Page 6 of Never Love a Lord
“I needn’t consent to anything,” Sybilla parried, leaning back in her chair.
“As I said, Edward wants the truth. But he is willing to settle for Fallstowe, and your corpse, as an answer to his summons. So the choice is truly up to you,my lady. You may answer for yourself and take your sentence, or you can die, many of Fallstowe’s good and loyal people with you.”
“I could kill you where you stand, you pretentious, court-softened dandy,” Sybilla whispered. “I just might, yet.”
“I would have your lovely neck snapped before you could so much as lay finger to that pretty little dagger at your waist,” Julian returned in an equally low murmur.
Sybilla felt her eyebrows raise, her heart pound, but she could not decide if it was in fear or anticipation.
“Care to try me?” she challenged him.
“I can think of nothing else that would bring me more pleasure at this moment.” Julian inclined his head slightly, as if in deference. “Upon your first move, lady.”
Sybilla’s heart still pounded like thunder in her chest, and she remained absolutely still. Her eyes bored into Julian Griffin’s, and his into hers. She felt oddly alive just then, and wondered what Julian Griffin’s hands would feel like around her neck.
“Don’t do this, Sybilla,” he cautioned her, but his square jaw remained set. “Don’t force my hand. The last thing I want is to kill you. Give me a chance. Give yourself a chance.”
“You’re being watched right now, you know,” Sybilla said, and glanced up at the darkened balconies. “You have no chance.”
Julian nodded once. “I saw the archers. But I promise I will reach you first. Even should they kill me after, Fallstowe will quickly fall without its head. Its heart. Many innocent lives lost. You can’t want that.”
“You are not faster than an arrow,” Sybilla challenged him, surprised at her reaction to Julian’s reference to her as Fallstowe’s heart. Surely it was the other way around.
“Perhaps not,” he acquiesced.
Sybilla let her lips curl in a smirk. But in the next instant, her breath caught in her throat as the figure of Julian Griffin became little more than a blur of fine tunic. In less time than it took Sybilla to blink, he had sprung over her table, wrenched Sybilla from her chair, and spun her around before him, even as thechunk-chunk-chunkof arrows peppered her table like hail. Sybilla heard the frightened cry of the nursemaid in the shadows.
In her ear he whispered, “But then again, perhaps I am.”
Sybilla gasped shallowly through her open mouth. She closed her lips and swallowed deliberately. “Well played, Lord Griffin,” she said. She inched her hand down toward her waist as she continued to speak. “Perhaps the pair of us are more equally matched than we suspect.”
He whispered into her ear again, just as her fingers touched the cold, empty sheath where her dagger had been only a moment ago.
“Or perhaps not so equally matched,” he suggested, and her skin broke out in gooseflesh at his hot breath along her neck. She heard a clatter, and her glance caught the flash of candlelight on blade as Julian Griffin tossed her dagger onto the tabletop.
For an instant, Sybilla thought she felt the brush of his lips behind her ear and it made her eyelashes flutter closed.
“What shall we do now?” she queried lightly, all the while trying to ignore the tightening sensation in her midsection. “We seem to be at an impasse.”
“I will release you, if you give me your word that you will entertain the interview I requested to its end. Then I will take you—and the evidence—to Edward. If I determine it worthy, I will do all I can to help you.”
“If I refuse?”
“Fallstowe will be no more. As it is, should my general not hear from my own lips in less than an hour, he has been ordered to initiate the siege.”
“You cannot think me to converse civilly with you in my home while hundreds of bloodthirsty soldiers wait beyond my door.”
“Then I shall send them away.”
Sybilla laughed despite herself. “You shall send them away?”
“This very night,” Julian agreed, his tone solemn, quiet, his lips still near her ear. “Not even within sight of Fallstowe.”
Sybilla hesitated.
“I swear it to you,” Julian whispered. “Trust me, Sybilla. I have your life in my hands already. Trust me to preserve it.”
She felt an odd catch in her throat at his words, and had to swallow quickly before giving voice to her doubt. “I trust no one but myself.”
