Chapter 4.2.2

The light dropped as Lady Victoria shielded her lantern. There was still enough for me to peer down at them, and I watched as she knelt beside Sharp and touched his face. "What’s this? Do Bards cry?"

"It is for the memory of a dear friend."

"What do mean?" She pulled his head to her breast. I caught my breath.

"The songs I sing: they were written by a man I knew, whom I loved as a brother. It hurts me to sing his songs."

"Is he dead?"

Blunt, wasn’t she?

"I believe so," Sharp replied, as if he had not looked me in the face earlier that evening.

"Why do you sing his songs, if they hurt you so?"

Because he cannot protest, I argued for him.

Sharp’s answer was different. "To fire my anger, to fuel my vengeance. Lord Reinard destroyed him, and so I will destroy Lord Reinard. I have come here to wreck his plans for marriage."

"Good luck." The lady touched his face with his her fingers. "Lord Guerney is quite determined for it to be completed, despite the complication."

The what?

He caught her hand and kissed her fingers, then lifted his face to the base of her neck. He kissed her skin, then pulled her neckline lower and nuzzled the curve of her breast. "What is that?"

"She’s pregnant."

His hand, already pushing up the hem of her gown, stopped. "I had not heard that."

"Neither has Lord Reinard." Sharp’s hands were nowhere near her girdle, but it fell away.

He lifted her hem higher, revealing her calf, her knee, and then the silken curve of her thigh. "He does not know he has a child coming?"

Lady Victoria laughed and leaned back, pulling Sharp over her. "They’ve not been face to face, much less belly to belly. The child is not his."

What kind of a harlot did my Lord seek to make the Lady of Songless Castle? How many times would she hang horns on his ignorant head? What was the true price of a piece of weed-filled, wizard-cursed woods?

"And what will Lord Reinard do when he finds out?" Sharp’s hand was above her creamy hip, and his belt lay to the side. I shifted, uncomfortable.

"My Lord intends for him not to find out, before the vows are given and the marriage sealed. I know I can trust you to keep silent."

Instead of a reply, he kissed her lips, her neck, the valley between her breasts...