Excerpt of His Duty, Her Destiny by Juliet Landon

Flinging her thick brown plait over her shoulder, Nicola picked up her rapier and turned to face her opponent with a disarming smile. "Ready?" she said, sweetly. The young man had put himself on the line by telling her she knew nothing about the Italian style of fencing, not thinking that she could produce a pair of rapiers she'd been using for years. He should have known better.

"What do I do with it?" she asked, innocently.

The young man smiled. "Your best, my lady,'he said. "Shall we take these silly guards off the points, then?" The smile disappeared. "It's not usual, in practice." 'Oh, then let's be unusual, for a change." 'Are you sure, my lady?" 'Quite sure. There, that's better. Now, on guard. Is that what they say?" He had been a nuisance for weeks, this young man: it was time to get rid of him. He could not be more than her own twenty-four years.

Fencing with an unprotected point obviously concerned him, for he was defensive, extremely wary and immediately rattled by her obvious familiarity with the weapon. Only aristocrats took this kind of fencing seriously, and most of them had learned in either France, Germany or Italy; very few in England. But women, never.

Nicola, however, had fenced with her four brothers since she was old enough to stand; she was naturally nimble, graceful, quick-thinking and, most of all, had learned from an early age to hold her own against men. In a house full of them, there had been no place for a faint-hearted woman.

Clearly taken by surprise at her sudden swift attack, his defence came a split second too late and his rapier went flying through the air to slide across the stone-flagged floor of the hall well before he'd had time to settle into a rhythm. It was a very undignified beginning.

"Oh, dear," said Nicola. "D'ye want to try again?" 'You've had some practice," he said, accusingly, picking up his rapier. "You might have said."

"I did say, last evening. You didn't believe me. On guard."

He started the next bout with more determination, but with a heavy chip on his shoulder, wondering how this lovely woman, whom men held only in their fantasies, could have learned how to best him at a man's game. His lack of concentration did him no favours, and almost immediately he was being forced backwards again under a charge that for sheer speed left him no time to recover.

Then, for a second time, his rapier took wings, clattering across the almost deserted hall to settle at the feet of a tall man whose powerful shoulders propped up the door- frame and whose expression was less than sympathetic. He looked at the swordsman pityingly and placed a high-booted foot upon the long narrow blade, shaking his head.

Without a word, the young man aimed a snappy bow in Nicola's direction and stalked off to the end of the hall, banging the great door behind him.

The point of Nicola's rapier had touched the floor in slow decline before it dawned on her that this intruder was not exactly a stranger and that his slow arrogant scrutiny of her from head to toe and back again was exactly what she remembered of their first meeting when she had been a mere eleven-year-old and he an uppity sixteen who had made no effort to endear himself to her then, either. On the contrary, she could still recall his frightening incivility, despite the protection of her brothers.

He pushed himself away from the open doorway, un-buttoning his velvet jerkin and sloughing it from his arms like a discarded skin, then dropping it to the floor. Picking up the rapier, he came to stand in a puddle of light from the large bay window, his eyes remaining on Nicola, but giving away nothing of his surprise at the change in her. "Try me," he said quietly, describing circles with the point. "I don't use a guard either. Not even in practice."

In the intervening years his voice had changed from that of a wobbling Scots-accented baritone to a rich bass, though he made the invitation sound more like a command, which, Nicola remembered, had always been his style. No matter that her family could boast an ancestry to rival any in England, this man's family had exceeding wealth, which, he had been led to believe, gave him the edge. She would show him how wrong he could be.

Her reply was to put up her rapier at arm's length and to touch the point of his with hers, locking her deep brown stare with his hard grey one, but knowing in her vitals that this would be no push-over like the last. This man was five years older than her, for a start. She was tall for a woman, but Sir Fergus Melrose was taller, with the physique of an athlete and the healthy tan of one who had caught the sea breeze and seen the world. She was slender, too, but her opponent's wrists were twice as thick as hers, and his lithe, tautly muscled body was better practiced in the arts of warfare, even the less usual ones.

She had dressed in men's doeskin breeches, a shirt and short padded jerkin in order to do justice to the young man's challenge issued last night at supper, and though she had given no thought to the indisputable fact that she was just as fascinating in this garb as in her finest gown, neither did she realise that now there was an androgynous element about her that any man would find unsettling. As had been proved. Her abundant dark hair was still contained within one plait, but no one would have been fooled into mistaking her body for that of a lad when her unbelted jerkin swung open at each move and the roundness of her hips filled the breeches as no man's ever could.

The sleeves of Sir Fergus's linen shirt were rolled up to reveal his wrists, and now he pulled at the cord of his neck to open the front, a trick her brothers had tried in the past to deflect her attention. She was not caught off guard as he had intended, and although she made no headway at all in the first few moments, nor did she allow him through her defence.

As she had done, he held back, hoping to lure her into a false confidence, though she knew this to be a ploy too, and would not be drawn. But soon she began to tire as the bout continued and, as his pressure became more intense, perspiration began to run into her eyes and stick her soft linen shirt to her chest. She found his style intimidating, his skill with a sword far superior to hers, his energy phenomenal, for he was not even perspiring, and instead of anticipating his next move as she should have been doing, she could not help but wonder how much longer she could continue before her rapier would go the same way as her previous opponent's.

After a vigorous exchange, she allowed her point to lower and saw to her surprise that he was changing his rapier over to his left hand, tapping the point of it under hers to make her lift it again, goading her, telling her that he could beat her left-handed. It was a disconcerting move, and the end came well before she could score a hit or even remove the patronising smile from his face.

Panting, and aching with fatigue, she made a mistake at last and felt the fierce sting of his point catch beneath her jerkin and slash like a razor through the thin stuff of her shirt. She leapt backwards, dropping her rapier and holding her breast with one hand, fending him off with the other as he closed in too quickly for her to evade him. Backing her against the panelled wall, he held her there with his body, his face so close that she could see the steel-grey fearlessness through his eyes which, as a child, she had both admired and found intimidating.

"Well," he said, watching the torrent of dark brown hair fall across her face, "some things have changed for the better, but not the temper, it seems. You'll have to deal with that, my lady, if you want to play men's games."

Her eyes blazed fiercely into his while she chafed at the shameful closeness of him and at her own stupid helplessness, her voice betraying her agitation. "What right have you to walk unannounced and uninvited into my house? And how would you know what's changed?" she panted through a curtain of silky hair. "My temper is none of your business either. Get off me!" She heaved at him, but he was as solid as a wall and, instead of moving, he prised the hand away from her breast, turning her palm over to reveal a sticky patch of blood upon it.

He moved back quickly to inspect the vertical slash on her shirt and the red stain that oozed through the fabric, and it was clear to her then that he had not known of this, not perhaps intended it. It had been the same when she was younger, getting hurt while trying to keep up with her brothers and him not caring of her damage, nor of the silence she had kept about her injuries, particularly to her pride.

Their fathers, close friends for years, had promised the two of them as future man and wife, but who could expect an eleven-year-old tomboy to understand or accept the implications of that? And what brash sixteen-year-old would not be more interested in the child's brothers than in her? Fergus had felt no need to pretend, having more pressing things on his mind than parents' promises.

Clutching at herself, Nicola tried to turn away, but already her legs had begun to shake with fatigue, making her stumble as he caught her quickly under her knees, tilting her body into his arms. She saw the bright window swing away over her head, then felt the sudden sting of her wound and another rush of anger that forced a strength into her arms. "Put me down! Let me go, you great clod! I can manage without you. My steward will..."

But his hands and arms tightened and there was nothing she could do but suffer him to carry her, writhing and fuming with humiliation and her undone plait hanging over his arm, down the length of the hall, up a narrow staircase and through two doors. Finally, he lowered her on to her own tester bed with his arms on each side of her to prevent her from rolling away, ignoring her protests that she could manage well enough without him after all these years.

His face was at first in shadow, so she was only able to guess at the degree of concern in his eyes, or otherwise. But there was little doubt in her mind about his intentions when he caught both her wrists and, transferring them to one large strong hand, held them easily above her head and pressed them down into the soft brocade coverlet. His grip held her tight, and her breast had begun to sting like a burn.

This was as bad as anything she had suffered as a child. "No!" she gasped, almost voiceless with fear. "Please...no!"