The Robin Hood Trilogy

by Marsha Canham

  Ariel stared at the delicate filigreed ring and noticed where his own skinned thumb was once again bare. Her gaze rose slowly to his but she could not see him clearly for the sudden film of bright, hot tears.

  “The way you acted,” she whispered raggedly. “The things you said …”

  “I have acted like a fool,” he agreed tersely. “And I have said things I never should have said. What is more, I am probably going to do it again, now, when I confess the hunger—the love—I feel for you is neither brotherly nor based on friendship. It is like an open, raw wound I cannot seem to heal. It only grows wider and deeper each time I touch you, or hold you, or … dream of holding you even closer.”

  Ariel’s lips quivered apart. “Me?” she gasped. “You love … me?”

  His fingers threaded into her hair again, tenderly this time, more of a caress than a punishment. “If this ache I feel every time I look at you is love … then aye, I must love you. If this need I have to hold you and kiss you until you have not the will or the strength to refuse me what I would take from you … if this is love, then aye, my lady, I am floundering in it … and have been since the moment I saw you tilting at shadows in the armoury at Amboise.”

  Ariel thought the walls and rooftops took a sudden swift dip downward and she had to curl her hands into the thickness of his surcoat to keep from staggering to her knees.

  “The other night … at the inn …?”

  “I should never have gone near you,” he said huskily. “Never. It only made me want you more.”

  “But … you pushed me away.”

  Eduard shook his head slowly. “I did not push you away; I pushed myself away.”

  Ariel knew she should say something. She knew she should. But the quivering in her lips had spilled downward, had spread and become a trembling, throbbing heat that shivered into her belly and between her thighs, rendering her speechless. And because she could not speak, her eyes implored him for the truth, eyes that were wide and dark and so completely stripped of pride, they left him no choice but to answer.

  He made a sound deep in his throat—a groan or a curse, she could not be certain—and his lips crushed down over hers, his response delivered so fiercely, so possessively, the shock of it left her breathless, drowning in her own heat.

  Rain beat on their shoulders and splattered on the stones. The sea and sky rumbled like shifting boulders, offering a final warning, but it went unheeded. Eduard’s good and noble intentions were lost in the consummation of taste, touch, and desperately clinging mouths.

  His body crowded hers against the rampart and their mouths slanted this way and that, their tongues lashing together, their breaths raging hot and fast. Their heartbeats clamored a challenge to the storm unleashing itself around them and the trembling needs in their bodies rivalled the tumultuous, recoiling shocks that echoed off the stone walls.

  “Eduard,” she gasped. “Eduard …”

  Rainwater bathed her face, made her hair cling to her temples and throat in dark, wet streaks. Eduard tore his mouth away and searched the shadows like a wild man, seeking a sheltered corner, an archway, a protected lee …

  “Here,” she demanded. “Now. With God watching, we shall defy the oaths made in His name. I am not afraid, Eduard. If you love me, I am not afraid.”

  Eduard blinked the rain and wind out of his eyes. He lifted his hands away from her long enough to loosen the buckles at his shoulders and to shrug his belts and baldric aside along with the heavily quilted surcoat. Within seconds the rain began to soak the linen of his shirt, plastering it to his skin, molding it to the hard slabs of muscle across his chest and shoulders. Seconds more and he might as well have been naked for all that the mysteries of his body were revealed in bold, rising magnificence.

  He made short work of removing Ariel’s cloak and loosening the green velvet tunic. His hands caressed her through the gaping layer of velvet before his fingers curled around bunches of fabric and tore the two halves asunder. Ariel arched her head back, her neck and throat glistening under the sheeting rain, her hands cradling the heat of his mouth to her bared flesh as he buried his face between her breasts. He reached for the hem of her skirt and pulled the crush of velvet up over her hips, his fingers greedy and searching as he sent them delving into the moist, deep heat of her.

  A jolt of lightning traced across the sky as Ariel opened herself to the pressure of his stroking fingers. She was wettest there, where the rain had yet to find her, and hot … so hot he groaned and dragged her down onto the spread folds of her cloak, his hands moving swiftly, feverishly to free his own pounding flesh from the confines of his clothes.

  With a mindlessness fueled by passion and long-denied hunger, he was between her thighs, he was pushing himself forward, he was thrusting into the lush folds of her body and stretching up inside, furrowing into her with a sense of urgency echoed by her long, shivering cry of fulfillment.

  Ariel’s mindless need forgave him his haste. Indeed, she revelled in the obvious agony of his own blinding demands, for there was but a moment of resistance, gone in the passing of a heartbeat, leaving only the more astounding awareness of being filled, impaled, glutted with hard male flesh. She groaned and arched her hips instinctively, straining to feel even more of him inside her. He obliged by thrusting again … and again … by plunging his hands beneath her bottom and lifting her until she learned how to lift herself, how to twine her legs around his waist and lock them there so that she could move with him, move against him, move for him.

  Lightning bathed their bodies in a blue-white lustre, the rain causing their exposed flesh to gleam like marble. The sound of the wind and the sea drowned out the groans, muffled the ragged gasps of ecstasy that sent Ariel’s hands clawing into the rapid rise and fall of his hips. Something burst within her. Something brilliant and beautiful, something bright and fiery hot that sucked the breath from her lungs and set her body moving in a blur beneath him.

  Eduard threw his head back and gave one last mighty thrust into the convulsing softness. His eyes squeezed shut and his lips drew back over the slash of his teeth, but there was no withholding, no controlling the passion that erupted within him. He plunged himself into her, poured himself into her, trembling, quaking in the grips of a pulsating white heat that left him with nothing in reserve, not even his pride.

  Ariel shivered.

  It was only once and only the tiniest of gestures, but Eduard noticed and was quick to crouch before the fire and add another log to the iron crib. His hair was still wet, smooth and inky, pushed back from his brow by an impatient hand. As she watched, a sparkling bead of water gathered at the tip of a curl and was shaken free with the movement of his arm, hissing when it splashed on the hot stones.

  He had just finished helping Ariel towel the excess moisture from her own hair and it was spread around her shoulders, little better than a wild froth of curls for all the vigorous rubbing. He had insisted she strip out of the remnants of her wet clothes and he had bundled her into a warm, dry blanket before seating her in front of the fire. He had not, as yet, spared a thought to his own comfort. His shirt still clung in wet patches to his shoulders; his hose were stained dark from the soaking. He had retrieved his surcoat and her cloak from the rooftop and both garments were hung over a chair, steaming and dripping into the silence.

  Ariel studied his broad back, wondering what was going through his mind. He had not spoken more than a word or two since carrying her down out of the rain and she knew she was partly if not wholly to blame for his closed expression. She had caused him to break an oath of honour—no trifling matter to a knight at the best of times. This, however, must surely have been one of the worst, what with the shock of discovering Princess Eleanor’s blindness already playing havoc with his emotions.

  Ariel was not entirely guiltless herself, now that the heat of passion had cooled somewhat. She had behaved like a wild woman, clawing and spitting one minute, tearing at his clothes and keening like a hoyden the next. So much
for nobility and breeding. So much for ever thinking she could hold herself aloof, unaffected by something so coarse and debasing as the physical act of coupling.

  The experience had left her feeling anything but aloof and unaffected. She felt warm and slippery inside, acutely aware of a new tenderness between her thighs that throbbed and ached as if he was still there, strong and vital. Her skin tingled and her body hummed with a shameful restlessness. In spite of the rain, in spite of their haste and surroundings … in spite of everything, their joining had been a thing of immeasurable joy and beauty. Nothing quite so trivial as the word coupling could ever describe it, for far more than just their physical bodies had been joined. It was as if he had reached inside and touched her soul.

  The new log had caught fire and Eduard ran out of excuses to poke and prod and rearrange the bed of hot coals. There was nothing else to be gained—or lost—by continuing to avoid the haunting green sparkle of her eyes, and he turned to face her, not quite knowing what he would see … or what he wanted to see.

  She was beautiful: that was his first thought. Lushly, erotically beautiful with the flush of newfound awareness glowing soft and pink in her cheeks. He had only caught a glimpse of slender white limbs and a shivering cool body when she rid herself of her sodden clothing, but what he remembered caused his throat to close and his eyes to slip down to the edge of the blanket where it had begun to droop over her shoulder.

  The enormity of what he had done kept his jaw tensed and his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. He had ravished the intended bride of a prince of Gwynedd. He had ravished the niece of William the Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, the most feared and respected knight in all of England, Normandy, and Wales. To a lesser degree, but of no less importance, he had ravished the sister of Lord Henry de Glare, a stalwart young lion in his own right who would no doubt take grave offence to FitzRandwulf’s lack of control.

  Silence stretched between them for another awkward moment before Eduard sighed and looked down at his hands.

  “What we did … what I did—” he said quietly, “was an unconscionable breach of trust, my lady, and I take full blame for it.”

  “Full blame is not yours to take, my lord,” she replied softly, “for I do not recall fighting you overmuch. Challenging you, aye … but not fighting you. Thus we shall have to share the blame in equal parts.”

  Eduard was adamant. “I took advantage.”

  “I was a willing partner.”

  “You were innocent.”

  “I may have been a virgin, but I was hardly innocent.”

  “My fault again,” he said with a frown. “For you still would have been innocent had I managed to keep my hands off you in St. Malo.”

  “In body, perhaps. Not in thought.” She waited until the silver-gray eyes rose to hers before she added to her admission. “Had my thoughts been actions, I would have lost my innocence in the armoury at Amboise.”

  “To a brute and a lecher, and a”—he paused and smiled faintly—“a great gawping ape?”

  “You were the first man who looked at me as if I was a woman and not just the means to an alliance with the Marshal of England.”

  “Had I known you were the marshal’s niece, I would not have looked at you at all,” he said dryly.

  “See then, what we would have missed.”

  Eduard’s mouth turned grim and she could almost see him withdrawing into himself again, closeting his emotions against any more displays of weakness.

  “You act as if we have committed some terrible crime,” she mused.

  “In the eyes of the king … and God … it will undoubtedly be regarded as such.”

  Ariel turned her gaze to the fire. “For the king’s laws, I care nothing. As for God … He had ample opportunity to drown us on the rooftop if He was truly angered by what we were doing.”

  “You feel no regret? No sense we have betrayed those who trusted us?”

  She looked at him and her fists clenched around the folds of the blanket. “I trusted my heart, and it does not feel betrayed. Unless, of course, you did not mean it when you said you loved me.”

  A tremor passed through Eduard’s body, but it was not caused by the chill of wet clothes. It was a stab of fear that slashed through him—the fear of a child who has suffered the darkest, blackest of nightmares and survived only because he has been able to put all hopes of love and being loved well behind the armoured plates surrounding his heart. He recognized some of that same fear in Ariel’s eyes as she watched him and waited for his answer … an answer that would either destroy them both or bring them out into the light.

  “I meant what I said,” he whispered tautly. “I do love you.”

  She seemed to wilt a moment, though there was not a flicker or shiver of visible motion anywhere in her body. “In that case, my lord, I have only one pressing regret.”

  Eduard held his breath. “Yes?”

  “My only regret,” she said, moistening her lips with the tip of her tongue, “is that when I was so insistent with the words here and now … I had no idea the roof would be so … so unyielding.”

  Eduard continued to stare at her as if he expected impalement at any moment, and he was as slow to follow Ariel’s hand down as he was to follow the hem of the blanket up over the hip she laid bare before him. The skin was chafed an angry red where it had come in contact with the coarse pebbling on the roof. In places the scratches were deep enough to have brought blood to the surface.

  The swift, instinctive bracing of Eduard’s defenses still required a final, long look into her eyes before it drained from his body on a sudden rush of breath. The rush became a halting laugh, and the laugh a deep, comfortable rumble of helpless surrender that turned Ariel’s complexion an even deeper shade of pink.

  “A rather unchivalrous response, my lord,” she grumbled, “Especially since you show no such ill effects yourself.”

  Piqued, she started to push the blanket down, to cover herself again, when Eduard’s hand reached out and caught her around the wrist. While the words of a protest were forming on her lips, he leaned forward and bowed his dark head over her thigh, his mouth bestowing a warm, gentle rain of kisses over the scraped flesh.

  “For this, I do take full blame,” he murmured, nudging the blanket higher, extending the path of his caresses to cover more than just the blemished area. “I would beg your forgiveness and ask, in my most humble mien, what form of penance might be acceptable?”

  “What you are doing now will suit quite nicely,” she said on a stilted breath.

  He lifted his head a moment and his eyes narrowed. His hands skimmed up beneath the layer of wool and circled her waist, drawing her forward, almost to the edge of the chair.

  It was so sudden—to be cocooned in a blanket one minute and in the next, naked and gaping down in shock and surprise at the head and hands determinedly easing her limbs apart. And when his mouth began to trace a sensual path over the top of her thigh, it was all Ariel could do to grip the sides of the x-chair and keep from tumbling off in a dead faint.

  “What … are you doing?” she gasped.

  “Proving how innocent your thoughts really were compared to mine.”

  “Oh … Jesu …”

  His mouth explored the silky flesh of her inner thighs, coming just close enough to the fiery delta of curls to feel her body stiffen in apprehension. He kissed the rounded softness of her belly and let his tongue play havoc with the indent of her navel; he kissed her breasts and enticed her hands to abandon their grip on the chair, to show him, by means of twining her fingers around the wet locks of his hair, where she wanted him to kiss her, where she wanted his mouth to roam next.

  Each rolling, fluttering stroke of his tongue drew a soft hiss of pleasure; each wicked pull of his lips tautened her skin and sent needles of heat slivering through her body so that she could not have denied him anything, did not deny him anything even when his mouth took absolute possession of the glistening, pearly folds of her womanhood. Her b
ack arched and her hair rippled in coppery flames. Her mouth gaped open in shock, in stunned surprise, as the first of many sweet, shimmering implosions responded to the sinful intimacy. She stared down at the top of his head, at the gleaming waves of hair she clutched so tightly, and she whispered his name, she gasped his name, she shuddered his name free on the writhing, curling spirals of heat that wracked her body on each knowing thrust of his tongue.

  The brightest peak was yet to crest within her when she was lifted off the chair and carried to the wide, raised bed. Smaller peaks, breathless shivers, were racing through her limbs as she felt herself sinking back into the soft fur coverings. With shaking hands she tore at Eduard’s shirt. She peeled it up his back and, with his help, tugged it up over his shoulders, baring the incredible expanse of virile male flesh that was hers to explore. She did so eagerly, restlessly, skimming her hands over the sculpted muscles, running her fingers through the tangles of soft, thick hair that covered his chest. Not surprisingly, she had lost a good deal of her shyness somewhere between the rooftop and the hearth, and she dragged his mouth down to hers, kissing him with an open-mouthed boldness that demanded all the skilled expertise of his lips and tongue.

  While Eduard kissed her, he loosened his braies and pushed them down over his hips. In a brief tumble of arms, legs, and glossy red hair, their positions were reversed long enough for him to kick the final encumbrances free, long enough for Ariel to rise above him and gaze in awe at the long, thick spear of flesh rising so proudly from the juncture of his thighs.

  They rolled again, his body naked, warm, and hard as he pressed her deep into the bed of furs. His palms smoothed over her breasts, cupping the supple flesh as he drew it into his mouth and suckled each nipple to a crinkled tautness. Ariel arched her back repeatedly, feeling the tug and pull of his lips all the way down to her toes. His heat was between her thighs and she moved with frantic little whimpers to entreat him closer. She raised her knees and dug her heels into the bedding, tilting her hips up and forward so that he slid against her, teasing her with both a threat and a promise. Again and again he simply slid against the dense, glistening curls, denying himself, denying her until she was so wet and he so hard they could not have stayed apart a moment longer, even if they had wanted to.