What did he mean by⁠—

Before she could finish the question in her mind, the man drew her into his arms, and she had her answer. He meant have her in a carnal sense, he meant he’d never ravished a lady—and he meant to remedy that right now.

“What’s this? Where is Alexander?” she repeated, panic welling inside her.

“Forget about your damn cousin, he’s lying on the floor, oblivious to everything. I hit him with a branch, so you and I can have some time alone. I’m guessing he would never have agreed to let me have my fun.”

Gwenllian froze, as suddenly she saw everything in a different light. He had sent her into the bushes, not so that his father could come back to his senses, but so that he could dispose of Alexander. Had he lied about the old man’s obsession with Isobel as well? Had it all been arranged between the two men? Surely not. There had been so much despair in John’s eyes that she refused to think he had been complicit in the scheme.

“But… Your father?”

“The old fool won’t disturb us, worry not. He never does. He saw you as you rode past earlier and instantly took you for my mother, as he does every time he sees a woman who looks like her. I could not believe my luck when you stopped mere yards after that. It rarely is that easy, and the women are rarely as fine as you are.”

Now that he mentioned it, she did remember riding past a few people on the road before they had stopped. But that was not a rare occurrence, and she had not paid the two men in the middle any heed. She should have. Because the man had taken advantage of her resemblance to his mother to pounce.

Fury surged inside Gwenllian, wiping off the fear.

This could not be happening. Her adventure was not going to end up with her raped and possibly injured in the woods by a ruffian who thought he could exploit his father’s grief and her sympathy for his plight. She straightened, outrage lending her strength. How dare he attack her thus? How dare he injure Alexander? How dare he use his poor father’s pain?