Defiant by Kris Kennedy

another conference.
    “The road diverges here,” Jamie was saying. He shoved his fingers through his hair in an impatient, sweaty way. “Along the eastern way, in about a mile or so, is a town. West hies toward Bristol.”
    “They might have gone there,” Ry was saying in his soft-spoken, smart voice. It was a sad thing she had met Ry in this way, with the ropes and the kidnapping, for she was certain they could have been friends.
    “Aye,” agreed the dark-eyed one with whom she could never be friends. “’Tis a major port, with ships.”
    “Easy to bring in a ship without being seen, sail out again.”
    “With a priest aboard.”
    “Precisely. Yet you say the signs point north,” Ry murmured. He sat as straight in his saddle as Jamie, his calm brown eyes looking less dangerous than Jamie’s, but she’d seen him at the docks and witnessed the calm competence when he had kicked open the back door of the inn. Surely he was as lethal as Jamie, should the need for lethality arise.
    Which it would.
    “Aye,” Jamie said. “North. Where there are no ships, no beaches, and no borders for two hundred miles.” He looked at his friend, forearm over the front of his saddle, considering this as if he were a king. “Tell me, Ry, how likely does it seem they made for a remote track that points nowhere but north for a hundred miles or more?”
    Eva stifled a curt reply along the lines of Utterly without possibility, unlike the likelihood of us being seen, sitting here like ducks.
    “More likely than heading into the remote north,” Ry said, shaking his head. “I’ve no notion why they would head north in the first place.”
    Because that is where Mouldin kept his lair in days past. Eva shifted impatiently. Surely he still knew people, had contacts and connections that would allow him to conduct the negotiations he no doubt intended to host, with Father Peter as the prize.
    How much would it be worth to Jamie, this news?
    But there was nothing useful to her here, in this line of thought. She had nothing to bargain with. If she mentioned Mouldin, at best Jamie would release her, and she would never regain Father Peter. Worse, he would do something inconvenient, such as tie her to a tree.
    Worse yet, it would get much, much worse.
    Mouldin meant heirs. He could not be mentioned.
    “So you counsel port?” Jamie said to Ry.
    Eva tipped forward, into their conversation. “That would be most unwise.”
    They turned in their creaking saddles and stared. Jamie’s expression was smooth and unreadable. Distant and considering.
    “The port, this is a most unwise choice,” she repeated. “Our quarry did not go west. Or east to a little town.”
    “And how do you know that?” Behind Jamie’s shoulders, thesky reddened with sunset light. His face was filled with lines of suspicion, which made him only more beautiful, which was highly distressing.
    “I do not know,” she retorted. “I use my reason. ’Twould be madness, would it not? To go to some busy port town with an unhappy priest and display him like new shoe leathers?”
    Jamie’s gaze, at once clear and impenetrable, never left hers. “I find your assessment riveting, Eva. What I do not understand is your certainty. It makes me curious.”
    “I do not like you curious,” she said sharply. But he was not curious whatsoever, not unless curiosity and predator went together like garlic and butter. He was like an animal crouched in high grasses, stalking its prey.
    He reined his horse beside her, facing opposite, so their eyes met.
    “I do not think they went to the town,” she explained with great dignity. “And you do not either. This, I know. I can see it in your face. When your Ruggart Ry suggests the thing, your eyes narrow this little bit.” She held up her fingers, squeezing her thumb and forefinger almost to touching. “And you think, ‘This idea is not so good.’ Do not tell me otherwise. Your oh-so-good skills of tracking have held us steady to