Till There Was You by Kurland Lynn

Author:Kurland, Lynn [Kurland, Lynn]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781101044353
Publisher: PENGUIN group
Published: 2012-04-25T05:02:55+00:00

Chapter 16

M ary stood in the lists and wished she’d had a bit of sword skill. She had aunts enough who could defend themselves if necessary. Even her mother had wielded a blade in her youth with great success. If she’d been able to do the like, she would have used a very sharp dagger on one of the men she was watching and that man wouldn’t have been Zachary. It would have been Connor, for he was fighting with Zachary and he wasn’t holding back.

She supposed it could have been worse. It could have been Jackson trying to reduce Zachary to tears. He’d been threatening the like for two days now, since Zachary had bested him so thoroughly in the courtyard with his bare hands alone. She supposed some of his anger was over that. The rest came from a misplaced determination to defend her.

She had discussed with him her lack of need for that in angry whispers that morning during Mass, something he never attended more than once a year. He had spent most of his time pointing out to her that Zachary was a rogue he intended to kill at his earliest opportunity. She had called him a dozen kinds of idiot. The conversation, if it could have been called such, had deteriorated from there until they’d both been asked to leave the chapel. Jackson had scowled at her, then stalked off, no doubt to visit the armory to see if there might be something there to add to his already too-large collection of sharp things.

She had retreated to the lists to see how Zachary fared. He had begun his day with Thaddeus, but soon moved on to Connor. At least her father was only watching him at present instead of offering very caustic opinions on how Zachary could improve himself.

Mary had been surprised at the way her father had from the very beginning subjected Zachary to a steady stream of criticism about where he was failing to live up to expectations. On those very rare occasions when he had actually deigned to work with someone, he always put them through several weeks of the simplest of exercises before he began to critique their technique. She had witnessed more than one man look at her father in disbelief at his harshness, then turn and walk off the field, having found Robin of Artane’s requirements to be a little too demanding for his taste. Zachary, however, hadn’t flinched. He had merely performed with exactness whatever her father had told him to do.

As Parsival had remarked more than once, Zachary certainly looked like a lad who wanted something very much.

She wasn’t sure she wanted to know what that something might be.

She took a deep breath and looked to her right to where her father stood watching Zachary. She didn’t like to disturb him in the lists, but today she was past the point of fretting over niceties. She walked over to him and slipped her hand into the crook of his elbow.

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