Dreaming within a dream, she finally remembered how she’d come to be there, and understood how she might get back home. The way to escape the Hawk and all his infinite promises of passion and pain.

She was awakened by the impact of the memory. Disentangling herself from the silken sheets, she crossed the room and peered out into the inky night.

Eberhard’s chess set.

She could finally recall with perfect clarity what she’d been doing moments before she’d been catapulted through time to land on the Comyn’s lap.

She’d been in her library, picking up the pieces of Eberhard’s chess set.

That dratted chess set really was cursed. When she’d swiped it from Eberhard’s house, she’d been careful not to touch the pieces. Eberhard had often joked about the curse, but Adrienne preferred to give legends, curses, and myths a wide berth. After she’d pilfered the set, she had left it packed, intending to unpack it only if she needed to sell it.

She knew she’d had the black queen in her hand when she’d appeared on Red Comyn’s lap, but where had it gone from there? She certainly didn’t have it now. Had one of the maids taken it? Would she have to confront the despicable Red Comyn to get it back?

She shook her head dejectedly. It had to be somewhere at the Comyn keep, and wherever it was she had to make an effort to find it. It could take her home. Could she find her way back to the Comyn keep?

Of course, she assured herself. After traveling scrubby backroads for two thousand miles, Adrienne de Simone could find her way anywhere. But quickly, while she was still under cover of the night. And before her resolve weakened.

Thirty minutes later she was ready. Tiptoeing through the kitchen, she’d found an oiled sack and filled it with crusty breads and cheeses and a few apples. Tavis snored in his chair by the door, his hand furled about a half-full glass of—she sniffed cautiously—pure grain alcohol from the smell of it. After a quick stop in the Green Lady’s room where she’d left the boots Lydia had given her, she’d be ready to go.

Slipping from the kitchen, she moved quickly down the short corridor and pushed open the door to the Green Lady’s room. Her eyes flared with dismay. There the Hawk slept, a white linen sheet wrapped around his legs, his torso bare to the dawn’s caress. His dark head tossed against the white pillows, and he slept alone—grasping in his arms the dress she’d worn that day she’d taken the dart.

They called him the king’s whore, she reminded herself. Perhaps there was actually a royal appointment to such a post. Or perhaps he was simply so nondiscriminating that he’d earned the title all by himself. Regardless, she would never again be one of many.

Adrienne spied her boots on the wooden chest at the foot of the bed. Eyes carefully averted from her sleeping husband, she slipped them from the burnished pine lid and skittered back toward the door on kitten paws, closing it gently behind her.

And now the difficult part. Guards were posted all over the castle. She would have to flee through the gardens, down the eternal bridge to the gatehouse, and through the east tower. She’d run from worse things, through worse climes before. She would manage somehow. She always did when it came to running.

Hawk slitted one eye open and watched her leave. He muttered darkly and shifted his body, folding his muscular arms behind his head. He stared at the door a long moment.

She was leaving him?

Never. Not so long as he lived and breathed, and he had a hell of a lot more fight in him than she must think.

He moved to his feet and grabbed his kilt, knotting it loosely at his waist.

So that’s the way it was going to be, he mused bitterly. The first sign of something less than savory in his past, and she would run. He hadn’t pegged her as the skittish type. He’d thought there was a lass of fiery mettle beneath her silken exterior, but one breath of his sordid past and she was ready to leave him. After the pleasure she’d so obviously experienced in his arms, still—to walk away.

Well, where the hell did she think he’d learned how to give pleasure?

Oh, nay. The next time his wife lay in his arms, and there would be a next time, he would take one of the gypsy potions to make him detached. Then he would truly show her the benefits she reaped from the past she eschewed so violently.

He was offering her his love, freely and openly. He, who had never offered anything more than physical pleasure for a short time to any lass, was offering this woman his life.

And still she would not accept him.

And she didn’t even know the first bloody thing about what it meant to be the king’s whore. Olivia had been about to tell her, there in the gardens. Olivia, who had ruthlessly exploited the Hawk’s servitude to the king by petitioning James to command the Hawk to grant her those carnal favors he’d previously denied her. Olivia, who had given James a whole new way to humiliate the Hawk. The memory of it shamed and enraged him. He banished such thoughts and the blinding anger they generated with a firm flexing of his formidable will.