The Maiden Bride (27 page)

"What are you going to do, Nicholas?"

"I plan to kiss you."

"Do you mean there?" He couldn't.

"Oh, yes, my love." He slipped his hands beneath her hips, raised them, and then, mother of all sweet mercies, he kissed her. Right there, lightly but with great attention. "And here." He parted her with gentle fingers and found the center of her with his tongue and then his ravenous mouth against her, and she was sure that the sunlight had come streaming into their midnight chamber, or the brilliant end of the world.

She was soaring upward toward some glorious heaven, leaving the earth, leaving Nicholas behind. And that suddenly felt all wrong. There were too many lies between them.

She'd intended to lead him down a tortuous path of near misses, to torment him for his deceit and to confuse him, to make him twist in the wind while she held the tether. But she couldn't do that now.

"I can't do this, Nicholas." She shoved him away, and flung herself off the bed and through the curtains to the outer room, shaking to her bones, wondering how she'd let it get this far.

Nicholas followed, starved for her, terrified that he'd frightened her, unsure what to do next. "Eleanor, what?"

"I'm sorry." He reached for her, but she scurried to the other side of the table, put her hands up, and turned from him. "I can't go on. I thought I could, but I'm not very good at this."

She was quaking, her skin goose-fleshed, and he draped a blanket over her shoulders. "You've been marvelous, love. I am stunned and aching for you. And though we've come far, you're still a virgin."

"Yes, Nicholas. But we can't do this now." She dragged in a hiccupping sob, harrowing tears welling in her eyes and then falling down her chest, making gleaming trails that he wanted to follow with his mouth and kiss away. "Because I can't deceive you any longer. I thought I could trick you into this."

He sighed, knowing that he wouldn't have missed this for anything—his wedding night with his remarkable wife. "My eyes are wide-open, Eleanor."

"No, they're not, Nicholas. They can't be." She pointed toward the bailey. "Do you know what Sir Richard told me today, just when he was leaving?"

A chill swept across his shoulders: the end of the world, the beginning of his forever without her. "More about your husband?"

Her eyes glittered wetly. "Oh, Nicholas, that he had a son."

Nicholas swallowed and battled his own tears, that everlasting grief. "Did he?"

"Yes. Don't you see what that means?
We
had a son. His and mine."

He felt her accusation bubbling inside his chest, sending his thoughts into circles, the past, the present all tangled and tied together. "I'm sorry for your loss, Eleanor."
For ours.

"I would have loved him, Nicholas—I love him now. I would have held him in his pain. I would have been a comfort beside his father who adored him, who would have laid down his life for him. But don't you see? I was never given the chance to mother him, never given a chance to love my husband as I should, as I want to."

He turned from her, feeling the light slip away, the familiar darkness at the edge of his vision. His chest filled up with sorrow, that fierce aching that never went away. "He wasn't that kind of man."

"Oh, but he
was
that kind of man, Nicholas. He was good and honorable and devoted."

"You have the wrong man."

"And the most remarkable thing about him was that he hadn't always been that way. He changed, Nicholas. He wasn't the man I married—not the William Bayard who came to live at Faulkhurst, who selflessly cared for his tenants, who found his bastard son and cherished him, who carved little bears for him out of scraps of pine. And who came to love a wife who overran his sanctuary."

"Eleanor, stop."

"No." The room grew quiet, just his heartbeat and hers. "You are my husband. William Nicholas Bayard."

His throat closed up, and he went to the window to find more air. "I can't be that man to you."

He could feel her heat at his back. "Why can't you?"

"You don't know me." He closed off his heart.
All those battlefields, all those bloody churchyards.

"You don't know yourself at all, Nicholas."

"Don't you see that it's too late?"

"For what?"

"Madam my soul is black and unchangeable—God's least favorite."

"No." She came around him with her clean scent, her goodness, put her warm hand in the middle of his chest. "You're His best kind of work, Nicholas, His proudest. Look at what you've done with your life in such a short time."

"You're wrong—I learned that the hard way. I know what it's like to feel God's coolness on your cheek, the breath of His laughter when you think that He's forgiven you all your sins. But you see, they pile up and begin to spill over into other parts of your life, into the whole countryside."

Eleanor's heart was breaking into tiny pieces for this wonderful man, whose broad shoulders carried the weight of the world. "The plague wasn't God's judgment on you."

"No. But it was His means to condemn me. I did everything He asked of me, gladly and with an honest heart, because I believed that I'd found redemption. After all, the world was falling apart, yet I had Liam. We had each other, the best of friends, father to son, my little boy and I. And then he was gone. Just gone."

He was looking out at the dark sea, his eyes full of tears that he was too stubborn to blink away.

"I'm sorry, Nicholas," she said through a sob.

"I've done my best here. I'll finish the chapel roof, and see that your grain barrels are full before I leave." He grabbed his breeches off the floor and looked as though he would just walk out.

"You'll do nothing of the sort, Nicholas." She caught his arm and stood in his path. "You're needed here, where you've always been."

"So that I can watch the crops fail and the tenants die and my wife taken from me because I love her with all of my heart? I won't have it."

"Liam wasn't taken from you out of retribution."

"You don't understand. We had six months together—six months to fill my heart to bursting with a love that I'd never known existed. I was terrified, Eleanor, and I was astonished, and I was—" His voice broke, and he raked his fingers through his hair, his hands shaking.

"Nicholas, you were a father."

"Oh, God, Eleanor, I couldn't save him." A keening sound tore from his chest. He dropped onto the chair and put his head in his hands. "I can't stop it from hurting."

Eleanor didn't know what to say, only knelt at his feet and feathered her fingers through his hair, sitting there for long minutes while he sobbed quietly.

"I don't want you to leave, Nicholas. I need you. Pippa needs you. Little Toddy thinks the world of you."

"You
don't know what you're risking." He stood abruptly, still startlingly naked, her caged lion, so vital, so very much alive.

"Only my love for you—and you have it all."

"Christ, Eleanor!" He came at her, as fierce as she'd ever seen him, and cradled the back of her head roughly so that all she could see was the terrible sorrow in his eyes. "Do you know how much I love you? And how helpless that makes me feel? I knew the ways of this God. I understood the proposition the first moment you and I met. You couldn't be plain, or timid, or dull. No, you were fashioned for me to love until the end of my days. And I'm terrified." He held her to him, brushed his lips across her ear and her lashes, as though he couldn't get enough of her.

"You've got it all wrong, Nicholas. I'm not plain or timid or dull, because I was sent here to save you—and you're an awfully stubborn man when it comes to opportunities. We have so much to do. A chapel to build, a life to celebrate, a whole village, rolling fields of barley and pease to tend." Eleanor thought she heard his heart shift as she took his face in her hands. "How many chances does one man get, my love?"

He looked down, his tender heart reluctant to the end. "I've had many in my life."

"Aye, Nicholas—but you've never had
me."

Nicholas felt his chest fill again, and he fought it, struggled against the coming pain and the emptiness—until he realized that the feeling was radiant and spiraling upward. His wife was mad and wonderful and warm, and if there were bright, persistent angels, she must be his—his redemption come to earth, as undeniable as the coming of spring.

"Will you marry me, Eleanor?" He picked her up into his arms, and her blanket fell away.

"Oh, my love, as often as you ask me."

His heart soaring, he carried his wife to their marriage bed. There he settled her back against the pillows and knelt in the joining of her legs.

"Do you know, wife, that this bed was given to us as a wedding present?"

She smiled and lifted her arm. "Mmmmm. Time we put it to good use, husband."

He groaned from deep inside, made love to her mouth, and to her throat, took his time with the backs of her knees and her fingers. Her eyes were smoky and daring, and while he plied his mouth to her breast, imagining the children they would have, she slid her stealthy fingers down his stomach until she reached the root of him.

"Woman, you—" But he hadn't been prepared for her boldness, for her fingers wrapped around him.

"Please, Nicholas. Inspecting the goods."

"Please, Eleanor." He ground his teeth and rode the sensations, the fluting of her fingers, until he was whispering for her to stop. "I'm too fond of this."

"Now, Nicholas. Please." She tilted her hips to meet him, and he met that place she'd offered him so boldly. He was at the end of his tether, could last no longer.

"I don't want to hurt you, my love." She was tight and tender and writhing against him.

"Just come to me, husband. Join with me." She arched her back and pressed her heels to his backside—and took him just inside.

"Oh, my love." Without another breath, Nicholas propelled himself mindlessly, heard her shocked sigh, and then her crooning.

"Married, Nicholas."

"Forever."

Her husband held himself above her, smiling broadly, his eyes misted, their corners crinkled, and she felt a quiet pulsing rhythm begin to build within her, matched within him.

"Are you all right?"

"Oh, my, Nicholas. I've never in my life been righter." She loved the hot pleasure that licked between them, like the currents off the sea. She couldn't get enough of him—held him and encouraged him and strained toward him, with him, feeling ripe and wanted, her skin made of sunlight.

"You
are magnificent, wife.
My
wife. I will say that a thousand times a day." His voice was jubilant as he roared out his joy, rocking her in his slow, pounding rhythm toward a place she'd never been before.

"Come with me, sweet." Nicholas's voice was a kiss, sweet and tucked against her ear.

"Anywhere, Nicholas." This wondrous feeling of being part of Nicholas, which turned her limbs light and languid, was a maddening, never-quite-far-enough euphoria—then a surge of pure, white-hot pleasure began where she was joined to him.

"Nicholas, I— Oh, my—I—" The pleasure grew and spread and became wave after cresting wave of bliss, and had her gasping, calling out his name until she was weeping.

Nicholas came up on his hands, her amazing husband, her miracle, thrusting himself into her while she pulled him deeper, nearer, until he finally thickened inside her and went still, his muscles flexed—

"I love you, Eleanor!" And then he was pouring his seed into her, their child, the rest of their lives. The thought sent her over another cloud, through another rainbow. She drifted from there, calling out to Nicholas.

And he was waiting there with his lopsided smile, his eyes damp, making her feel so well loved.

"Well, my dear wife, what shall we say to Edward?"

She nuzzled his chin and settled into his shoulder, marveling that they fit together so perfectly, in their hearts and in their marriage bed.

"I'll tell him that I found my husband in my castle, and that I'm going to keep him."

He rolled atop her, holding his weight on his elbows, sheltering them both.
"Our
castle, my love."

"Oh, Nicholas, our home—forevermore."

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