Knights (16 page)

When he parted her and took her into his mouth, she sobbed with joy and urged him closer with her free hand. The rising tension, the exaltation, the promise of violent, all-encompassing satisfaction, caused her to rock against him, as though riding his tongue. Dane alternately teased and consumed her, and steadied her with his hands, still suckling, when the tumult began.

Gloriana was flung, as if by a catapult, to a place where she could see the backs of the stars, and Dane gave her no chance to retreat from the experience. When it was over, at last, she fell forward over his shoulder, boneless and only half conscious, and he carried her to the bed and laid her gently down.

She raised her arms to him, for his need of release was plain even to her innocent eyes, but Kenbrook shook his head.

“No, Gloriana,” he said. “Not tonight.”

Perhaps not ever
. The words lay unspoken between them.

Gloriana was just beginning to breathe normally. She was flushed from head to foot and glistening with perspiration, and her heart still raced like a deer pursued over uncertain ground by wolves. Without speaking, she reached out, caught hold of his hand, and brought it to rest on her belly.

With a groanlike sound, barely audible, Kenbrook was again on his knees. His hand moved downward, to cup the place he had just mastered so thoroughly, and Gloriana tensed with renewed desire. Having known the splendor once, she wanted it again.

Kenbrook knew that, of course, without asking, and plunged one of his fingers deep inside her.

Gloriana raised both hands to her head, like a woman in the throes of madness, and moaned.

Dane bent over her and kissed her mouth, her breasts, her belly, all the while stroking her internally in a way that at once soothed and excited her. A delicious interval of growing fever had passed when he found a special, secret place inside her, one he had apparently been searching for.

Gloriana cried out and hurled her hips high off the bed. Once again, the stars seemed to fall away behind her, as if she had worn them for a robe that was now shed, fragment by glittering fragment. Having driven her outside the boundaries of her own mind, Kenbrook patiently guided her back, stroking her thighs, whispering comforting words, soothing her in her wondrous delirium.

By the time Gloriana could assemble her thoughts into coherent patterns again, her husband had raised himself from the floor, gone round to extinguish all but one lamp, and found his way back to the bed. He’d stubbed his toe and cursed several times in the process, but did not speak a word when he lay down.

“Dane?”

There was a great shifting of weight while he settled himself for slumber.
“Hmm?”
he asked.

“What about you?” she asked.

His exclamation, though she didn’t make out the
actual term, was another oath. “Go to sleep, Gloriana,” he said.

She indulged in a long, contented sigh. “Oh, I shall sleep, without question. But I am still concerned about you.”

“Don’t be.” Dane did not sound at all friendly, given the intimacy of the acts he had performed upon her eager body. “I’ve been a soldier fully half my life, and I have undergone far greater hardships than any this day has wrought.”

Gloriana gazed upward, into the darkness. The chamber’s ceiling was not visible. “I am sorry, Dane,” she murmured. “I thought only of my own desires. It did not occur to me that you would suffer.”

Kenbrook swore again and rolled over, setting the rope springs to swaying again. “There are tunes,” he said, “when honor is a wretched burden. Nonetheless, where you are concerned, Lady Gloriana, it must be served. Now, if you have even the faintest shadow of mercy in your soul, cease tormenting me with reminders of what might have been and
go to sleep!”

Except for the things she had learned that very night. Gloriana was still innocent. Instinct told her, however, that she could seduce Dane simply by lying close to him, perhaps touching and kissing him.

Integrity prevented her from employing such tactics. Without her express permission, Dane would not have shown her the pleasure she had known. For obvious reasons, reasons that bruised Gloriana’s heart, Kenbrook did not want to consummate their marriage, and she must respect his wishes. His body was his own to give or withhold, as Gloriana’s was hers alone.

“Good night, then,” she said. “And thank you.”

He let out a loud, somewhat angry moan.

“What did I say that was wrong?” Gloriana asked, somewhat wounded.

Kenbrook did not answer, but hurled himself from the bed and began stumbling about in the gloom, evidently searching for his clothing, muttering as he stomped and bumped about.

Gloriana suppressed a strange urge to laugh and put it down to hysteria. There was, after all, nothing funny about their situation. They were prisoners, and there was no guessing how long they might be shut up together.

“What are you doing?” she asked, when she could trust herself to speak. Tears seemed more imminent now than laughter, but she would dive from one of the tower windows before she wept for him again.

Dane did not reply, but she heard a stopper being drawn from a ewer and guessed that he had found the wine. She sighed, settled in deep, and closed her eyes.

Sometime in the wee hours, Kenbrook returned to the bed and flung himself down, fully clothed, to sleep as soundly as a dead man.

Gloriana sat upright in bed the following morning, covers pulled to her chin, watching sunlight pouring in from another set of windows high overhead, filling the tower like some golden liquid. The chamber was not the grim, forbidding place she had thought, but more like a well-furnished solar. Extensive efforts had been made to make the room habitable.

There were braziers to provide heat and plenty of coals to feed them. Ample supplies of food and water had been laid in, and Gareth—or perhaps it had been Elaina—had even thought to send along a trunkful of kirtles and tunics and chemises. Fresh rushes covered
the floor, and there were no cobwebs within reach of a broom.

Kenbrook sprawled beside Gloriana, on his stomach, his back rising and falling with the deep, even meter of sleep. She bent over and peered at the wound on the back of his head, which looked fairly good, all things considered, then rose and crept over to peer behind an intricately painted screen.

As she had hoped, the screen concealed a chamber pot. She was dressed and washing her hands and face at the basin, near the bed, when Kenbrook stirred at last and then hoisted himself onto one elbow.

“It wasn’t a nightmare after all,” he said in a tone of immense disappointment.

“No,” Gloriana answered, blotting her face dry with a bit of undyed linen provided for the purpose. She was embarrassed, remembering the way she’d carried on the night before while Kenbrook dallied with her and then denied himself rather than make a promise, with his body, that he did not want to keep. “Plainly,” she said, with what dignity she could manage, “our truce is ended.”

Kenbrook sat up with exaggerated effort, one hand pressed to the back of his head. “Do not try my patience, woman,” he warned. “I am not a man who is at his best at this hour of the morning.”

Bells chimed, pure and silvery, from the other side of the lake. “We’re missing mass,” Gloriana observed, sticking to plain subjects, lest she say something incendiary.

“That,” Kenbrook said, heaving himself to his feet at long last, “is a great pity.” He moved unsteadily to the food stores on the other side of the room and examined the crocks and baskets until he found a loaf of bread and a bit of cheese. “Let us meditate upon
the trials of Joseph, robbed of his many-colored coat and flung into a pit by his wretched brothers.”

Gloriana rolled her eyes. She was trying to be civil, but if Kenbrook was going to go about comparing himself to people from Holy Writ, she would not be able to hold her tongue for long.

Kenbrook went, with his bread and cheese, to the northern window, which overlooked the lake and presented an imposing view of Hadleigh Castle. “Damn you, Gareth,” he bellowed, at the top of his lungs, his voice echoing. “Damn you to hell!”

“A fine thing to go shouting over the countryside,” Gloriana said huffily, helping herself to a ration of food and sitting down at the table, like a civilized person. “It’s no use hoping someone will hear you, you know, and come to the rescue. Everyone believes Kenbrook Hall is haunted, and you’ll be taken for a spirit.” She could not resist a little sting. “An evil one, at that.”

Dane turned from the window, bearing a dark expression. One would not have believed he was the same man who had loved her so patiently, so passionately, only a few hours before. “They’ll have to come back to bring us food and water, unless they mean us to perish of starvation and thirst,” he said. “When they do, we’ll overpower them. God’s blood, when I get my hands on Gareth, he’ll wish he’d died in infancy!”

Gloriana ate with precise motions designed to keep her temper in check. “You are overly optimistic, sir,” she said, in tones equally measured. “As strong as you may fancy yourself to be, you surely cannot hope to prevail against half a dozen of Gareth’s best men.”

Kenbrook scraped back a chair, turned it round, and sat astraddle it. His eyes, as he glared at Gloriana,
were narrowed and full of blue fire, while his hair only looked more wonderful for being in disarray. “You liked me better last night, methinks,” he said, “Called my name, over and over, you did, and if Gareth’s men were posted in the hall, they’re sure to think their purpose has already been served.”

“Stop,” Gloriana said, and the word was half a plea, half a command.

He took a bite of cheese, chewed ponderously, and finally swallowed. “It was that very chair, wasn’t it,” he went on, in a relentless undertone, “where you stood with one foot up, while I—”

“Yes!” Gloriana cried, red from her knees to the roots of her hair, “Yes, damn you, it was this chair! Why do you torture me?”

Kenbrook’s magnificent face softened. “An apt question,” he conceded. “Perhaps I should put you through your paces again, good wife, thus rendering you mild and sweet-spirited. At least, until you catch your breath and can harangue me once more.”

Gloriana lowered her eyes, mortified that a part of her wanted to submit to him, even then. “I confess,” she said shakily, “that I have never known such feelings as you made in me. I would remind you, however, that my body is my temple and my own to command. Husband or none, you have no rights to it.”

Dane was silent until she looked up and met his gaze. He had speared a piece of bread on the point of his knife, and although he put the morsel into his mouth in the most ordinary way, something about the gesture made Gloriana squirm on her chair.

“I suppose it is inevitable,” he said, “that we shall mate. Gareth has judged me well—I cannot endure many nights like the one just past, without breaking.”

“You would force me?”

He cut off another chunk of bread and once again ate from the knife. “I would not be required to force you, Gloriana,” he said with pointed indulgence, after a lengthy silence designed, surely, to nettle her. “You are a hot-blooded little thing, and I could make you want me without laying a hand to you.”

Gloriana, who feared he was right, was infuriated by his arrogant presumption all the same. “You are not so charming, sir, as you seem to think.”

Kenbrook merely smiled at this. “Last night was only an introduction to the pleasures of the flesh, you know,” he said, and there was a dark sensuality in the languor with which he spoke that entranced Gloriana, almost like a wizard’s spell.

She gave herself an inward shake, but she still felt as though her muscles were turning to warm honey. She sat very straight in her chair and looked through Kenbrook as though he were transparent, willing herself not to listen, not to think, not to feel.

Kenbrook began to describe, in slow, vivid words, how he would prepare her, how he would tease her, how he would bring her to the edge of satisfaction and then deny her, beginning the process all over again. He told her what she would say to him in her abandon and what he would say to her, and how he meant to arrange her for his convenience and her delight.

Gloriana shifted on her chair.

Dane went on painting verbal pictures, impossibly erotic scenarios that caused her blood to simmer in her veins and her woman-place to ache. He talked and talked, never raising his voice, never hurrying, until Gloriana was fit to swoon. Her skin felt slick, all over, and she wanted him a hundred, nay a thousand, times more than she had the night before.

She had no way of knowing how much time had passed when Kenbrook said, in that same quiet, untroubled voice, “Come here, Gloriana.”

Gloriana stood, fully aware of what she was doing, and moved to Dane’s side.

Without speaking again or rising, he used his knife to sever the laces that held the bodice of her gown closed, and the garment fell back over her shoulders. With one tug of Kenbrook’s hand, it fell to the floor in a soft pool of fabric, leaving her bare before him except for her thin linen chemise.

He set the knife aside to trace the shadows of her nipples with the tip of one finger, and the expression on his face was not that of a conqueror, but of a reverent pilgrim who has at last reached his place of worship.

“What of this, Gloriana?” he asked, in a throaty voice, bunching the gauzy cloth of her undergarment in his fist, “What would you have me do?”

“Tear it away,” she whispered.

Ever the gentleman, Kenbrook complied.

H
ad Kenbrook not already been sitting, he knew he would have been felled, as if by a blow from a broadsword, at the sight of Gloriana standing before him, naked, in all her purity and perfection. In that moment, he saw the whole of his future, as if some seer had conjured it before his eyes, complete in every detail.

He whispered something insensible, out of his awe, and at last reached down to the floor and snatched up the chemise he had sundered, at her request, with his hands. He shoved it at her and said in a hoarse voice, “Cover yourself.”