Twice Tempted by a Rogue (Stud Club #2)

Ah, now that was the sort of reception he’d been expecting. But unless the old superstitions were true and some witch had foretold his arrival, Rhys knew the words couldn’t have been meant for him. No one was likely to recognize him at all—he’d been just seventeen years old when he’d been here last.

Pulled forward by curiosity and the smells of ale and peat smoke, he approached the open door, stopping just outside.

The tavern was cramped, and much as Rhys remembered it. Just big enough to hold a small bar, a half-dozen tables, a mismatched assortment of chairs and stools, and—on this particular occasion—complete pandemonium.

“That’s it! Pound ’im good!”

Two neckless apes faced off in the center of the room, spitting and circling one another as the onlookers pushed aside tables and chairs. The taller of the two brutes took a clumsy swing that caught nothing but air. The momentum carried him into a startled onlooker’s arms. That man took exception and shoved back. Within seconds, the room was a blur of fists.

Standing unnoticed in the shadowed doorway, Rhys shifted his weight. An echo of bloodlust whispered in his ear. As a younger man, he would have hurled himself into the thickest knot of violence, eager to claw and punch his way back out. Just to feel the surge of his racing pulse, the slice of broken glass scoring his flesh, the tang of blood in his mouth. The strange, fleeting sensation of being alive.

But he wasn’t that young man anymore. Thanks to the war, he’d had his fill of both fighting and pain. And he’d long given up on feeling alive.

After a minute or two, the peripheral scrabbling defused. Once again the two louts faced off, huffing for breath and clearly hungry for more. They chuckled as they circled one another, as though this were their typical Saturday night fun. It probably was. Wasn’t as though life on the moor offered a wealth of amusements other than drinking and brawling.

Now that he studied their faces, Rhys wondered if the two might be brothers. Or cousins, perhaps. The taller one had mashed features, while the shorter sported a beaky nose. But their eyes reflected the same empty shade of blue, and they wore identical expressions of willful stupidity.

The shorter one picked up a low stool and taunted his opponent with it, as if baiting a bull. The “bull” charged. He threw a wild punch over the stool, but his reach fell short by inches. To close the gap, Bull grabbed a brass candlestick from the mantel and whipped it through the air, sucking all sound from the room.

Whoosh.

Beak threw aside his stool, and it smashed to splinters against the hearth. With Bull’s attention momentarily diverted, Beak dove for a table still set for a meal. Half-empty dishes and bread crusts were strewn over white linen.

Rhys frowned. When had old Maddox started bothering with tablecloths?

He stopped wondering about it when Beak came up wielding a knife.

“I’ll teach you to raise a club to me, you whoreson,” he snarled.

Everyone in the room froze. Rhys ceased leaning against the doorjamb and stood erect, reconsidering his decision not to intervene. With a brass club and a knife involved, someone was likely to get seriously injured, or worse. As tired as he might be of fighting, he was even more weary of watching men die.

But before he could act, a series of sounds arrested him where he stood.

Crash. A bottle breaking.

Plink, plink, plink. Glass bits trickling to the floor.

Thud. Beak collapsing to the table unconscious, rivulets of wine streaming down around his ears.

“Harold Symmonds, you’ll pay for that wine.” A slender, dark-haired woman stood over Beak’s senseless form, clutching what remained of a green-glass bottle. “And the tablecloth too, you great lout.” She shook her head and tsked. “Blood and claret will never come out of white linen.

“And as for you, Laurence—” She wheeled on the second man, threatening him with the broken bottle’s sharp glass teeth. Though he was twice as big as the barmaid and a man besides, Laurence held up his hands in surrender.

In fact, every man in the room had gone still. As though they all feared the harsh discipline this tiny barmaid might dole out. Interesting. To a man like Rhys, who’d spent several years commanding soldiers, that snap to attention spoke volumes.

Jabbing the bottle at Laurence, the barmaid backed him up against the wall. “’Twas your own master who brought that, you know.”

“This?” He stared at the candlestick in his fist. “It’s Gideon’s?”

“No, it’s the inn’s.” She wrenched the brass club away from the stunned brute and curled her arm, lifting it to eye level. “But Gideon delivered it. Hauled it and its mate all the way up from Plymouth just last week. The set came very dear, and I’ll thank you to keep your grimy mitts off the bric-a-brac.”

The thing must have weighed a stone, but it cost her no effort to heft the candlestick up on the mantel with one hand and nudge it back into place.

“There,” she said to herself, apparently satisfied with the symmetry. Standing back, she threw the jagged remnants of the bottle into the fire, and a wine-fueled blaze surged in the hearth.