Page 30 of Saxon Blade Norman Blood
“Seventeen… My God, you killed a man aged seventeen?” She felt her blood turn cold in her veins. Just how many men had he killed? “How monstrous.”
“Says the woman who came to my bed armed with a dagger.”
His temper had quickly returned but Rowena refused to be intimidated. “That is not the same and you know it. I never owed you my respect. I did not humiliate you beforehand by bedding your spouse.”
William uncrossed his arms and gripped her shoulders once more. “Enough. If you want to judge me, you should at least know all the facts.”
“I do not—”
“But I will tell you all the same, and you will listen.”
She flinched. He had never spoken to her so harshly. It seemed she would have no choice but to listen to his story.
“One day the comtesse insisted I should make love to her in her own bed. Foolishly, I agreed. The comte walked in on us in a, shall we say, compromising position. He flew into a rage.”
“It’s difficult to blame him,” Rowena exclaimed, trying to move away. He did not let her go. “He was the injured party, wouldn’t you say?”
“Yes, he was.”
The flat tone made it clear he agreed with her to prevent an unnecessary argument, not because he thought she was right. This lack of empathy with a man he had wronged—and subsequently killed—chilled her to the bone. She had hoped to see at least a sign of regret. But evidently William de la Falaise could kill a man and think nothing of it.
She shivered. How had she ever thought herself safe with him?
“He threw me out. I barely had time to pick up my clothes. He never said anything to me, he simply threw me out. I wanted to stay and face my responsibilities, but there was no chance to do so.”
The ominous voice was less than reassuring. “And?”
“After I had left the room I heard a scream, a scream like I had never heard before.” William looked into the distance. The same gleam as before passed in his eyes. When he spoke, his voice had lost its usual warm quality. It was ghostlike. “I rushed back inside the room. My esteemed overlord, the injured party, the man it would be hard to blame, was beating his wife with the obvious intention of killing her. She was curled up on the floor, naked, and he kicked her as viciously as he would have kicked at an animal he meant to torment. She was with child at the time.”
Rowena gave a whimper of horror. The hands at her shoulder tightened their grip even further but she barely felt it. William planted his gaze into hers. Unable to sustain the intensity of the moment she lowered her head to the floor.
“You seem so sure of what’s right and wrong so tell me, should I have walked away? Should I have let the man kill his wife?”
“No, of course not,” she whispered.
He nodded, as if satisfied with her reaction. “I stepped between them, and in the fight that ensued, I sent him reeling backward. His head hit the table behind him, and he fell to the floor, unconscious. He died the next day, never having regained consciousness. I cannot be sure I would have killed him if he had not fallen first, but I might have been forced to.” William sounded grim. “He would certainly not have stopped until he had killed me, for he wanted to kill his wife, and I was the one obstacle preventing him from doing so.”
“But… How on earth were you accused of murdering him then? As you said, you were only defending the comtesse, and you did not mean to kill him.”
“Nobody believed my version of events when confronted with another.”
“How was there another version?” Rowena frowned. He’d just said the man had died without having regained consciousness. “There was no one else in the room with you.”
“There was one other person,” he answered levelly.
“Yes, the comtesse but…” She stopped as the reality of what he was saying dawned on her. In a calm voice, he confirmed her suspicions.
“She accused me of killing her husband, making it imperative for me to flee the country.”
“But you had just saved her life!” Rowena cried, stirred into anger by the unfairness of the accusation. “It was not as if you had killed her husband in cold blood, and anyway, his death was clearly an accident.”
“I am gratified to see you have come to consider my situation more sympathetically.” His fingers relaxed their gripon her shoulders. “The comtesse had planned the whole thing. Her husband walking in us was no accident. She had arranged it that way. We had never met in her room, but she had hinted that she wanted to many times. One day I relented, fool that I was.”
“But she put herself into incredible danger in doing so.”
“Yes, that was her mistake. She miscalculated her husband’s reaction. She thought he would lunge at me in anger, a reasonable assumption to make. Of course, I would have defended myself, and as I was younger, fitter, it was not difficult to guess I could have injured or killed him. Instead, he let me go and took out his anger on her. If I had not come back, I have no doubt that she would have been killed.”
“I cannot believe anyone would do something like this,” she murmured.
