For Love And Honor (41 page)

“I can be coarse when the occasion is right.
For me such an occasion will always be private.” He caught her face
between his hands. “Shall I kiss you, Rohaise? Do you want me
to?”

“Only if you mean it, my lord.” She stood
very still, with her hands resting on his chest, waiting, until
Piers bent his head and put his mouth on hers. It was a gentle
kiss, but one full of promise. When he drew away she sighed,
reluctant to have it end.

“If you would like,” he said softly, “I
believe I could find another unused mistletoe berry.”

“That won’t be necessary.” She let her hands
slide upward along his chest and around his neck. He pulled her
closer, enfolding her in his warmth and strength. This time when
their mouths met hers was slightly open. He took immediate
advantage, touching her lips with his tongue, then moving into her
mouth. Rohaise, who had never been kissed so deeply or so
thoroughly before, felt as if she was sinking into a vat of warm,
sweet honey. All of her limbs felt boneless. The least movement was
an effort, while deep in the core of her, delicious sensations
disturbed and thrilled her very soul. Piers put his hands on her
hips, holding her against him. She did not mind; she was not afraid
of him, and she wanted more of what he was doing to her.

“Come with me,” he whispered. “Come
upstairs.”

“I’m not sure how I’ll get there,” she
whispered back. “Perhaps I’ll fly. I feel as if I could.”

“
I will
help you.” After another brief kiss he put an arm around her waist
to guide her, and side by side they ascended the stairs,
quickly,
before
anyone
could see or question them. Rohaise did not think her feet actually
touched a single step.

They went to her room, where with a pounding
heart she watched Piers bolt the door. He must have heard her catch
her breath at the motion that eliminated any possibility that she
would change her mind and refuse him. He came to her at once and
lifted her chin, holding her so she could not avert her eyes from
his burning gaze.

“I promise I will do nothing to hurt you,” he
said.

“
I know.
I’m not afr
aid, not with you.”

He helped her to remove her clothes and take
down her straight brown hair. When she was naked he stepped back to
look at her, a smile softening his sharp, narrow features.

“You are lovely,” he whispered.

She did not tell him how Radulf had always
complained about her thinness and said her breasts were too small.
Piers had no criticism about her body. Instead, he kissed her
breasts and shoulders, caressed her, and murmured that her skin was
soft as fine silk. He eased her down onto the bed, and there he
touched her breasts again. He touched her in other places, too, in
ways that made her tremble and ache to hold him inside her.

When he removed his own clothes and knelt
next to her she opened her arms and took him to her with a
tenderness and need she had never experienced before. She closed
her eyes when she felt him pushing into her so she could relish the
sensation with no distractions. She could feel him so far inside
her that she knew she was going to shatter and disintegrate from a
penetration that was hard and gentle at the same time.

“Look at me, Rohaise.” She obeyed his tender
command, to find him gazing at her as if she were something
miraculous. All her apprehensions gone, she found she could smile
back at him. The smile ended when he began to withdraw from her.
She gave way to panic. Radulf had done this to her innumerable
times, had too often left her aching and miserable. She clutched at
Piers’s back, digging in her nails, daring to cry out what she was
feeling. “Don’t go. Please don’t leave me.”

But this was not Radulf holding her, and
Piers knew exactly what she needed.

“I leave only to return,” he murmured, and
surged into her again. He repeated the movement several times,
withdrawing almost completely and then filling her, while she grew
steadily more heated and her moans increased in intensity with each
stroke.

“Don’t tease me,” she begged, still not
entirely sure she could trust him not to leave her desolate.

“I tease myself, too,” he whispered, “and
it’s time to stop.” With that he plunged deeper still, displaying a
new and sudden urgency, the action turning her moan into a cry of
pleasure. She began to understand that this was what she had
desired all her life, this tender affection, this hot, continuing
motion of a man inside her, this building certainty that something
wonderful was going to happen, something only Piers could create,
and she comprehended at last that she could trust him to stay with
her until her need was fulfilled.

“Rohaise,” he whispered. “Lovely Rohaise.”
The words ended in a groan, and Piers went rigid, straining against
her. She knew what was happening to him; what she did not
understand was her own reaction. She could not breathe; her heart
seemed to stop beating and a strange, half-strangled cry tore from
her throat. An incredible heat swept over her. An instant later
Rohaise discovered that, just as she had always imagined, lying
with a man who cared about her was indeed the most beautiful thing
in the world.

The midday feast was well underway before
Piers and Rohaise entered the
great hall and walked hand-in-hand toward the high table. They
stepped onto the dais, Piers’s happy grin and Rohaise’s shy smile
and shining eyes providing fair warning to all seated there. With
an elaborate flourish Piers pulled out a chair so Rohaise could
sit. By this time everyone in the hall was looking at
them.

“My lords and ladies,” Piers said, “I have
the honor to inform you that Lady Rohaise has consented to be my
wife.”

“No, you can’t.” Against the noisy background
of applause and cheers and a few raucous whistles erupting at
Piers’s announcement, Will’s angry cry could only be heard by those
nearest him. “Rohaise, you cannot do this. Grandfather has not been
dead for even a month.”

“Will, I am sorry if our plans upset you,”
Rohaise told him, “but you know as well as I do that widows with
large inheritances are frequently married off very quickly.”

“You don’t have an inheritance,” Will
objected.

“
No, I
have not,
thanks to Radulf. He married
me for the lands I brought him, and he saw to it
that those lands became entirely his once our marriage was
consummated. Save for my small widow’s portion, I am a pauper since
Radulf s death.”

“
You will
always have a home w
ith me. I’d
never put you out,” Will said. “You don’t have to remarry
in order to survive.”

“You are kind, Will, and I thank you for
caring what happens to me. I want to marry Piers, and since I have
no great holdings for men to quarrel about, I am free to do as I
please.”

“We plan to wait until Uncle Ambrose
returns,” Piers added. “I want him to bless our marriage.”

“
It’s too
soon,” Will insisted. “You scarcely know each other. We have no
real proof that these men are great lords in Sicily as they
claim
to be.”

“Ambrose has known Alain and me since we were
boys,” Piers said. “He has sworn to the veracity of our story. Do
you doubt a priest, Will?”

“I question this unseemly haste. I cannot
approve of the marriage.” Nor would Will be moved by Piers’s calm
assurance that he would treat Rohaise well. He was similarly
unaffected by Rohaise’s insistence that she had known and liked
Piers before Will was born, or that her marriage to Radulf had
brought her no happiness and, considering the terrible things he
had done, she could not truly mourn his death.

“You are too old to wed,” Will told her in a
desperate attempt to end the argument in his favor. He succeeded in
stopping the argument, but not in the way he expected. Rohaise
burst into laughter, and Piers’s shoulders began to shake.

“
I can
tell you honestly,” Rohaise said between bouts of giggles, “that at
this moment I feel no more than sixteen, and as happy as a young
girl in love for the first time. Which, in truth, is what I am.”
She took P
iers’s hand and smiled into his eyes with such
adoration that Will pushed back
his chair and stood up.

“This is disgusting,” he said, and left the
dais, striding out of the hall with his face set and grim.

“
Now,
that is much like his father,” Alain r
e
marked. “If you remember, Piers, Crispin could be
stubborn, too.”

“He will not stop us,” Piers answered,
putting a protective arm around Rohaise.

“
It
pleases me greatly to see you happy again,
old
Sir Piers,” Alain said. Turning
to Joanna, he asked, “When Will returns to the hall why don’t we
tell him our news, too, and have done at once with the decisions
that will upset him?”

“Certainly not,” Joanna cried. “Why would you
suggest such a thing? Let him learn to accept Piers’s and Rohaise’s
betrothal before we distress him with yet more bad news.”

“
Bad
news?” Alain was tired of being patient, weary of keeping his love
for this woman a secret from her son. At her words his temper
flared into real anger. “As baron, your son will have a fair amount
of bad news, I assure you. The revelation that his mother intends
to marry a man who has loved her for the better part of his life
does not fall into the category of
bad news.
Castle walls undermined by
sappers during a siege, villages burned
and sacked, crops
destroyed in warfare,
loyal
servants hanged by invaders, a wife dead in childbirth, a beloved
child slaughtered – those are bad news. I say we tell him now and
be done with it. When he does learn the truth he won’t thank you
for keeping i
t from him.”

“
Don’t
you dare give me orders!” Joanna was on her feet. “I am no longer
the biddable girl you once knew. I have had enough of obedience to
last me
two
lifetimes. I will decide what, and when, and how, to tell
my son. /, not you or an
y
other man!” Before Alain could reply to her outburst she
left the table, hurrying out of the hall. Alain went after her,
their hasty passage causing little stir among the revelers, who
were at that moment entranced by a juggler’s attempts to toss into
th
e air and catch four flaming torches with
out setting himself or his audience on
fire.

“I do hope she’s not going after Will,”
Rohaise remarked. “Samira followed him as soon as he left, and I
really think she can bring him to a reasonable state of mind before
his mother could.”

“Do you think we will ever quarrel like
that?” Piers seated himself and pushed a plate of sliced venison in
sauce toward Rohaise.

“Possibly,” she said, “if we had a son and
did something to shock him.”

“A son. What a lovely thought.” Piers picked
up a piece of the venison on the point of his knife, offering it to
Rohaise. She bit into it, her teeth slicing it neatly in half.
Piers popped the remainder into his own mouth, then bent forward to
kiss the juices off her lips.

*
* * * *

“
Well, at
least you didn’t run after your precious son, to coddle him.” Alain
shoved at the door of Joanna’s room, shutting it with a resounding
slam
.

“Go away. I don’t want to see you right
now.”

“Joanna, you are being unreasonable. Will is
a strong young man and is maturing rapidly. He can accept the truth
when he’s told it. Consider the way he has dealt with the events at
Banningford.”

“
I
won
’t listen to this.” Joanna began pacing
back and forth, but she didn’t have much
space in which to move. Her room at Haughston was half the size of
her chamber at Banningford. She reached the bed, turned, and came
back toward him.

“I think it’s you who cannot accept what has
happened.” Fists on hips, eyes narrowed, Alain watched her
distracted movements. “It must be difficult to find yourself
completely free after so many years.”

“It is not difficult at all. It’s wonderful.
Do you know what it was like during those years, Alain?”

She paused, taking quick, panting breaths,
staring at him with eyes that did not see him at all, but focused
instead on a room miles away at Banningford, a room she could not
leave except briefly and by her father’s permission, a world
circumscribed by four walls and two narrow windows. “Everything was
decided for me: when I could walk upon the battlements and for how
long, what I would say to my son and how long he might visit me.
Every detail of my life was decided by someone else, someone who
ought to have cared about me, should have loved me, and did not.
Have you wondered how I survived with my wits intact? I’ll tell
you, Alain. I made a vow to myself. I swore that if I was ever
released, I would never again allow anyone else to make decisions
for me. No, not even you.”

“All the same, Will must be told,” Alain
insisted. “If you wait much longer, you will have to begin lying to
him again, and that will only make him more angry when he does
learn the truth. It might be easier for him if another man tells
him. Tomorrow morning I can lead him into a discussion of Piers’s
intentions toward Rohaise, and while we talk I can tell him we have
two marriages to plan, for I intend to wed you as soon as
possible.”

“No! You can’t do that. I won’t let you hurt
William Crispin when he’s suffering so much pain over what his
grandfather did. You haven’t been listening to me, Alain. You are
trying to do to me just what Radulf did. You are trying to control
me. This is my decision to make. Mine! Why can’t you understand?”
Her eyes were wild, and she was close to tears.