LITMIR.BIZ

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      Contents

      Chapter One

      Chapter Two

      Chapter Three

      Chapter Four

      Chapter Five

      Chapter Six

      Chapter Seven

      Chapter Eight

      Chapter Nine

      Chapter Ten

       Chapter One

       F linging her thick brown plait over her shoulder, Nicola picked up her rapier and turned to face her opponent with a disarming smile. ‘Ready?’ she said, sweetly. The young man had put himself on the line by telling her she knew nothing about the Italian style of fencing, not thinking that she could produce a pair of rapiers she’d been using for years. He should have known better.

      ‘What do I do with it?’ she asked, innocently.

      The young man smiled. ‘Your best, my lady,’ he said.

      ‘Shall we take these silly guards off the points, then?’

      The smile disappeared. ‘It’s not usual, in practice.’

      ‘Oh, then let’s be unusual, for a change.’

      ‘Are you sure, my lady?’

      ‘Quite sure. There, that’s better. Now, on guard. Is that what they say?’ He had been a nuisance for weeks, this young man: it was time to get rid of him. He could not be more than her own twenty-four years.

      Fencing with an unprotected point obviously concerned him, for he was defensive, extremely wary and immediately rattled by her obvious familiarity with the weapon. Only aristocrats took this kind of fencing seriously, and most of them had learned in either France, Germany or Italy; very few in England. But women, never.

      Nicola, however, had fenced with her four brothers since she was old enough to stand; she was naturally nimble, graceful, quick-thinking and, most of all, had learned from an early age to hold her own against men. In a house full of them, there had been no place for a faint-hearted woman.

      Clearly taken by surprise at her sudden swift attack, his defence came a split second too late and his rapier went flying through the air to slide across the stone-flagged floor of the hall well before he’d had time to settle into a rhythm. It was a very undignified beginning.

      ‘Oh, dear,’ said Nicola. ‘D’ye want to try again?’

      ‘You’ve had some practice,’ he said, accusingly, picking up his rapier. ‘You might have said.’

      ‘I did say, last evening. You didn’t believe me. On guard.’

      He started the next bout with more determination, but with a heavy chip on his shoulder, wondering how this lovely woman, whom men held only in their fantasies, could have learned how to best him at a man’s game. His lack of concentration did him no favours, and almost immediately he was being forced backwards again under a charge that for sheer speed left him no time to recover.

      Then, for a second time, his rapier took wings, clattering across the almost deserted hall to settle at the feet of a tall man whose powerful shoulders propped up the door-frame and whose expression was less than sympathetic. He looked at the swordsman pityingly and placed a high-booted foot upon the long narrow blade, shaking his head.

      Without a word, the young man aimed a snappy bow in Nicola’s direction and stalked off to the end of the hall, banging the great door behind him.

      The point of Nicola’s rapier had touched the floor in slow decline before it dawned on her that this intruder was not exactly a stranger and that his slow arrogant scrutiny of her from head to toe and back again was exactly what she remembered of their first meeting when she had been a mere eleven-year-old and he an uppity sixteen who had made no effort to endear himself to her then, either. On the contrary, she could still recall his frightening incivility, despite the protection of her brothers.

      He pushed himself away from the open doorway, unbuttoning his velvet jerkin and sloughing it from his arms like a discarded skin, then dropping it to the floor. Picking up the rapier, he came to stand in a puddle of light from the large bay window, his eyes remaining on Nicola, but giving away nothing of his surprise at the change in her. ‘Try me,’ he said quietly, describing circles with the point. ‘I don’t use a guard either. Not even in practice.’

      In the intervening years his voice had changed from that of a wobbling Scots-accented baritone to a rich bass, though he made the invitation sound more like a command, which, Nicola remembered, had always been his style. No matter that her family could boast an ancestry to rival any in England, this man’s family had exceeding wealth, which, he had been led to believe, gave him the edge. She would show him how wrong he could be.

      Her reply was to put up her rapier at arm’s length and to touch the point of his with hers, locking her deep brown stare with his hard grey one, but knowing in her vitals that this would be no push-over like the last. This man was five years older than her, for a start. She was tall for a woman, but Sir Fergus Melrose was taller, with the physique of an athlete and the healthy tan of one who had caught the sea breeze and seen the world. She was slender, too, but her opponent’s wrists were twice as thick as hers, and his lithe, tautly muscled body was better practiced in the arts of warfare, even the less usual ones.

      She had dressed in men’s doeskin breeches, a shirt and short padded jerkin in order to do justice to the young man’s challenge issued last night at supper, and though she had given no thought to the indisputable fact that she was just as fascinating in this garb as in her finest gown, neither did she realise that now there was an androgynous element about her that any man would find unsettling. As had been proved. Her abundant dark hair was still contained within one plait, but no one would have been fooled into mistaking her body for that of a lad when her unbelted jerkin swung open at each move and the roundness of her hips filled the breeches as no man’s ever could.

      The sleeves of Sir Fergus’s linen shirt were rolled up to reveal his wrists, and now he pulled at the cord of his neck to open the front, a trick her brothers had tried in the past to deflect her attention. She was not caught off guard as he had intended,

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