Enchanted

by Elizabeth Lowell

  Ariane’s tongue probed repeatedly, her teeth biting gently all the while. She enjoyed the shivers of sensation that coursed through her own flesh while she explored Simon. As her mouth caressed, her fingers returned to the tiny male nipples that she had felt harden when she had first stroked the curly hair on his chest. Sucking lightly on his neck, Ariane plucked and teased his nipples.

  “Who taught you?” Simon groaned when he could take no more.

  Reluctantly Ariane lifted her head from its warm nuzzling of his neck.

  “Taught me what?” she murmured.

  “This.”

  Simon lifted Ariane’s hair aside. His teeth and tongue caressed her ear until she shivered and sank her nails heedlessly into his skin. Delicately his fingertips circled the tips of her breasts. Her nipples budded in a velvet rush that made Simon’s whole body clench.

  Ariane cried out softly and covered his hands with her own. Simon froze, expecting her to pull away. Instead she swayed subtly, pressing against his hands, caught in the sensual thrall of his touch.

  “Who taught you?” Simon repeated against her ear.

  Then his tongue thrust down again. The burst of sensation that went through Ariane made it impossible to think, much less to speak.

  “I dreamed—it was—done to me,” she whispered.

  A ripple of hunger went through Simon at the thought that Ariane might have shared his sensual dream.

  “Did it disgust you in your dream?” he whispered.

  “Dear God, no.”

  “And now?”

  Simon caught the tight velvet peaks of Ariane’s breasts and rolled them lovingly between his fingertips.

  “Does this disgust you?” he whispered.

  “Nay.”

  Ariane made a ragged sound as Simon’s tongue and teeth caressed her ear. Dimly she realized that her hands were covering his as they roamed over her breasts, flicking and squeezing and arousing until her nipples pouted, flushed with heat.

  Then he bent his head and curled his tongue around a taut pink bud. The amethyst cloth served to magnify rather than diminish the sensuality of the caress. Her head rolled back on her neck and she shivered as his mouth suckled her.

  “Are you afraid?” Simon whispered.

  “Aye. Nay. I…do not know. I feel like a bud must at the first touch of the sun. Flushed and quivering on the edge of…something.”

  Simon took a deep, steadying breath and straightened until he could see Ariane’s face. Her eyes were both shadowed and sultry, caught like her between nightmare and dream.

  “What else did you dream?” Simon whispered. “Tell me, nightingale.”

  “I cannot!” Ariane whispered.

  The heat of her blush radiated out to Simon through the thin cloth that was all she wore.

  “Then show me,” Simon said, smiling against Ariane’s ear.

  She shook her head. “It will shock you.”

  “If I faint, bring me wine.”

  The thought of being able to fell with mere words the man whose body flexed powerfully beneath her hands disarmed Ariane. She dipped up some more balm and resumed rubbing it into Simon’s body.

  When her fingers swept over his nipples, he groaned softly. She repeated the caress, thrilling to the sense of power it gave her to so affect him.

  “Tell me your dream,” Simon said huskily.

  “You tempt me, my lord.”

  “How can I? ’Tis your hand on the reins, not mine.”

  The reminder quivered through Ariane, a brightness that pushed her dark fears back a bit more.

  “Tempt me, nightingale. Share the dream that makes you blush like the dawn.”

  Delicately Simon plucked at Ariane’s nipples, which still thrust hungrily between his fingers. He felt again the heat of the blood rushing from Ariane’s breasts to her forehead. Slowly he released her nipples from sensuous captivity.

  She gave a ragged sigh and leaned her forehead against Simon’s shoulder. The tips of her breasts brushed against his chest. It both soothed her and made her restless.

  “In my dream…” Ariane whispered.

  “Yes?” he encouraged.

  “I can’t say it.”

  “Then show me.”

  “On your body?” she asked.

  “Would it be easier that way?”

  “I don’t know. Simon…”

  “Yes?”

  “Would it disgust you to be touched?”

  “By you? Never.”

  “I mean…” Ariane took a swift breath, gathered her courage, and ran her hands down Simon’s torso. “Here.”

  “Mother of God,” he said through clenched teeth.

  Ariane snatched back her hands.

  “I’m sorry,” she said unhappily. “I warned you that you would be disgusted but you didn’t listen.”

  Breath hissed back in through Simon’s teeth.

  “You misunderstand,” he said raggedly.

  “Nay, ’tis you who don’t understand!”

  Simon put his forehead against Ariane’s.

  “Again, nightingale.”

  “What?”

  “Touch me again.”

  “There?”

  “Aye.”

  “Are you certain?”

  “By all the saints, yes.”

  Hesitantly Ariane’s hands slid down to Simon’s waist, then skimmed over his abdomen to a point between his legs. Her thumbs went back up, tracing the blunt flesh that poked out above the waist of his breeches.

  “You are very hard,” she whispered.

  “How can you tell?” he asked huskily. “Your touch is light as a butterfly’s.”

  When Ariane ran her hands over Simon again, he groaned and moved urgently against her palms.

  Fear rushed through her, a harsh warning of a lesson that had been learned at great cost. A man in the throes of lust was a beast.

  “Simon?” she whispered.

  “Again, nightingale. Or do I…disgust you?”

  Ariane drew a broken breath and then another, nightmare and dream warring within her. Simon didn’t sound mindless or brutal. But neither had Geoffrey the Fair, until that final night when he had raped and ruined her in the eyes of Church and family.

  Dear God, what am I to do? Despite all common sense, despite all past pain, I yearn to become Simon’s true wife.

  And the moment I do, he will hate me as my father did. Whore. Wanton. Witch.

  “Ariane?”

  “You don’t disgust me. But I am…frightened.”

  “Of what?”

  The seething thoughts within Ariane’s mind were too complex to sort out. So she chose the most simple, potent truth.

  “I am afraid of this,” she said, running her fingers over Simon’s aroused flesh. “’Tis made to tear a woman apart.”

  “Not so. It is made to pleasure a woman.”

  “I’ve heard no woman describe it thus,” Ariane said bleakly.

  Simon would have argued if her touch hadn’t drawn his whole body upon a rack of passion so intense it was painful.

  “Smooth balm into me,” he said in a low, hoarse voice. “It will help me and it will be a way for you to learn that not all men are vicious beasts.”

  He took Ariane’s lower lip between his teeth, bit gently, and flicked his tongue over her lip. She made a small sound and trembled.

  But she leaned toward rather than away from him.

  “Touch me,” Simon whispered. “Learn me. It is your hands upon the rein, not mine. This time.”

  Even Ariane couldn’t say if it was fear or excitement that made her hands tremble as she lowered them to his body once more. After a few hesitant strokes, she pressed more firmly.

  Then she lingered, curious about the contours of Simon’s surprising masculinity. She stroked the length of him several times before returning to explore the inch of hot flesh that had pushed above the waist of his breeches.

  “So smooth,” Ariane murmured, circling Simon with curious fingertips. “I h
adn’t expected that of something so hard. Are you sensitive here?”

  “Dear Christ,” Simon hissed. “I ache.”

  Ariane froze. “I didn’t mean to wound you. Truly. I—”

  “You can heal me,” he said across her quick apology.

  “How?”

  “My breeches are too tight. Pick apart the laces.”

  For the space of several ragged breaths, Ariane looked into Simon’s smoldering eyes.

  Touch me. Learn me. It is your hands upon the rein, not mine. This time.

  With trembling fingers, Ariane did as Simon asked, loosening the laces until the length of him lay hot and hard between her palms. She stroked with gentle care.

  “Is this better?” she asked anxiously.

  Simon groaned and bit back a searing curse. Sweat broke over his whole body.

  In the firelight, his face seemed drawn by pain.

  “Do you truly hurt so much?” Ariane whispered, shaken.

  “God’s teeth,” he said hoarsely.

  “Would balm help?”

  A shudder went through Simon.

  “Yes. Oh God, yes,” he said through his teeth. “Heal me, nightingale.”

  The fragrance of balm rose from Simon’s heated flesh as Ariane caressed him within the concealing warmth of his fur-lined mantle.

  “Some day I will caress you like this,” Simon said huskily.

  “I am not shaped as you.”

  “Aye. You are softer than any petal ever made by God.”

  Ariane’s fingertips found the single, unseeing eye and explored it delicately while Simon’s passionate words sent streamers of heat through her.

  “The flower of your womanhood is a softness beyond imagining,” he whispered. “I yearn to caress that softness, taste it, bathe in the sultry fountains of your desire and bathe you in turn with my own passion.”

  Simon’s words flicked Ariane like a whip of fire, flushing her skin, making her breath shorten. Her hands slipped lower as unfamiliar sensations made her whole body tremble. Her fingertips found the taut, aching spheres that held generations yet unborn. Curiously, caressingly, Ariane explored his very different flesh.

  Simon watched her face through slitted eyes. Her expression was shuttered by a veil of midnight hair. Flames from the brazier sent more shadows than illumination over Ariane’s expression. He could not decide whether her response to the intimacy was hot or cold or merely…dutiful.

  Simon closed his eyes and stopped asking questions that had no answers. All that mattered to him was here, now, and it was on fire.

  “Your fingers are like tongues of flame,” Simon whispered, shuddering. “Licking all over me, making me burn. Sweet God, you are killing me.”

  “No,” Ariane whispered, caught by the strain in his voice. “I wanted to heal your pain, not make it worse.”

  “Then heal me.”

  “Can it be done without…” Her voice died.

  Oh God, bad enough that Geoffrey taught me to fear what other women seem to enjoy. But it is worse, far worse, that he took from me the virginity that should have been my gift to Simon.

  I cannot bear to look at Simon and see disgust for me in his eyes.

  Like my father.

  Like my priest.

  Loathing me, believing that I was wanton rather than innocent.

  How could Simon believe differently? Look at me with him, touching him, stroking him, wanting nothing more than to be closer to him and then closer still.

  He lures me rather than pins me down with his greater strength. He doesn’t hold me in a vise of male power that leaves me helpless to escape.

  “Can it be done without coupling?” Simon asked when Ariane did not speak. “Is that what you’re asking?”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  “Aye. It can be done. ’Tis less than a grain against a bushel, but ’tis one grain better than naught.”

  Simon’s words made little sense to Ariane. She understood only that there was something she could do to ease the tension raking through Simon’s hard, hot body.

  “Tell me,” Ariane urged. “Let me heal you.”

  Simon’s only answer was that of his hands fitting over hers, teaching her how to stroke and how to hold, when to tease and when to end the teasing.

  Suddenly Ariane felt the shudder that convulsed Simon, heard his ragged groan, and sensed something spilling between her fingers like silky blood. She looked down, but saw only his mantle and a wedge of darkness that was his body.

  “Simon?” Ariane asked anxiously. “Are you all right? I felt…blood.”

  Simon almost smiled despite the shocks of pleasure that went through him at each delicate probe of her fingertips over his still aroused flesh.

  “Nay, nightingale.”

  “But I did,” she insisted. “It was too thick to be anything but blood.”

  “What you felt was the children you will never know unless I taste ecstasy while our bodies are joined.”

  Ariane’s eyes widened into mysterious pools of darkness. Her breath caught as fire licked through her. She became aware of herself in an unfamiliar way—breasts both taut and heavy with sensation, a throbbing promise that was repeated in the sultry flesh between her legs.

  Slowly, gently, Ariane stroked Simon’s still swollen flesh, thinking to soothe him, for shudders came to him with almost every breath. Warmth and the scent of balm laced with something even more elemental rose from the opening of the mantle. She breathed deeply, infusing herself with the heady mixture.

  And then something that was more than a dream and less than a memory blossomed within Ariane.

  Firelight and the scent of roses. Balm smoothed over my skin, sinking into me.

  Everywhere.

  “Did you care for me in this way while I lay healing?” Ariane asked starkly.

  The accusation in her voice caught Simon on the raw. She had just given him sweet release, her hands were even now making him swollen with new need, and she was looking at him as though he were a dangerous stranger.

  Simon’s jaw clenched as he fought to still the wild race of his blood. He wasn’t successful. Ariane was too close, her hands too soft, the smell of ecstasy too fresh.

  “Only once,” Simon said in a low, rough voice.

  “When?”

  “When you were almost well. Do you remember?”

  “I…”

  Ariane’s breath caught as a streamer of memory coursed through her.

  She had been held in thrall, but not in the darkness and rage of her nightmare. The hands and mouth caressing her body had been gentle rather than harsh, the voice husky rather than drunken, the breath sweet rather than rancid with ale.

  “You touched me,” she whispered.

  “Yes.”

  “Even…”

  Her voice died, but Simon understood.

  “Yes,” he said. “Even here.”

  Simon’s hand moved between Ariane’s thighs. His palm cupped her tenderly.

  Ariane gasped and jerked back as though Simon had taken a whip to her. Even as Ariane’s mind reassured her that Simon would never brutalize her as Geoffrey had, echoes of pain and humiliation made her stiffen.

  Cursing his own lack of control and her lack of desire, Simon snatched back his hand.

  “You were less cold while you were healing,” he said curtly.

  “I wasn’t awake.”

  “Nor were you asleep.”

  “I don’t remember,” Ariane said frantically.

  “I do. When I touched you like that, you lifted toward me!”

  Eyes wide, Ariane looked at Simon. The fire transformed his hair and clipped beard into a halo of golden light. His black eyes were like night itself; clear, deep, flecked with glittering light.

  “Now do you understand?” he asked in a harsh whisper.

  Ariane shook her head so hard that her hair seethed like black flames.

  Simon whipped off the mantle, revealing to the chill air and dancing firelight everything
that had been concealed.

  “Look at yourself,” he whispered fiercely. “You are all but naked, sitting astride me.”

  Ariane shivered.

  “Think how close is the sword,” Simon said in a low, relentless voice. “Think how open and vulnerable is the sheath.”

  Ariane looked down. A ragged sound was torn from her.

  If he moves at all, he will learn that he has been deceived. Then there will be no more kindness, no more gentleness, nothing but pain.

  “No!” Ariane whispered.

  When she would have retreated, Simon’s hands clamped onto her thighs, holding her as she was.

  Open.

  “Do you fear rape?” Simon asked sardonically. “For nine long days and nights you lay vulnerable to me. Did you awaken torn asunder and crying your violation to God?”

  Ariane barely heard. All she knew was that she couldn’t move, couldn’t escape, yet she must do both.

  “Let me go!” Ariane cried, clawing futilely at Simon’s hands.

  The raw emotion in Ariane’s voice chilled Simon’s blood as nothing else could have. An icy rage at his own weakness and the coldness of his bride broke over him.

  He set Ariane aside so swiftly that she fell back onto the bedding. As he came to his feet, he whipped the mantle around his shoulders. For the space of three heartbeats he stood looking down at her with eyes darker than any nightmare she had ever known.

  “Sleep well, wife. You need not fear my unwanted touch again. Ever.”

  21

  The lord’s solar in Blackthorne Keep was spacious and luxurious. The walls were hung with draperies in shades of wine and jade green and lapis lazuli, and threads of precious metal ran through the cloth like captive sunlight.

  The draperies had been brought back from the Holy Land, as had the rugs that warmed the floor. The clean scent of herbs and spices was everywhere, for it pleased Meg’s spirit.

  It pleased Ariane as well. Even after nearly ten days spent at the keep, the rushes covering the floor continually surprised her with their scent. She took a deep breath and then another, savoring the complex interplay of fragrances.

  Her fingers danced over the strings of her lap harp as she tried to match music with a room that was masculine in its size and decoration, yet had the fragrance of a woman’s garden.