"Sums?"

"Numbers. Arithmetic."

"I-I have never bothered much about such things. I leave my accounts to my clerks. I am an excellent hunter, though, and my swordsmanship is above respectable."

She caught the rare thread of energy beneath his boast. So, 'Twas martial pursuits that stirred his pa.s.sion, not the dull work of business or the awkward courtship of dancing.

Isabel found herself smiling. "My father will say we have danced like heathens tonight. I will command the musicians to make the next song more sedate. And I think my sister Agnes might be glad of a new partner."

She took Sir Theo's arm and guided him across the floor, sent Sir Gavin off to fetch her a cup of wine, coaxed Sir Theo to ask Agnes to take his hand for the next dance, and was about to leave them to speak to the musicians when she heard Lucian's voice carry across the chatter and music of the circle.

"Pray, Lady Ronwen, I will be but a moment. I must speak just a word to the Lady Isabel."

Isabel stood frozen as Sir Theo led Agnes to another point along the circle, smiling bashfully at her. Had Lucian observed Sir Theo's dismay when Isabel had curtsied to him and how, after they had spoken, Isabel had swiveled the ring on her finger? He could not possibly guess the truth, for he knew not the source of the ring. Did he come to mock her nonetheless, thinking Sir Theo had changed his mind after observing the forward way she had taken control of the dancing? She knew she had annoyed Lucian. It had not been the first time she had seen that exasperated look on his face. Fie on the man! She would not pretend to be stupid to satisfy his or any man's vanity.

She heard a footfall behind her and lifted her chin. She had a few complaints of her own she meant to throw in his teeth if he intended to renew their quarrel.

She pivoted about on her heel, then gasped as her eyes met, not Lucian's challenging blue gaze, but the sultry, dark eyes of Sir Eustace. He took her hand in his and raised it to his lips, allowing his kiss to linger against her white skin. Then with a slow, sensual touch that caressed more than the yellow stone, he turned the gem outward once more on her finger.

"I have waited all night to thank you, my lady, for accepting my token."

"You?" she whispered.

"Indeed. I knew you would remember I wear a topaz signet ring and hence would know that this-" He rubbed his thumb across the yellow stone. "-came from me. I shall be honored to make you my wife, and I a.s.sure you, I shall make you a most-zealous-husband."

She heard murmurs as she stared into his saturnine face and knew his resonant p.r.o.nouncement had reached the ears of the other dancers. A movement jerked her gaze to the s.p.a.ce over his shoulder. Lucian had stopped a mere two feet behind Sir Eustace. His eyes held the same bleak look they had the day she had sent him away. He gave her a curt little bow, then returned to Ronwen's side.

The Oak Tree Sir Eustace glanced down dubiously at the snow beneath the barren branches of the great oak where judgment had been pa.s.sed on Lord Stephen's manor since the days of the Conquest.

"This is not what I had in mind when I agreed to a moonlight tryst," he said.

Isabel raised her brows at him, knowing he could see her frown perfectly in the glow of the full moon set in a winter sky, so cold and clear that the stars glistened like tiny crystals in the midst of the silky black heavens. "Have I agreed to marry a man so tame he is afraid to dampen his tunic in the snow?"

Sir Eustace ran a hand down his sleeve to the jewel-encrusted cuff. "'Tis a very fine tunic, purchased new for this Christmas feast."

The garment of forest-green wool, adorned with three bands of jewels about the neck, fell in flowing folds to his ankles, allowing the curling points of his red slippers to peek out. She did not know why she remembered the more conservative points on the half-boots that had graced Lucian's feet in the hall, or the fashionable way Lucian had drawn the sides of his tunic up through his girdle to expose the muscular calves beneath his straw-colored hose, or how his blue tunic had made his eyes look like vivid chips that had fallen out of a summer's sky.

Sir Eustace's voice broke through her lovely vision. "There are better ways for a man and woman to pa.s.s their time on Christmas Eve than to stand shivering apart in the cold. Let me warm you, my lady." His arm pa.s.sed slyly about her waist, but Isabel slipped away before the caress could become an embrace.

"You should have called for your cloak while I fetched mine from my chamber." She felt quite cozy in her cloak's plush lining of squirrel fur.

"Have pity on me, my lady. Your beauty overwhelms me. I came out here promptly at your bidding, trusting in the love betokened by the ring you wear. Give me but one small pledge of your affection, and I shall be your slave forevermore."

She knew from the way his gaze fastened on her lips that he hoped for a kiss. And from the heat in his eyes, she knew he would not be satisfied with just one. In spite of her cloak, she shivered a little, but blamed it on the breeze that swirled up to nip her cheeks.

"There shall be neither pledge nor reward until you have a.s.sisted me with my quest, sir. Help me gather some mistletoe to decorate the hearth and then-we shall see."

His desire thus rebuked, the sultry gleam died from his eyes. He stomped his feet in the snow and blew on his naked hands. "Let us go sit by the Yule fire and send a servant for your task." He barely bothered to conceal his petulance.

"We shall sit there soon enough," she said. "'Tis a small enough thing I have asked of you, sir. But if you are so vain that you fear for your tunic..."

"I a.s.sure you, my lady, I am not so frivolous," he said, even as he tenderly stroked his other sleeve. His topaz signet ring flashed like a tiny flame in the moonlight. He cast another longing glance at her lips, then raised his gaze to the branches which reached like spectral tentacles towards the sky. "Are you sure there is mistletoe? I can see nothing but barren branches."

"That is because the upper branches are too high to see distinctly in the dark, and the lower ones are hidden in the shadows of the upper ones. But I saw some growing here a week ago. If you will only let me climb on your shoulders, I am certain I can pull myself into the limbs there..." she pointed to a branch she judged that she could reach from his shoulders if he knelt in the snow "...and achieve a perch that will allow me to knock down a cl.u.s.ter with this sword."

Sir Eustace looked startled when she drew her father's war blade from beneath her heavy cloak. Weapons had not been permitted at the Christmas feast, so she'd had to borrow Lord Stephen's from his chamber.

"Does your father know you have that?" Sir Eustace asked. "I cannot imagine Lord Stephen would be pleased to know you are carrying his sword about this way."

"He will not be pleased that I am gathering mistletoe, either. It is banned by the Church, though few people outside of the priests themselves observe the proscription." She had been one of those few until tonight, not out of concern for the plant's pagan connotations, but merely because she had never thought it worth the trouble of gathering it when holly and ivy were so much easier to obtain. She had a purpose tonight, though. "Does it trouble you, Sir Eustace, to defy the Church this way?"

"It troubles me only that I might displease you," he said with a promptness that should have gratified her, had she not been hoping for another answer. "However, I cannot allow you to climb the tree yourself, much less wave a sword about once you are sitting in the branches. Hand me the blade, and I will endeavor to fetch the mistletoe for you."

Everything in Isabel rebelled at his offer. She had no choice but to marry him now that everyone at the Christmas feast had seen her wearing his ring, but it was not in her nature to permit another, man or woman, to perform a task she knew herself perfectly competent to perform. She knew this obstinacy in her had driven Lucian away. She had hated herself for weeping at his loss, and deplored the moment of springing hope she had felt this night that he might have forgiven her pride and wish to try again. The joy she had known whirling about with her hands in his still glowed inside her, even now.

One man is very like another, she had said to Agnes, but dancing with Lucian had exposed those words for the lie they were. No man had ever made her feel like Lucian, and after being with him again this night, she knew that no other man ever would.

Her impulsive determination to punish him for the quarrel that had left her so miserable and alone had resulted in binding her to Sir Eustace. She knew perfectly well that despite a flattering tongue, Sir Eustace wanted her only for the pleasure of her beauty. Lucian might have been aggravating beyond bearing, but their heady exchange of kisses had been interspersed with laughter and the sharing of hopes and dreams, and even sweet stretches of silence.

She knew she could never reclaim those days. She had seen Lucian return Ronwen's smile as he'd led her in the sedate dance she had commanded the musicians to begin just before she had invited Sir Eustace to join her in the moonlight. Lucian had found himself a more docile love to fit his temper. Isabel had rashly chosen herself a husband as well. Having once accepted Sir Eustace's ring, her father would never allow her to return it.

Still, she had yet one test to pose to Sir Eustace. If it caused him to request the ring back, well, her father could not fault her for that.

"That is good of you, Sir Eustace, but you confess you cannot see where the mistletoe is, while I recall its position from daylight hours. You may hold the sword for me, if you wish, until I am in the branches, then hand it up to me. Now, if you will please kneel as I requested..."

She trailed off, bracing for another protest while gathering her arguments to parry it. A nice, brisk quarrel, followed by his demand for the ring...

Sir Eustace glanced at the snow again. "Perhaps I could boost you up thus." He bent over and linked his hands together, forming a stirrup for her foot.

Isabel sighed. That he preferred to capitulate to her unorthodox request, rather than seek to resist it, suggested that his ring would remain firmly planted on her finger right through their wedding day. At least, she consoled herself, a man who would sooner bow to his lady's wishes than sully the skirts of his tunic should be easy enough to govern in marriage. She blamed the sour lump in her throat on an unidentified dish from the feast that disagreed with her, leaned the sword against the trunk of the tree, placed her foot into his waiting hands, and let him lift her into the branches.

She had climbed this tree as lithe as a cat when she had been a little girl and had scrambled over the shoulders of a cooperative stable boy. However, lack of recent practice, the weight of her now-adult body, and the c.u.mbersome folds of her winter cloak threatened to frustrate her project for a moment, but a panted command for Sir Eustace to boost her higher enabled her to finally heft herself onto one of the lower branches. It took a deal of bouncing, swiveling and swishing of her skirts to arrange herself into a sitting position of some modesty.

The breeze that had chilled her cheeks on the ground blew more briskly at this height, gusting her braids away from her neck and imparting a sudden surge of freedom that echoed a bittersweet memory: the rush of air against her face, her hair whipping in the wind, the powerful muscles of the stallion Abatos pounding beneath her as he galloped headlong down the forest road while she had embraced an almost mindless burst of triumph...then the ache of her shoulders, the reins beginning to slip through her fingers, and the uprooted tree blocking the road, cast down by a summer's storm...

She shook away the awful aftermath of that day and devoted her concentration to scrabbling her feet beneath her and pulling herself up into a standing position along the branch.

"Now, Sir Eustace, if you will hand me up the sword."

"Are you sure you are steady, lady?"

His belated words of concern only made her cross. "Quite steady. The sword, please."

She grasped a nearby limb as she leaned down to take the hilt he held up to her, and then she straightened. The sword was much heavier to lift over her head with one hand than it had been with two, but she was not foolish enough to entrust her balance to her feet alone. She shifted her supporting grasp to a limb nearer the height of her face, and on the second swing, succeeded in stabbing the blade into the branches above where she had seen some mistletoe clinging earlier that week.

"Great heavens, man! Are you mad?"

Isabel looked down at the ringing tones she knew like the beat of her heart. Lucian and Ronwen came striding, hand in hand, through the snow. The same wind that tossed her skirts and shook the limbs around her blew off Lucian's acorn cap. He made an absent grab for it then let it swirl away without breaking his forceful advance. The moonlight bathed his dark blond hair as silver as Ronwen's and revealed an expression in his eye that made Sir Eustace step back as Lucian halted before him.

"She has her heart set on some mistletoe," Sir Eustace said. "I offered to go up for her-in fact, I insisted, but she is a headstrong la.s.s and clamored up into the branches before I could stop her."

Isabel snorted the same instant that she heard Lucian do the same.

"Headstrong I know her to be," Lucian said, "and sly enough to defy a direct prohibition as soon as a fellow's back is turned, but I doubt even she could reach a branch of that height on her own. Thank the Saints I arrived in time to put an end to this farce of a betrothal before she left you with a corpse to marry. She is determined to break her neck one way or another, and you are imbecile enough to abet her."

Sir Eustace spluttered a protest, but Lucian shoved him out of the way with one hand.

"Come down from there, Isabel. Now."

Isabel glared at him, though she suspected he could not see it from that height. "You, Sir Lucian, forfeited the right to command me six months ago."

Lucian gave a harsh, ringing laugh. "Had I ever had the power to command you, you would be my wife today. Don't make me come up there and get you."

"I will come down as soon as I have dislodged some mistletoe." She made another jab into the branches above her head.

"Lucian, pray let us go," Ronwen begged. "I meant no harm, and it has all turned out for the best. Sir Eustace will make her a splendid husband. Why, I would give my eye teeth to have you look at me with the pa.s.sion that he bestows on her."

A growling sound startled Isabel into glancing down again. She saw Lucian release not Ronwen's hand, but her wrist.

"He'll bestow his pa.s.sion on her over my dead body-but not, Isabel, over yours. Now are you coming down, or am I coming up?"

"Neither," she said. "I do not need your help with the mistletoe any more than I needed it with Abatos."

Her heart hammered as the falsehood slipped from her lips. Why could she not confess the truth they both knew?

A white band of anger formed around Lucian's mouth. Isabel braced herself for a blast of fury, but his look must have frightened Ronwen, for she made a half turn as if to run back to the castle, which distracted him.

"Stay where you are," Lucian snapped at her. "You are the reason I suspect she is standing in that tree, and- Great heavens, Isabel! Is that a sword?"

The weight of the blade had begun to sag in her hand, so she had lowered it to her side to rest. "What if it is?" she said, jutting up her chin.

He reminded her just how much taller he stood than the other men she knew by grabbing hold of the branch she perched on without even lifting onto his toes.

"This limb will not hold both our weights," she warned. She did not know if it was true, but her words checked him.

"Blazes, Bel, what is it you're trying to prove?"

Isabel did not know the answer. She had never understood what drove her to try to command every situation. It had hovered as a barrier between her and Lucian from the first, barely noticed by either in the beginning, but gradually stirring some measure of annoyance in Lucian as their courtship had progressed. Even knowing how it nibbled away at the edges of their trust in one another, she had not been able to subdue her need to control, to confirm a degree of independence within herself, even at the risk of losing at last his patience and his love.

"I don't need you, Lucian," she repeated, though something cracked in her heart as she said it.

Her avowal seemed to refresh Sir Eustace's confidence. He stepped between Lucian and the tree. "You heard her, Sir Lucian. Take your lady back to the hall and leave me to deal with my betrothed."

Lucian made a guttural sound of rage in his throat. Isabel had heard it the day he had wrestled her from Abatos' back, when the stallion, sensing her waning strength, would have dislodged his unfamiliar rider by jumping the fallen tree.

"She is not your betrothed," Lucian growled. "That ring she wears on her hand is mine, not yours."

The statement hit Isabel so hard that she swayed on the branch. "Yours?" she repeated. "Lucian, you sent me the ring?"

Shock collapsed her into squatting down on the branch. Relief, followed by a heady burst of joy, extended the sword to the hand he held up.

"No, he sent the ring to me," Ronwen's voice huffed. "That was my tart you found it in."

Isabel jerked the sword back before Lucian's fingers could close around the hilt. Her gaze shot over his head at Ronwen, who stood, smirking with her hands on her hips.

"Agnes and I overheard Lucian bidding his squire to take the ring to the kitchen and persuade Marjory Cook to place it in a tart and mark it just for me," Ronwen said. "But Agnes, the little traitor, must have told Marjory to send the tart to you instead. As soon as I saw the ring on your hand, I guessed what had happened. The way Agnes smiled as she watched you dance with Lucian confirmed it. She must have hoped when you donned the ring that it would trap Lucian into marrying you after all, but I could tell that you failed to guess its origin. I saw Sir Eustace's signet ring and the hungry way he looked at you, so I told Sir Eustace to claim it."

Isabel glanced at the topaz on her hand. She did not need to ask if the story was true. The stone agreed too well with Ronwen's gown, while Lucian-Lucian had said he would drape Isabel in rubies.

"You should thank me, Bel," her cousin continued. "You wanted a husband you could rule, like you have ruled your father. I have given you one. And you know I will suit Sir Lucian much better than you. He wants a meek wife, not one who absconds with that ferocious destrier he brought back from the East and scrambles about in trees."

Isabel stood back up. Thankfully, she could not see Lucian's expression through the tears that swam in her eyes; his silence was condemning enough. She pushed the sword under her arm, pulled the ring from her finger, and hurled it over Ronwen's head.

"Take it, then. And take your tyrannical betrothed back to the hall. As soon as I have my mistletoe, I shall announce to my father that Sir Eustace and I wish to be married by Epiphany."

"Tyrannical?" Lucian exclaimed. "You call me a tyrant merely because I wish to safeguard the woman I love?"

"Then do so," Isabel said. "Safeguard Ronwen to your heart's content, because I-"

"Do not say it again," Lucien said. "Don't you dare say you do not need me while you stand in that tree, the wind tangling your skirts around your feet, a sword you can barely lift tucked under your arm, and a temper so proud you think it mere foolishness to hold on to a branch to steady yourself." Lucian jerked his head disdainfully in Sir Eustace's direction. "Do you think he has wits enough to catch you if you fall?"

Isabel realized that to pull off the ring, she had released her hold of the supporting branch. As right as she knew Lucian was about her carelessness, she could not bear to give him the satisfaction of clutching at the branch again.

"I am perfectly steady, as I told Sir Eustace," she said, praying no powerful gust of the wind would prove otherwise.

"Oh, bother!" Ronwen cried. "What were you thinking to throw the ring like that, Bel?" Her cousin knelt, digging in the snow. "Lucian, Sir Eustace, help me find it."

Sir Eustace joined her like an obedient puppy. Had the man no backbone at all? Apparently he did, but only where his vanity was concerned, for he attended his hems and carefully bent from the waist to join Ronwen in the search.

"Go help them," Isabel said when Lucian continued to stand where he was. "I have a task to finish here." As soon as he would turn away, she would grab the branch again and swing the sword back up to knock down the mistletoe.

"And leave you to topple out of that tree?" Lucian said. "I don't think so."

"I am not going to topple out."

"Like you would not have lost your seat, and broken who knows how many bones, had I allowed Abatos to jump that tree with you still on his back?"

Aha! She had known he would bring that up. She answered defiantly, "I would not have fallen! I can ride as well as you, even that brute you found in the East."

She recognized the frustration that twitched his lips. "So you have told me a dozen times whenever I forbade you to try. I have seen you ride, Bel, I know what a skilled horsewoman you are. But Abatos surpa.s.sed your strength, as I warned he would. I saw the fear in your face when you realized he meant to make the leap. You knew I was right, yet you refused to admit it then, just as you do now. If I had not caught you in time and pulled you from the saddle-"

"I would have landed safely on the other side."

"Blazes, Bel! I vow you are the most contrary woman in England!"

She ground her foot against the branch to prevent herself from stamping it. "Go help your meek little love find the ring you intended for her. Let her fawn and pet over you, let her declare you her lord and master. I won't bend for you, Lucian de Warrene. I won't bend for any man."

"I haven't asked you to bend, only to listen-"