Page 72 of The Champion

“Nay, love. I’ve only had you. But I’ve heard other men talk enough to know.”

She smiled at his confession. Though why it pleased her, she couldn’t imagine. “Who was your first lover?”

He looked a bit startled by her question. “Do you truly wish to know?”

“You know who mine is.”

He gave an odd half laugh at that. “She was a lady in France where I was sent to foster. She’d come to the Count’s domain with her father that winter.”

“She was experienced?”

“Aye. She and her ladies had come out to the list to watch the knights train. She said that she had seen me assisting my lord and was enchanted by me.”

Rowena couldn’t fault the woman for that and she wished she had known Stryder then. Had he been as handsome as a young man as he was now? “Was she older?”

“By four years.”

“And how old were you?”

“I had just turned ten-and-five.”

Rowena was stunned by his words. “You were far too young for her.”

“She thought not.”

She rolled her eyes at the arrogant boast of those words. How ever true to male form. “Do you ever see her now?”

“Nay. She died from illness while I was in the Holy Land.”

Rowena felt a pang of sadness for the woman’s fate. “I’m sorry.”

“As was I. She seemed too kind a lady to have such a young death.”

“Would you have married her?”

“Nay, I barely knew her, in truth. We were together that once and then I never saw her again. It was only by coincidence that I learned what had befallen her.”

Stryder sat up and helped her dress, while Rowena reflected on what she had done with him and everything she had learned about him.

Surely, she wasn’t pregnant. Her ladies were ever after men and none of them had ever become pregnant.

Even so, the prospect of having Stryder’s baby wasn’t quite as repugnant to her as it should be.

Instead, a part of her almost hoped for it. What would it be like to have a child growing inside her? To watch Stryder play father to their son or daughter?

He would be a good, kind father she was certain, like her own father had been.

But with that thought came the bitter reminder of what had happened to her father. Stryder had even more enemies who would like, as not relish, the idea of sticking a knife between his ribs while his back was turned.

Instinctively, she flinched away from him.

“Rowena?”

“Forgive me.” She forced those thoughts out of her mind.

“What is it?”

“Nothing.”