Kissed by Shadows (11 page)

Lionel stepped out from behind the curtain where he had remained after the king had revealed himself. He bowed to Their Majesties and moved swiftly after Pippa.

What had happened to her since they'd walked together earlier? A few short hours ago? She appeared to be inhabiting some half world. Her eyes were blank, her expression carved in stone. It had seemed that she was completely unaware of her surroundings.

She had reached the end of the outer chamber when he spoke her name.

Slowly Pippa stopped and turned towards him.

Ten

“I was coming to find you” Pippa said, startling herself with the admission. She had not formed the intention consciously but now that she saw him she knew quite simply that there was no one else she could turn to.

Lionel strode towards her. “What's the matter, Pippa? Something's happened. What is it?” His voice was urgent.

Pippa felt the last of her defenses crumbling under the piercing warmth of his eyes, the insistent concern in his voice. She gazed back at him, for the moment unable to find the right words. “Where can we go?” she asked finally.

Lionel glanced around. There were servants in the presence chamber now, readying it for the public audience later that morning. They were casting curious looks at himself and Pippa and he couldn't blame them. Pippa's distress and tension were almost palpable.

“Outside.” He took her hand in a firm warm clasp. “Whatever it is it will be better aired in the open.”

“Yes,” Pippa said. Sunlight, air, open spaces. She needed all of those to throw light on this dreadful dark bewilderment that was draining her of all sense of herself, of who and what she was . . . of the person she thought she
had
been.

They left the presence chamber. The corridor beyond was thronged with people chatting in excited knots, hurrying importantly about their business, or simply lounging against the walls observing the scene.

Lionel moved Pippa's hand to his arm so that their progress had a more natural appearance. He felt her hand quiver on his sleeve but she walked quickly beside him, looking neither to right nor left, hastening towards the doors at the end of the corridor.

Outside Lionel directed their steps to a little-frequented path that circled the kitchen gardens at the rear of the palace.

“Now, tell me what has happened.”

Pippa took her hand from his arm. She crossed her arms over her breast and looked up at the sky for a minute. “Will you hold me?”

He took her in his arms. A gentle almost tentative hold but she clung to him fiercely, turning her face up to him. “Kiss me.”

He kissed her, again gently. He had no idea what was behind this but he could no more have refused her than he could have cut off his own hand. He had wanted to hold her, to kiss her. Wanted it for weeks now.

He ran his hands over the narrow back, feeling the sharp shoulder blades, the knobs of her spine beneath the casing of her gown. She was deepening the kiss, pressing his mouth open with her tongue, delving within. There was something desperate about her, about her need for him, and finally, reluctantly, Lionel drew back, his hands clasping her narrow waist.

He smiled down at her ruefully. “Pippa, I don't mean to sound ungrateful for such invitations, but I would like to know why they've been issued.”

She put her steepled fingers to her tingling mouth, and the words came out in a flood of anguish. “I am five and twenty and I do not know how I am to live the rest of my life like
this . . . like an empty . . . a discarded shell. He has condemned me to live without love, without touching . . . to live with a man who is repulsed by the very sight of me. How can I spend the rest of my life like that?”

She took a deep shuddering breath as if she had forgotten how to breathe, and the words poured forth anew. “He deemed me worthless . . . worthy only of being used as a cloak to cover his real desires. How could he take everything that is
me,
my needs, my
self,
and cast it all aside in favor of his own? He has used me as a shield, hidden behind our marriage. And I'm to endure that. Live until one of us dies, forever untouched, unloved. Forever without . . . without being held or kissed in the ways of passion because he must indulge his own.

“Why? Why did he choose me?” Now she was angry, her voice tight with tears she would not shed.

“Why did he choose me for such a monstrous deception? Why did he think I was worth so little?” she repeated, punching the words at Lionel as if he were to blame, her eyes bright with tears of fury and a hurt that ran so deep it stabbed him to the heart.

For a dreadful moment his mind would not work. It seemed impossible that her husband had told her the truth about himself. And yet what else could it be? Cold terror swamped his belly. She could not possibly . . . not
possibly
. . . know what had been done to her.

He took her hands, said urgently, “I don't understand, Pippa. What is it that you mean?” His clear gray gaze held hers until some of the wildness left her countenance.

“I mean that I came upon my husband in bed with another man,” she articulated slowly and emphatically. “That is what I mean. I mean that my marriage is a sham, a deceit, so that my husband can safely follow his own inclinations. And I'm carrying
his
child to make it even more convincing.” Her voice caught.

“Now he will never have any reason to come to my bed, to do with me what so clearly revolts him. That is what I mean.” She fell silent, her breathing rapid and shallow, her color ebbing and flowing, the bright sheen of tears still glazing her eyes.

Lionel exhaled slowly. Beneath her outrage and her bewilderment he could hear the fear . . . fear that she was diminished in some essential fashion by her husband's hideous deception. He understood that fear, he had felt it once himself when he had been forced to accept his own powerlessness. It was a crippling terror that struck at the very soul and spirit of humanity.

A terror that still filled him sometimes, stirred by the scent of green wood smoldering, or the crackle of flames.

Lionel accepted that he shared responsibility for much that had been done to this woman, but he could not hold himself responsible for her marriage or for Stuart Nielson's betrayal of his wife, and he could help her now with that terror that he understood so well. He could restore her knowledge of herself, give her back her humanity, the dignity of self-worth.

He cupped her cheek in the palm of one hand. He bent and kissed her eyes, the tip of her nose, the corners of her mouth. She didn't move, her eyes remained open, but a shiver ran through her taut frame.

He moved his mouth to beneath her ear, to the side of her neck, to the tender skin beneath her chin. Her head fell back, exposing the white column of her throat, the now wildly jumping pulse; the swell of her uplifted breasts rose above the low, square neckline of her gown.

Desire rushed him, took his breath away, obscured reason and rational thought. He needed no excuse. This was no mission of healing and renewal. He wanted this woman. From the very first moment he had been drawn to her. He had pretended to deny it, to deny the magnet that attracted them each to the other, but he would do so no longer.

“I want you,” he said softly, his breath whispering over her skin. “I want to hold you, love you, possess you utterly, every inch of your skin, every fiber of your being. I would touch you in ways that will make your body sing, bury my tongue in your most secret places, drink deep of your sweetness, drown my senses in your fragrance.”

He kissed her mouth even as he whispered his passion and his longing. Pippa pressed into him, as if she could lose herself in the boundaries of the body that held her. She could not, would not, think. She tasted his tongue, the salt of his skin, put her arms tight around him to encompass him with her body as she was held in his.

His words, rustling still in the hot air around them, brought a rushing warmth in her belly, a tingling across her skin, a tremor in the taut muscles of her thighs. When he lifted her in his arms she curled sideways, her arms around his neck, her mouth pressed to his. Her eyes were still wide open as if she could not bear to lose a single thread of sensation.

He carried her. Pippa could never remember anyone carrying her since childhood and the idea amused her, breaking for a moment the trance of desire as it brought a little bubble of a giggle to her lips even as she kept her mouth on his.

They were in a shady place now, fragrant with the scent of cut grass. Pippa had no interest in their surroundings. Lionel knelt with her, laid her down on a thick sweet bed of grass.

She stirred, murmured, as he unfastened her bodice. She gave him her breasts, holding them for his caressing mouth, her nipples hard, prickling, sending a jolt deep in her loins as if there were some line connecting the two parts of her body.

He licked the little pool of sweat from the hollow of her throat, licked away the dampness that glistened between her breasts. His hands moved beneath her skirts, sliding up her thighs.

She lay back on the bed of new-cut grass, her eyes still on his rapt countenance. His fingers moved on her flesh, unfurling the tight complex folds of her sex. Touching, stroking, opening. Pippa stirred, a soft murmur of delight spilling from her lips. She had not known this was possible.

Lionel smiled at her, knowing what she was feeling, knowing that it was new for her. He kissed her again, his cupped palm holding her sex, warm and strong. She felt her own dampness and a sensation that was almost painful in its intensity. She bit his lower lip and tasted blood.

He knelt up as she lay awash in her own pleasure. He loosened his hose, pushed aside her skirts with sudden roughness. His hands cupped her bottom as he lifted her hips and slid into her wet and welcoming body as easily as a hand into a kid glove.

And now it was a different sensation. Pippa, her hazel eyes fixed on his as they hung over her, held her breath as she absorbed the newness of this. She had coupled with Stuart many times, but this was something quite different. Her whole being seemed to have a part in it. Every tiny piece of her body was intimately involved in this loving.

And the delight was different from a minute ago. Now Lionel's pleasure was a part of her own. She gloried in the feel of him inside her, the strong vibrant throbs of his penis against the sheath that held him. She tried to curl her legs around him, to hold him more tightly within her, but the tangled mass of her clothes got in the way, snaring her feet, trapping her knees.

“Damnable clothes!” she gasped. “This should not be done with clothes.”

He smiled lazily down at her. “Not always,” he agreed. “But sometimes it adds another dimension.”

He drew back a little and she felt him leaving her. A little breath of disappointment escaped her. Then he was back, slowly, so very slowly, and she lifted her hips, the cleft of her body smacking hard against his belly; her eyes finally snapped shut and she was aware only of her own body, of this amazing, astounding delight that made her curl her toes, tighten every inch of her legs, her belly, did strange and wonderful things to her ears, and made her scalp tight. Then it let go and she was soft and unformed as melted candlewax lying on her bed of new-cut grass.

Pippa lay with her eyes closed. She wanted to sleep, to roll onto her side and sleep, her body curled over the wonderful thing that had happened to it, a wonderful thing that was slowly slipping away from her.

Lionel knelt up, laced his hose, gazing down at the still figure, her skirts rucked up around her. There was something endearing about the thinness of her ankles, her calves and thighs. He thought she was asleep. Her sandy eyelashes were crescents against the pale freckled countenance that retained the glow of lovemaking. Her headdress was awry, the black velvet and emeralds glowing against the grass beneath her. Her beringed fingers lay hapless beside her still form.

He rearranged the tangle of skirts and petticoats and as he did so her eyes opened. “I think I fell asleep.”

“I think you did,” he agreed, leaning over to brush a straying lock of cinnamon hair away from her eyes. “Are you ready to get up?”

Pippa sat up. She glanced around and saw that they were under some kind of shelter. No sides, just a tin roof, and she was lying on a mountain of grass cuttings.

“Is this a compost heap?”

“Not yet,” Lionel said with a chuckle. “Simply the makings of one.”

Pippa straightened her hood and the emerald-studded frontlet. She observed, “I have never been made love to on a compost heap before, but then again I now realize that I have never been made love to before.” Her smile was quizzical as she held up her hands.

He took them and pulled her to her feet. Her observation required no response except the private pleasure it gave him.

“I must look quite disarrayed,” Pippa said, brushing grass off her skirt. “I have grass in my hair, don't I?”

“Yes . . . perhaps if you take off the hood . . . ?”

“Without a mirror I could never put the pins back again,” she said. “More importantly, my hose is twisted, and that, I should tell you, sir, is very uncomfortable.” Without blinking, she hauled up the layers of skirts and petticoats and straightened her white silk hose, twisting and turning so that he glimpsed the length of thigh, the curve of a buttock.

His body stirred anew.

Pippa settled her skirts around her again. She glanced at him, suddenly unsure of herself again as an unpleasant thought assailed her. Had he pitied her? She had poured out her soul. Had pity led him to succor her in that way?