The Maiden Bride (14 page)

"Will you meet with me tonight, Nicholas? After supper, after everyone is abed?"

"What, madam?" He roared like an injured lion, set her squarely down and stepped back, shaking off the dangerous scent of her, purposely conjuring images of walking barefooted across a bed of shimmering embers. "What the devil are you asking me?"

Her soft brows winged deeply, and she looked at him openmouthed, as though he'd just taken leave of his senses—not that he had any left to leave. "I thought you were interested in hearing all of my plans for the castle."

"I am. But you can't expect me to—"

"Only last night, Nicholas, you demanded that I include you in my every last thought on any subject regarding the castle. Aren't you still?"

"Interested?" What a driveling, besotted fool he was—for not keeping her at arm's length, for kissing her, for Christ's sake. For missing—whatever the hell she meant by that.

He said evenly, so that he wouldn't growl, "Yes, of course."

"Then you'll come tonight?"

"Yes."
God help me.
He felt stripped of his will, exhausted. Tested to his limits and beyond, when all he wanted was to serve her justly and then be gone as quickly as possible.

"After supper then, at my husband's office."

He caught himself before he answered. "Which is where?"

"In the tower keep, Nicholas. A solar, really, and my new bed chamber." She beamed at him, triumphant against her husband once again and nearly crowing in her pride. "I found the estate office."

"And the manor records, my lady—did you find them, too?"

Did I leave any damning evidence of myself for you to use to impeach me?

But she only harrumped at that other man in her life—the wicked-hearted one who'd died and left her all this misery.

"So far, I've found everything but the last four years. But I'm not going to give up. I'll find the other records, somewhere. And then you and I can study them before we decide on which crops to plant and where to plant them."

Christ, he'd forgotten that she'd need forecasts to grow a sturdy crop that would feed her tenants. Which fields had been marled, which had lain fallow.

"And I did wonder, Nicholas—do you read?"

He nodded at the worry in her eyes, disgusted at himself for putting it there. "And I write as well."

She sagged happily back against the ladder, her whole face brightening. "I was hoping that you could, though I am surprised." Not surprised at all, if he read her rightly, but damned suspicious, cocking a doubtful brow at him. "You were a foot soldier; how did you come by such learning?"

It had been knocked into his head at Balliol and then at Merton, when he wasn't carousing in the taverns or bedding some willing wench. "A soldier gets bored when the battling is done."

He didn't deserve her smiling approval. "You're a marvelously fine man, Nicholas."

He'd never in his life been called fine or marvelous, and wanted desperately to know why she thought so. "In what possible way do you mean, madam?" he asked as cooly as he could manage.

"Soldiers usually hie themselves off to the nearest village and find themselves a barrel of ale and a … well—" she touched the tip of her tongue to the arc of her lips, left them glistening, inviting him "—you know what I mean. So I applaud your dedication."

God, she was beautiful and blushing. And absolutely
his.
"I'm not a saint, madam."

Her eyes widened, and then she smiled, fanned at the bright spots on her cheeks, and picked up the forgotten ewer. "Neither am I, Nicholas. Neither am I."

She left him with that enigmatic call to arms. Not a saint? What the devil did she mean by that? She'd damn well
better
be a saint.

His
saint, his virginal wife. From head to toe—and every sultry place between.

Chapter 12

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S
upper seemed more like the opening day of a market faire than the simple feast in her new home that Eleanor had imagined.

Chests and barrels and furniture were piled around, and Pippa and Lisabet were drawn to them like friendly little bees to a forest of hives. Dickon took his meal in the gatehouse; Fergus and Mullock at the trestle, eating as though they had never eaten before. Hannah managed her bites between the hall and the kitchen, and Eleanor not at all.

Nicholas had snagged a loaf of rye and some cheese and then apparently disappeared to work on the armory, because she soon heard his hammer against stone.

Even through all the chaos—his chaos. Deep inside her chest, flittering around like a bird wanting the sky.

He kissed me.

But he hadn't really kissed her; it only seemed that way. Just tit for tat, that sort of thing.

Then why had his mouth been the most delicious, the most stirring thing she'd ever felt against her cheek or any part of her? Why had time stopped; why had the armory floor started spinning? And why had he lingered two heartbeats longer than she had the night before?

All of it nonsense—not to be repeated.

Addled and distracted, she finally—as he had predicted—whacked her shin with the sledgehammer.

"Oh, blast it!" The pain shot everywhere at once, splintered into her shoulder and out her toes. She stifled the pitiful howl that would bring Nicholas running and chiding, but she hobbled and hopped around the great hall, now the center of attention.

"Oh, Nellamore! Owwwww for you!"

"I'm all right, dear."

But Pippa kissed her hand and Mullock dragged over a bench for her to sit on, and Hannah brought cold rags, and Fergus a sturdy walking stick.

Eleanor burst out in an unseemly bout of laughing, hugging them all. Because though her leg burned like fire, she loved her new home and family dearly, so much that her heart seemed too big for her chest.

It all overflowed in streaming tears and more laughter—almost the hysterical kind. Especially when Mullock regaled them with his amazing skill at a hurdy-gurdy he'd found in the undercroft. When the dancing began, she forced herself to dismiss her injury.

An hour after sundown everyone was asleep, the hall peaceful and quiet save for Fergus and Mullock, who snored in antiphonal chorus.

Thoroughly exhausted and suddenly reluctant about meeting with Nicholas to study her plans for the next week, Eleanor hobbled up the stairs toward the solar, grateful for the walking stick.

Just as she hoped that she could hide her accident from Nicholas by sitting down before their meeting, she heard him on the stairs below—that solid footfall and a resonant accusation that rippled up her legs and melted the knot in her stomach.

"Are you limping?"

"Well, of course, I'm
limping." And it's your fault,
she wanted to say.
For being so distracting.

Blast the man, she resented having to turn and face his scowling, but he was already burning holes in the back of her skirts with his glaring, and pointing at her leg when she finally hobbled around to confront him.

"It's nothing."

"It's
everything
to me, madam." A breathless sentiment to throw to a woman he'd just kissed. He charged up the few steps between them two at a time, then pointed to her legs. "Show me."

Ha! As though she'd just lift her skirts for him and obey. "That isn't necessary—"

"You'll sit." A single sweeping gesture from that great paw of his had her sitting on the step. He knelt in front of her and shoved her skirts up past her knee, like an insistent bridegroom.

A bridegroom.

Oh, yes—the man was perfect. Strong and raven-haired and tossing off his orders as though he had a husbandly right to her. But that sort of daydreaming was too much for this very long day, too close to her thoughts to be borne.

"What the devil are you doing, Nicholas?" She tried to shove her chemise back down, and to shove away the fluttering butterfly in her chest that told her it was just fine that he was so interested in her legs—more than fine, that his hands were hot and imperious.

He grabbed her ankle and stretched out her
stockinged
leg. "Good Christ, madam." She'd never seen him so angry, and she tried to get away, but yanking her foot proved fruitless; it might as well have been anchored into mortar and stone. "How did you do this? And when? Why didn't you tell me?"

Her shin had become an angry lump, bulging her stocking, looking far more dramatic than it had an hour past when she'd been dancing with Pippa and Fergus, and far worse than it actually felt.

"Really, Nicholas. A bit of foolishness is all. I was only—"

"Sledging away at another of those damnable locks? I'm right, aren't I?" She would have lied, but everyone in the hall knew the truth and would tell him when he asked.

"Yes."

"Bloody hell. I told you to come find me."

"It wasn't a very big lock."

A moment later he and his expert fingers were all the way up her dress, had her garter points free, and her stocking slumped round her ankle as though he were planning to bed her there on the steps to the solar.

And that suddenly didn't seem like such a disagreeable idea. Her troublesome maidenhead gone in an instant, taken by this very strapping man. And the idea would have come from Nicholas himself, not from her—not a request by his lady or a demand for his labors, which might impinge upon his morals.

"Bloody hell, woman, I warned you to take care." He was rumbling curses under his breath, wincing as he examined the bruise as though he had been wounded himself. "You might have broken a bone."

"I didn't break anything—except the lock."

He cradled her calf in his hands—his very large, very capable hands—raised her leg, and slowly, delicately inspected the profile of her shin against the lamplight. "Look at this."

She was looking, but not at her leg. At his face and his fury and all his fineness. Another wholly inappropriate thought lodged itself like a wicked whisper inside her belly and warmed her there: that he might be planning to nibble where he was looking so intently, right there behind her knee where he glided his finger; and then trailing those marvelous lips all the way down to her ankle and back again, higher, perhaps, to that warm and quickening place which seemed to be shamelessly calling to his fingers as they moved along her calf.

Dear God. And here she was, lounging like a strumpet across the steps and his leg, with her kirtle and chemise nicked up to her bare thighs.

"You were damned lucky this time, madam."

I am still, sir.

"It's only a bruise." But still he turned her leg this way and that, as clinically distant as a battlefield surgeon. Hopefully—please, God—he was unaware that her heart was thrumming, that he'd completely unstrung her.

For she was trembling on the verge of asking him to take care of her little virginity problem.

"Let me see your hands." He took them before she could object and raised her ragged palms for her to see. "Just as I expected: blisters. Why aren't you wearing your gloves?"

"One's missing. I've never been able to keep a pair together." Now he had her boot off, and then her stocking. "Nicholas!"
Not in the stairwell,
she nearly said.

"Blisters here, too." He was frowning at her toes, tugging at each of them until she was squirming against a giggle. "And here and here, inviting poisons and fever."

"You're quite free with my limbs, steward." She tried to sit up, but that only exposed more of her thigh and heaven knew what else.

"All this because your boots don't fit you. How long have you had these?" Off came the other boot, to thunk its way down the stairs to the landing.

"Dickon found them on a deserted cobbler's bench. It's the best I can do at the moment."

"Your stockings are riddled with holes." Now her legs and feet were entirely bare, and his hands were so warm, so thorough.

"I have only that pair."

"And a great hall filled to bursting with chests of clothing and shoes."

"You're so sure of that?"

"You'll have boots and stocking in the morning, if I have to tear through the goods myself. Have you suffered any other injuries in my castle that you haven't told me about?"

His
castle, still. His arrogant claim rolled off his tongue as though it had belonged there. So, apparently these were not
her
feet, or her blisters.

"I'm perfectly capable of taking care of myself, finding my own linens and boots."

He made one of his heated, head-to-foot studies of her, then stood abruptly. "You're coming with me, madam."

"Where?" But she was already in his arms, caught up against his chest, and he was starting down the steps with her. "I'll go peaceably, Nicholas. I can walk."

"Not without your shoes."

"Must I point out that you just stole them off me?" And her stockings—with those large, fine hands of his. "Where are we going?"

"Did you ever wonder where the hot water that pours into the kitchen comes from?"

"You're taking me to the kitchen?" But he was heading the wrong way for that, toward the cellar and then into the darkness at the bottom of the stairs, into that odd, sulfurous smell that she'd often noticed along this corridor.

"Not to the kitchen, madam," he said with a rumble of dark amusement that thrilled her.

He shouldered open a door that she hadn't known existed, then bolted it again—more of his secrets. Like a quick summer fog off the river, the cold, damp air of the passage was chased away by the heated air of boiled minerals.

The very same smell as the kitchen, only stronger.

"Sister Hypathia."

"Who?"

"The herbalist at St. Catherine's. It smells like her cauldron did at summer's end: herbs and minerals. Sulfur and dragon mint."

This scent was similar, though not as greenly floral, and grew stronger, damper as Nicholas carried her deeper and downward into the undulating passage, until the walls were no longer made of castle stone, but of twisting fissures in the bedrock.

The last fissure opened onto a wide staircase and an even wider chamber, lit by three oil lamps that must burn and flicker all the time.

The devil's grotto.

"My dear sir, what have you found here?" Soaring stone-carved ribs, vaulting high up to a center point, and beneath that at the grotto's center was a large, steaming pool of water, a dozen feet across and twice that wide. It was bounded on the near side by ancient, square-hewn stones, on the far side by a low, rocky outcropping, and was fed from a fall of water that came tumbling out of the wall and then exited over a ledge at the foot of the pool into a sieve of fissures in the damp floor.

"For your well-being, madam." He stood her on her feet and shucked her of her woolen kirtle, down to her chemise, then lifted her over the side to dangle her legs. "Sit here."

But the moment she felt the heat against her flesh, felt it hiss deeply into her calves, she slid off the edge of the pool into the wondrously warm water that reached all the way to her waist.

"Oh, my, Nicholas." She cooed as her knees melted with the pleasure, then she let herself float free on her back in all that caressing water. "You found me a bit of heaven."

Aye, wife—but it makes me ache like the devil for you.