"You're just like Joan of Arc," Brenna agreed eagerly, "leading her people to victory!"
"Except that I'm marrying Edric MacPherson."
"And," Brenna finished encouragingly, "suffering a worse fate than she did!"
Laughter widened Jenny's eyes at this depressing remark, which her well-meaning sister delivered with such enthusiasm.
Encouraged by the return of Jenny's ability to laugh, Brenna cast about for something else with which to divert and cheer her. As they neared the crest of the hill, which was blocked by thick woods, she said suddenly, "What did Father mean about your having your mother's 'look about you'?"
"I don't know," Jenny began, diverted by a sudden, uneasy feeling that they were being watched in the deepening dusk. Turning and walking backward, she looked down toward the well and saw the villagers had all returned to the warmth of their hearths. Drawing her cloak about her, she shivered in the biting wind, and without much interest, she added, "Mother Abbess said my looks are a trifle brazen and that I must guard against the effect I will have on males when I leave the abbey."
"What does all that mean?"
Jenny shrugged without concern. "I don't know." Turning and walking forward again, Jenny remembered the wimple and veil in her fingertips and began to put the wimple back on. "What do I look like to you?" she asked, shooting a puzzled glance at Brenna. "I haven't seen my face in two years, except when I caught a reflection of it in the water. Have I changed much?"
"Oh yes," Brenna laughed. "Even Alexander wouldn't be able to call you scrawny and plain now, or say that your hair is the color of carrots."
"Brenna!" Jenny interrupted, thunderstruck by her own callousness. "Are you much grieved by Alexander's death? He was your brother and—"
"Don't talk of it any more," Brenna pleaded shakily. "I cried when Father told me, but the tears were few and I feel guilty because I didn't love him as I ought. Not then and not now. I couldn't. He was so—mean-spirited. It's wrong to speak ill of the dead, yet I can't think of much good to say of him." Her voice trailed off, and she pulled her cloak about her in the damp wind, gazing at Jenny in mute appeal to change the subject.
"Tell me how I look, then," Jenny invited quickly, giving her sister a quick, hard hug.
They stopped walking, their way blocked by the dense woods that covered the rest of the slope. A slow, thoughtful smile spread across Brenna's beautiful face as she studied her stepsister, her hazel eyes roving over Jenny's expressive face, which was dominated by a pair of large eyes as clear as dark blue crystal beneath gracefully winged, auburn brows. "Well, you're—you're quite pretty!"
"Good, but do you see anything unusual about me?" Jenny asked, thinking of Mother Ambrose's words as she put her wimple back on and pinned the short woolen veil in place atop it. "Anything at all which might make a male behave oddly?"
"No," Brenna stated, for she saw Jenny through the eyes of a young innocent. "Nothing at all." A man would have answered very differently, for although Jennifer Merrick wasn't pretty in the conventional way, her looks were both striking and provocative. She had a generous mouth that beckoned to be kissed, eyes like liquid sapphires that shocked and invited, hair like lush, red-gold satin, and a slender, voluptuous body that was made for a man's hands.
"Your eyes are blue," Brenna began helpfully, trying to describe her, and Jenny chuckled.
"They were blue two years ago," she said. Brenna opened her mouth to answer, but the words became a scream that was stifled by a man's hand that clapped over her mouth as he began dragging her backward into the dense cover of the woods.
Jenny ducked, instinctively expecting an attack from behind, but she was too late. Kicking and screaming against a gloved male hand, she was plucked from her feet and hauled into the woods. Brenna was tossed over the back of her captor's horse like a sack of flour, her limp limbs attesting to the fact that she'd fainted, but Jenny was not so easily subdued. As her faceless adversary dumped her over the back of his horse, she threw herself to the side, rolling free, landing in the leaves and dirt, crawling on all fours beneath his horse, then scrambling to her feet. He caught her again, and Jenny raked her nails down his face, twisting in his hold. "God's teeth!" he hissed, trying to hold onto her flailing limbs. Jenny let out a blood-chilling scream, at the same moment she kicked as hard as she could, landing a hefty blow on his shin with the sturdy, black boots which were deemed appropriate footware for novice nuns. A grunt of pain escaped the blond man as he let her go for a split second. She bolted forward and might even have gained a few yards if her booted foot hadn't caught under a thick tree root and sent her sprawling onto her face, smacking the side of her head against a rock when she landed.
"Hand me the rope," the Wolf's brother said, a grim smile on his face as he glanced at his companion. Pulling his limp captive's cloak over her head, Stefan Westmoreland yanked it around her body, using it to pin her arms at her sides, then took the rope from his companion and tied it securely around Jenny's middle. Finished, he picked up his human bundle and tossed it ignominiously over his horse, her derrière pointing skyward, then he swung up into the saddle behind her.
Chapter Two
Royce will scarce believe our good fortune," Stefan called to the rider beside him whose prisoner was also bound and draped across his saddle. "Imagine—Merrick's girls standing beneath that tree as ripe for plucking as apples from a branch. Now there's no reason for us to have a look at Merrick's defenses—he'll surrender without a fight."
Tightly bound in her dark woolen prison, her head pounding and her stomach slamming against the horse's back with each lift of the beast's hooves, the name "Royce" made Jenny's blood freeze. Royce Westmoreland, the earl of Claymore. The Wolf. The horrifying stories she'd heard of him no longer seemed nearly so farfetched. Brenna and she had been seized by men who showed no reverence whatsoever for the habits of the order of St. Albans which the girls wore, habits that indicated their status of novice—aspiring nuns who had not yet taken their vows. What manner of men, Jenny wondered frantically, would lay their hands on nuns, or almost-nuns, without conscience or fear of retribution, human or divine. No man would. Only a devil and his disciples would dare!
"This one's fainted dead away," Thomas said with a lewd laugh. "A pity we haven't more time to sample our loot, although, were it left to me, I'd prefer that tasty morsel ye've wrapped in yer blanket, Stefan."