Christmas At The Tudor Court: The Queen's Christmas Summons / The Warrior's Winter Bride. Amanda McCabe
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her with his eyes, and drew her to him, until she vanished to her family and fiancé.’
‘He had magical eyes?’
‘Aye. A beautiful emerald-green, like your own, if I remember the story right.’
Juan gave a sad sigh. ‘But alas, I have found no princess to love me.’
Alys laughed. ‘You just have not looked close enough, I would wager. I am sure princesses from Antwerp to Lisbon have looked into your eyes and been lost. Mayhap your mother was not Spanish after all, but fey folk...’ Emerald-green eyes. Alys smiled as she thought of their rare beauty and felt the deepest sympathy for the lost human princess. They were mesmerising indeed. Just like...
Like the green eyes of the boy who had once saved her and soothed her tears away.
Startled by her own memory, she looked up at Juan and saw there the boy. The green-eyed boy with the floppy dark hair and sweet smile. He had come back to her now, when she had thought never to see him again.
Flustered, she looked away. ‘I should look at your shoulder and make sure it is healing properly before I go,’ she said. ‘Does it give you any pain?’
He rolled his shoulder with seeming ease. ‘Not at all. You have worked miracles. A healing angel.’
Alys felt her cheeks turn warm with a pleased blush. ‘Nay, not I, it’s just the herbs. My mother used to say any wound could heal, if kept clean and dosed with the right herbs. The earth knows what is needed.’
‘Then she was a most wise woman. I’m fortunate she had such a daughter.’
Alys smiled and tentatively eased back his shirt. The linen was warm from his body and when she was so close to him it was hard to remain sensible. She forced herself to concentrate only on his wound, not on the way he smelled, the smooth, hot satin of his skin.
She turned back the bandage and saw that the poultice was doing its work. She reached for the new mixture of herbs from the basket and wound a fresh bandage around his shoulder. The familiar work distracted her from old memories.
‘Do you remember anything at all of your own mother?’ she asked.
‘Very little. She died when I was very young. I think I recall the way her perfume smelled, of summer roses, and her smile, which was sad and sweet. After she was gone, I fear our house was not a home at all. The buildings began crumbling, a wreck just like my father turned into.’
Alys felt a pang of sadness for him as a little boy, left alone to face a cold world. ‘I am sorry. Dunboyton might be dull and chilly, but it is never cruel. The home my mother tried to make is still here.’
‘Is it your home, Alys?’
She thought about that carefully. ‘Not the castle, no. But my memories, the people I love—that makes it home, I suppose.’
‘Will you miss it when you marry and leave?’ he said tightly.
Alys peeked up at him and found he watched her carefully, his bright eyes narrowed. ‘Of course. But thanks to my mother, I will know how to make a new home. What of you, Juan? Will you find a fine lady to marry and make a new home?’
He gave a bark of laughter. ‘Nay, I would not know how to do that. I have never known a home.’
‘But would you like to?’
He was quiet for a long moment. ‘I think I might. A home—it does sound like a fine thing.’
There was a note of sadness in his voice that made Alys’s heart ache all over again. She rested her hands on his shoulders and leaned against him, longing to bring him comfort. To bring that to herself.
Suddenly, the air between them seemed to change, growing charged as the sky was just before a lightning strike. She could hardly breathe, especially when he reached for her and drew her closer. She had never been so close to a man. How dizzying it was! All her senses tilted and whirled, and all she knew in that moment was him. The way he felt under her touch, so alive and strong and warm.
‘Alys...’ he said hoarsely.
‘I—I am here,’ she whispered.
As if in a hazy dream, far away, yet more immediate and real than anything she had ever known before, his head tilted down towards her and he kissed her.
The brush of his lips was so soft at first, like warm velvet, pressing softly once, twice, as if he expected her to run. But Alys could not have moved away from him. As she moved up to meet him, his kiss deepened. It became hotter, more urgent—the most urgent, hungry thing she had ever known.
Something deep inside her heart responded to that urgency, a rough excitement that grew and grew until she thought she would burst from it. She moaned, parting her lips to the shocking feel of his tongue seeking entrance, sliding over hers. There was only him, not the world outside, only him and that one perfect moment.
But the outside world insisted on breaking into her dream. A sound like a branch falling against the roof shocked her, making her fall back from him. She jumped to her feet, her whole body shaking. She longed to jump back into his arms, yet she knew she could not. If she did, she might never free herself again.
‘Alys, I am so very sorry...’ he said, his sea-green eyes grown dark.
‘Nay. Please don’t say you are sorry for what happened,’ she gasped. ‘I could not bear it. I just—I must go now.’
She whirled around and ran out of the dairy, hearing him call after her. She couldn’t stop, though. She hurried out of the abbey’s ruins as if the ghosts were indeed running after her. She didn’t feel the cold wind, even though she had left her shawl behind, and she could hear nothing at all but the wild beat of her heart in her ears.
She paused at the kitchen-garden wall to try to catch her breath. If her father was awake, she knew she could not let him see her in such a state. But as she studied the castle, she saw that no windows were alight, except the one in the guest chamber of the tower. The one where Sir Matthew stayed. She felt as if someone watched from behind those blank windows, someone who sought all her secrets.
He was not alone in his hiding place. John could sense it. And whoever lurked outside, it was not Alys. She would have dashed inside, her basket in her arms, and lit up the darkness with her smile.
John’s extensive training during his work with Walsingham had sharpened his sixth sense to an exceptional degree. He always knew when he was being followed, being watched. It had served him well in the palace corridors of Madrid and Paris, and the back alleys of Lisbon. Last night, when he was alone after Alys left, he felt the sharp prickle of that sense. He had tried to shrug it away, to attribute it to the darkness of the sky and Alys’s tales of ghostly monks and fairies. Now he saw how foolish shrugging it away had been.
John held the hilt of the only weapon he now had, the eating knife, lightly on his palm and stepped silently to the half-open door.
He could feel whoever it was moving closer, like the slow slide of a length of silk over his skin, barely a whisper.
Then he heard it. The merest crackle of a fallen leaf on the old, cracked flagstones. It could have merely been blown by the wind, but he knew it wasn’t. He heard another sound, the brush of wool against the wall, and he lunged out the door, his dagger raised. His other hand shot out towards a shadow looming in the darkness and caught a fistful of that woollen cloak.
The figure inside the cloak was too tall, too muscular to be petite Alys. He shoved the man against the wall, into the ray of light coming out of the door, and pressed his knife to a throat, just at the vulnerable spot beneath the chin. Before he could drive the blade home, the cloak’s hood fell back and he saw the man’s face.
It was as familiar to him as his own in its sharp, hawk-like angles, in the wry smile