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chivalrous intensity with a jest. “I would appreciate it, though, if you’d try not to die for a while. Twenty to one odds, Sir Knight? That’s a bit extreme, even for you,” she said playfully, realizing she had succumbed to nervous chattering. But so be it. She was not used to the presence of a large, naked man. “Unless you were trying to commit suicide by Urmugoth?”
    He smiled and stood up, stretching his neck and shoulders this way and that, the lower half of him still blessedly hidden by the shadowed water. She tried not to look at the glorious sculpture of his abdomen and chest and massive arms gleaming with wetness…
    “There are worse things than dying, my lady. I sent for reinforcements, but they tarried.” He shrugged. “It had to be done. Besides, I thought if nothing else—” His words broke off. “Ah, never mind.”
    “What is it?” she asked, intrigued.
    He snorted and looked downstream to where the winding brook babbled away into the forest.
    “Well?” she prompted, unable to take her eyes off him.
    “I guess I thought that news of my death might, I don’t know, shake some in our kingdom out of their complacency.”
    “Mmm.” She smiled wistfully at him, startled not by his never-ending bravery but by his willingness to die to make a point. “The sentiments are admirable, but I fear that price is much too high, if it would even work. Unfortunately, many of our countrymen are sleeping harder than you were.”
    He sent her a sharp sideways glance, looking pleased and a bit surprised that she shared his opinion of the current situation in their country. “How long have I been here?”
    “Only since last night.”
    “Really?”
    She nodded. “We’re just up the hill from where you had the battle.”
    “Did I win?” he asked with a roguish glint in his blue eyes.
    She laughed. “Don’t you always?”
    “Well, usually,” he admitted with a boyish grin, then dove under the water and swam away.
    She couldn’t wipe the mystified expression off her face as she watched him cross the pool. When he popped out of the water several yards away, she pulled a bar of soap out of the basket. “Don’t take this personally, but here.” She tossed it to him with a teasing smile.
    He caught it. “Thanks!” He smelled the lavender-scented soap before he began rubbing it over his body.
    Wrynne stifled a small groan of pained admiration and looked away.
    “Du Mere?” he mused aloud a few seconds later as he continued washing himself. “Any relation to the Building Baron?”
    “Ah, yes. That would be my father.” She cringed slightly even as she smiled, waiting for his reaction.
    But to her surprise, Thaydor looked impressed. “You must be very proud. There’s not a town of any size in the realm that doesn’t have a guildhall, tower, aqueduct, or palace that one of your father’s companies didn’t build.”
    “Oh, yes, he’s everywhere,” she said wryly. “No one haggles harder with the stonemasons’ guild. He’s the bane of the timber merchants, too.”
    Thaydor laughed. “I respect a man who knows how to get things done. Especially one who came up from nothing and built himself a merchant empire with naught but skill and hard work.”
    “That is very kind of you,” she said, grateful for the generous words coming from one the kingdom’s most prestigious citizens.
    Many highborn people made fun of her loud, fat, coarse-mannered father. They neither knew nor cared that the Building Baron had a good heart. Only that he had the subtlety of a siege machine.
    Wrynne had been but a child when Mother had made it her mission to parlay Father’s fortune into a title through generous political donations.
    With a sigh, Wrynne shifted to a sitting position. Pulling her skirts up to her knees, she slid her bare feet into the water.
    Thaydor watched her every move.
    “Father has the energy of a bull, I’ll give him that. And the tact of one,” she added in amusement as she kicked her