“I gave your brother his ring on his twentieth birthday. Much too young really. But we had a dire need.”
“Look inside the band,” His Majesty commanded.
Grey brought the ring up close and squinted to make out the engraving. “Loyalty. To who? You?”
“To me and to each other. Do you see the way the ‘y’ loops around to touch the ‘l’ then back to meet the end of the ‘y’? The word was engraved to form a perfect circle that symbolizes the unending trusts between me and my spies. Each ring has a different word engraved in it. Can’t have anyone linking the rings together. Your father’s ring says trust. But the words are also looped to form a connection.”
“Spies?” Grey clamped his mouth shut the second he realized it was hanging open.
“Of course. How do you think we stay so powerful? Kings must make luck, Grey, and always be six steps ahead of everyone else. My spies are my luck—each a step that keeps me on the throne. One of them has been killed. And now I need another.”
Astonishment was too weak a word for what Grey was feeling. “And you are askingme?”
“Were your father and brother wrong about you? You seem surprised.”
By God hewassurprised. His father must feel something akin to warmness for him to recommend him to the king. Shame swept through him like a raging fever. He clenched his teeth together on the need to confess the ass he had been for the last fifteen years. A thirty-year-old self-indulgent bastard didn’t deserve to be a spy for the king. But, by damned, he wanted this. He would become a spy. Hell, he would devote his entire life to being a spy. And then maybe he would earn his father’s love and respect. He paused. It had been years since he’d admitted to himself he wanted those things.
The king smiled at him. “Your eyes give me your answer. Put on the ring and say the vow.”
He quickly did as he was told, and once the words of loyalty were spoken, and he was dismissed to spend this one day as he wished, he knew exactly what he wanted to do. He wanted to find Madelaine and make a fresh start. Maybe they could take a stroll or a ride through the park.
He wanted to get to know her not as the man he had been, but as the man he wanted to be—no longer an unrepentant rake but a man of honor like his brother and father.
It took him a good hour to find Lady Madelaine, but it was worth the effort and the coin he had to part with to get her lady’s maid to reveal that Lady Madelaine had slipped out of the castle to collect some flowers as a surprise for the queen. Grey snorted at the thought. There weren’t any flowers in bloom this time of year, and the maid had said Lady Madelaine was carrying something wrapped in a cape.
He suspected she’d slipped away to get in some target practice with her bow and arrow, and when he spotted her close to the woods and hidden by several tall trees from the view of anyone who chanced to look out the castle window his suspicion was confirmed. He started to make his way toward her, but stopped as she drew up her bow and arrow and aimed at a distant tree she’d placed a circular target on.
He didn’t want to startle her or throw off her aim with his approach. By the look of concentration on her face, and from what he’d already seen of her archery skill, she took her practice seriously. He leaned against a tree to watch her. She pulled her bow taut, moved her face into and away from the wind, and shifted her stance.
Desire made him shift his own position. She fascinated him. He’d never seen a look of such determination on a woman’s face unless she was determined to trap a man into marriage. Lady Madelaine wanted marriage, an admission by her own lips. He should be avoiding her at all cost yet he was here. What would marriage to her be like? He’d never considered marring anyone. A lady to tumble for pleasure and to annoy his father with scandal was the closest he’d ever linked himself with any woman.
He knelt down by the tree no longer wanting to approach her. What better way to learn the real her than to watch her. Her guard would be down. Every time she smiled, he smiled. Her exclaims of frustration made him laugh. But the way she threw her arms over her head in triumph when she made a good shot was the best part of watching her. She was beautiful, and his lust was stirred. Yet something else was awakened.
He’d been stirred to lust many times in his life. It was her uniqueness that he found compelling. She cared for things women were not supposed to. She loved these things so much she’d chanced sneaking away and incurring the queen’s ire or worse. Lady Madelaine was going to have a deuced hard time with the marriage she was seeking if her future husband minded a wife who wasn’t the typical female most men seemed to want.
Most men, except him. He smiled and frowned in turn, but a stick breaking beside him interrupted his musings. He reached for his dagger and glanced up at the shadowy figure above him.
As he shielded his eyes from the sun’s glare, Gravenhurst dropped to his haunches. “Spying?” he said, looking between Madelaine and Grey.
“Something like that.” Grey shifted uncomfortably at being caught, Gravenhurst’s knowing smirk, and his friend’s choice of words. Gravenhurst had been the one person Grey had ever confided anything in, and it seemed strange not to be able to tell his friend about becoming a spy for the king.
“Are you working out a plan of attack?” Gravenhurst asked.
“Not exactly.” Grey watched Madelaine draw another arrow. He quickly told Gravenhurst of his encounter with Lady Madelaine and Thorton, and their enlightening conversation afterward.
Gravenhurst chuckled. “I’d say that’s the worst misjudging of a lady you’ve ever done.”
“I’ve never misjudged what a lady wants, until now.”
“And misjudging her makes you smile?”
Did it? Grey quickly wiped the smile from his face once he realized Gravenhurst was correct.
“Who do you think she’s imagining she’s shooting?” Gravenhurst sat on the ground and crossed his legs out in front of him.
Grey ran a hand over the stubble on his face. “Could be me or Thorton. It’s hard to say.”
“Take heart, Grey. Your character may be tarnished in her mind, but I doubt she thinks you a bloody bastard, which is undoubtedly how she thinks of Thorton.”
