After an irritating delay, Biagio moved to the other side of the bed to help. He didn’t bother to hide his thoughts, and she quickly threw up the familiar barriers when she realized the path of his wicked reflection. He was doing it a’purpose, of course. And was highly amused by his own mischief, the cheeky devil. If she wasn’t already in such confusion, she would box his ears quickly enough.
As it was, she worked swiftly to help undress the knight. She didn’t know what was worse—Biagio’s knavery or Elspeth’s glowering disapproval. Or, she thought in the next breath as Biagio pulled away Rhys’s undertunic, the turmoil inside her.
Rhys, clad only in his linen, lay sprawled in drugged slumber on the mattress. Candlelight flickered over him, revealing taut ropes of muscle on his abdomen and chest. She tried to ignore a flash of appreciation for his masculine beauty. It was too unsettling.
When she took a step back, Biagio said softly, “If ‘tis dreams of love play you mean him to have, ‘twill be more believable if he is not still in his linen. Capiche?”
“Of course I understand, you idiot.” She flicked him an irritated glance. “And I agree. Remove them.”
Biagio wisely did not say the words she knew trembled on the tip of his tongue, but obeyed silently. Sasha took a deep breath.
“Wait outside the door, Biagio. I will do what must be done and join you swiftly.”
“Even asleep, ‘tis more than he deserves.” Biagio cast a quick, dark glance at the naked knight.
She stood still in the center of the small room as Biagio let himself out the door. What to do, what to do . . . a lifetime of avoiding this very situation left her ill-prepared. She approached the side of the bed again. Yet, perhaps this was the best way. She would never admit it to Elspeth or Biagio, of course, but if she’d found herself unable to bind the knight with any other method, she was fully prepared to do what must be done to achieve her goal. After all, she was well past the age when most maids were already wed, with squalling brats clinging to their skirts. The tiny membrane that signified the difference between maiden and matron had not gained her any great prizes that she’d seen, save the entertainment of watching men turn themselves inside out to be first to shatter it. And for what? The straining, grunting, and groaning that she’d observed beneath castle stairs, in shadowy corners, on silk-covered couches, and in street gutters held no allure for her. It looked to be a sweaty, messy business, not worth the efforts she’d seen others go to in order to perform such acts. Nay, she had never needed Elspeth’s constant reminders that she was a princess, not needed her frequent warnings of the hazards of yielding to the persuasions of a common swain.
And yet . . . and yet, when she thought of that day in the meadow, lying under sweet-scented hawthorn flowers and the spreading branches of an alder, with the blue sky overhead and the wind blowing soft, and the knight summoning the most exquisite sensations with his mouth and hands, she could understand a small bit of what induced men and women to behave as they did. A small bit.
A thick mutter brought her attention back to the knight on the bed, and she looked down at him. She was not blind to his physical virtues. Even in the dim light of candle gloom and erratic moonlight, she could see the lure of his strong, muscled body. A beautiful male animal, a man in his prime, with the hard, lean muscles of a trained knight, well accustomed to wielding heavy weapons and enduring strenuous conditions. He was a lord, a worthy champion, a man capable of achieving anything he undertook. She meant to bind him to her with wile or guile . . . or whatever it took to reclaim her legacy.
Silently, Sasha removed all her garments except for her shift and took up the candle. She placed it nearer the bed, so that the shadows would cloak her near nudity while the glow revealed her identity. There must be no mistake, no accusation that she had not kept her word. A night of passion and heat she had promised, and a night of passion and heat he would get. Or so she intended him to remember.
A quick stoop, and she retrieved a small jar from a pouch in her garments. With her other hand, she pulled her hair forward to drape her body and hide her short silk shift. Then she moved to the bed.
Ropes creaked when she perched on the edge of the mattress and leaned over him. He smelled of wine and spices. His chest rose and fell with steady, regular rhythm, and she put a hand on the slightly furred skin between his flat brown nipples. He was warm—almost hot beneath her palm. His heart beat strong and steady. His torso was nearly as dark as the skin browned by the sun, though faint lines marked the boundaries of his clothing. She moved her hand in light exploration. Small scars puckered his skin, raised and ridged beneath the grazing brush of her fingertips. Marks of his profession. Badges of courage. Or of being too slow to get out of the way.
Her fingers skimmed over the spaced ridge of his ribs to the hard bands of muscle on his belly. Dark whorls of hair arrowed downward from his navel. Curiosity overcame any lingering shreds of reluctance she might have felt about the invasion of privacy, and she let her gaze move slowly and with great interest over the knight’s attributes. A mighty warrior indeed, in the lists of love as well as combat.
But on to business, before she grew too distracted to remember the purpose of this audacious plan. She was in his bed, as she’d said she would be. And when she was ready, she would wake him just enough so that he would have vague memories of her presence. A daring plan, a bold plan.
She braced herself as she lifted her body over his. Straddling him, one knee on each side, she rested her weight gingerly on his thighs. It took a moment of brief struggle to uncork the jar of ointment; a sharp, pungent odor filled the close air as the cork came free. She wrinkled her nose. A novel method, stopping up the necks of bottles and jars with the bark of a Mediterranean qurq tree, and very effective. Arabs had been using stoppers for years, though the custom was slow to reach the West.
She clenched the cork between her teeth and dipped out a liberal portion of ointment. With the tips of her fingers, she rubbed it onto Rhys’s skin, smoothing it into his chest with gentle, circular motions. The ointment of crushed eucalyptus leaves, mint, and goose fat spread easily. Her palms tingled as she smoothed it into his skin. Proof of her presence. If fortune was with her, the ointment would spread its warmth into him and penetrate his deeply drugged haze enough to leave him with lingering memories of heated embraces.
He moved restlessly beneath her hands. His long legs and arms twisted so that she was almost unseated. It was like riding an untamed stallion, except that horses listened to her. Rhys was lost in a world of deep slumber and oblivious to her soothing words. Finally, he quieted, and she realized that she’d slid from his thighs up to his groin. Wearing only her shift, there was no barrier between his pressing arousal and the juncture of her thighs. It was a riveting sensation.
Frozen, she stared down at his face. Her teeth clenched tightly on the cork still in her mouth. His eyes were closed, his lips slightly parted, a pulse surging in the dip of his throat. He was asleep. Or at least, part of him was. The part of him that wasn’t pushed insistently against her, moist and hot and hard, nudging at the entrance of her body with scalding determination. She moved, and it rubbed against her, a searing friction that sent exquisite shudders of pleasure through her like lightning.
She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move. She hovered over him, knees pressing into the thin mattress, thighs stretched wide over his body, caught in an agony of suspense. Any motion was likely to bring her into abrupt contact with him again, drag her into a quivering admission of his effect on her. It didn’t bear thinking about to wonder what would happen if he was awake. This was bad enough. Arousing sensations tingled from their contact, erotic heat spreading between her thighs as his male member scraped over tender parts.
He made a noise low in his throat. His hips moved, thrusting upward, grazing across her with arrant sensuality. She shuddered weakly. He moved again, this time with blind purpose, pu
shing so hard and certain the dull, clamoring throb between her thighs altered to a sharp ache of pain. Her hands flung out to stop him, and the jar sailed from her fingers, clattering to the floor. The cork popped from her mouth, her teeth clamping down on the tip of her tongue so hard that she couldn’t stop a wailing cry of pain.
The sound—or combination of sounds—brought his eyes open. She stared down in mute panic. The stinging pain of her tongue was forgotten as she saw the flare of candle glow in gray eyes, his smoky focus fixed on her face, and a slow smile of satisfaction curving his mouth.
“Chérie . . .”
Low, guttural, sleepy, but definitely awake. She was in terrible trouble.
Not enough poppies, not enough potion in the wine . . . Elspeth never could get the proper amounts. Why had she trusted to fortune? If she’d done it herself, he’d still be in that half-dream world between slumber and awareness, and she wouldn’t be poised atop him waiting for disaster.
But there was no time to worry about that now, not when he was reaching for her, his movements languorous and confident. She moved at last, but she was too slow and he was too fast, deceptively swift, treacherously bold, his fingers hard around her wrist, his other hand tangling in the drape of her hair between them.
Think, think, think . . .
Shaky: “Beau sire . . . again so soon?”
A husky laugh. The fingers in her hair twisted, wound it around his fist, brought her inexorably closer, drew her down so that she lay nearly atop him, her arms flung out to the sides to brace herself against the mattress. Her face was close to his now, close enough to count each long eyelash, close enough to see the faint sun lines at the corners of his eyes and the faded white scar that stitched his cheek. Close enough to feel the lift of his chest that grazed against her breasts with each breath he took. She shook inside.
He was solid muscle and determination, heat and danger and quivering temptation, and she suddenly knew beyond a doubt that she was not ready for this. It was more than the physical contact. It was all that went with it: the searing reaction she hadn’t expected or been able to control, the rapid swing from euphoria to desolation. Euphoria had come with the hope that he was the man of the prophecy, desolation with the sinking despair that he was no more than Elspeth insisted—a knight with little on his mind but war and wenching.
“Chérie,” he said again, soft, husky, an endearment that drifted between them on the breath of a sigh. A casual term, carelessly used by men, yet with this man, in this room, at this time, it sounded like so much more than she knew it was. And then his mouth was on hers, gentle and tasting of wine, his tongue urging her lips apart. She splayed her hands against his chest, helpless to resist, yielding to the kiss, the touch of his tongue against her poor bruised tongue an erotic play. He dragged his tongue over the outline of her lips, a flickering stroke, then skimmed the curve of her throat when her head tilted back to escape him.
The throb was back, that dangerous pulse between her thighs that was as exhilarating as it was bewildering. Then—shocking—his head bent lower; his lips found her breast through the thin silk. Heated and damp, the strong tug of his mouth shot a spear of flame through her to fuse with the aching throb between her thighs. Her hands were on the bed, curling into the rough covering spread over the mattress. Her back arched. Everything whirled around her in a heated haze. Coiling sensations made her writhe and moan, and a sense of urgency arose, as if there was something attainable just out of her reach, just beyond her grasp, if only she knew what it was and how to get it. . . .
She cried out softly, and there was a thump on the door and a muttered question. Biagio. He was in the dark hallway . . . waiting.
“Beau sire . . . it’s late . . . I must go . . .” She tried to pull away, but he held her, tangling the loose silk of her shift in one hand, fingers still gripping her hair in the other. His eyes were narrowed, iron gray and barely focused, fixed on her face with dreamy intensity.
Spinning thought fragments, one urgency replaced by another, and she was twisting free with a strength born of desperation, leaving him holding her silk shift in one hand. She threw herself from the bed, stumbled, caught herself, and looked up. He blinked at her. Frowning, his eyes glazed and muted with poppy glow, he blinked again, this time more slowly, and his lashes drifted down. His head slowly lowered to the mattress, and he sighed deeply.
She stood naked and trembling, poised for flight. He was asleep. Claimed by the drug again. She moved to the bed, a quick faltering step to retrieve her shift. He held it tightly in his fist. Another thump on the door sounded, this time louder and harder.
“Bella . . .”
“I’m coming.” Abandoning her shift, she snatched up her outer garments and shrugged into them, tucked her pretty embroidered slippers with the tiny bells under one arm, and flew to the door. Grateful it was so dark in the hallway, she slipped from the room and closed the door behind her.
“Is he still asleep?” Biagio asked, voice soft and curiously angry, his lean frame just a tense shadow against darker shadows.
She nodded without looking at him. “Yea, and he’ll have a painful headache when he wakes.”
“Good.”
Noisy laughter drifted up from the common room downstairs. She smiled. “Come. We have a lot to do yet.”
IT WAS MUCH TOO warm. The cloying fragrance of spice surrounded him. His head ached. Rhys lifted a hand to his eyes and was assaulted by a drift of silk and scent. Jerking his eyes open, he found a scarlet length of silk clutched tightly in his fist. A tiny prick of gray light filtered through an open window to shimmer in the sheer material. He frowned.
There were no silk walls, no cushions with gold tassels, no brass flagons or cups . . . no woman. He turned his hand, staring at the limp silk shift in his fist. Cursing, he sat up with a jerk, then swore at the stab of pain that action brought.
His eyes adjusted to the dim gloom, and he recognized his surroundings: the tavern room. It reeked of old food and lingering spice. He’d last been in a silken tent redolent with incense. He remembered being sprawled in a very comfortable chair gazing down at the maid, remembered drinking wine—so much wine he did not remember walking back to the inn. Jésu, it had been a long time since he’d been fool enough to do something like that.
But there were other memories—pleasant ones, if his head wouldn’t ache so damnably bad and he could focus on them. Dark silky hair, soft skin, high breasts—he cursed softly.
Where was she? The blurred memory of her atop him—her soft thighs on each side of his body, the taste of her in his mouth—was enough to vault him from the rough bed in search of her.
That unwise movement made his head swim, and he sank back down with a groan to rest his head in his hands. The length of silk fell free, drifting over his bare thighs. He was naked, but had only hazy memories of being undressed. A dull pounding made his head ache even more. It was several moments before he perceived that the sound came from the closed door.
Carefully lifting his head, he squinted at the origin of the noise and snarled a command to enter. He wasn’t too surprised to see a red head thrust through the opening, quickly followed by the rest of Brian.
“My lord Rhys . . . are you well?”
Rhys gave him a sour glance. Brian looked disheveled but clear-eyed. “Nay. I am beset by a thick tongue and a thicker head. Pour me wine.”
Brian blinked. “Wine. Do you think it wise for you to—”
A rough Welsh oath had the desired effect, and Brian immediately crossed to the small table that held the jug of wine and loaf of stale bread. Liquid splashed, then Brian appeared in front of him, thrusting out a battered pewter cup.
Rhys downed half in a single swallow, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He peered up at Brian, squinting against the brightening light coming through the unshuttered window. “You Irish must h
ave iron guts.”
“Aye, lord.” Brian glanced uneasily about the room. Silence fell, and he shifted from one booted foot to another, oblivious to the rumpled state of his clothes and red hair sticking up atop his head like broom straws. His gaze moved to the silk draping Rhys’s thighs. A brow rose. “I’m relieved to find you still here.”
“Where else would I be? Ah, wait. I know. Dancing in elf land, or wherever it is that faerie queens take their willing victims.” The ache in his head had begun to dull a bit, lessened no doubt by the hair of the dog that bit him. Rhys took another gulp of wine.
“You jest about a matter you should view more seriously,” Brian muttered in a wounded tone. “If she is no elf queen, explain why she wears a robe of purple.”
Rhys eyed him darkly. “Jésu, Brian, but you say the most—”
“Purple is the color of royalty, you know that. Only those of royal blood are allowed to wear it, yet the . . . maid . . . flaunted it before she disappeared into the mist.”
He frowned. That was true enough, but she was definitely not a maid who seemed to care about conventions. And she was discreet enough to wear the color only in wealds, it seemed, for he’d not noted it adorning her outer garments in the village. He looked hard at Brian.
“There is a difference in being reckless and being magic. The magic I’ve seen from her is of a more worldly nature.”
Brian said nothing but stared down at his feet. Then he bent to retrieve a small object from the floor. He held it up, squinting at it. “And this? What worldly use was this, my lord?”
Turning his head slowly so as not to unbalance himself, Rhys peered at the tiny jar Brian held. Made of thick blue glass carved with strange markings, the jar caught and held the light in muted glimmers.
Brian shook the jar, and the room suddenly filled with a pungent odor. Dropping it as if burned, he made the sign of the cross over his chest and backed toward the window, chanting, “Acre arcre arnem nona aernem—”
The Magic Page 9
