The Robin Hood Trilogy

by Marsha Canham

  “Forgive me for barking at you, Goodwife,” he murmured thickly. “I shall be in your debt forever after this night.”

  Brenna lowered her chin and gave what she hoped was an admirably husky imitation of Margery’s voice. “A coin or two is thanks enough, my lord. If you think it is well earned.”

  “Well earned?” He groaned again and curled his fingers into the fur. “You can have no idea how wonderful this feels.”

  Brenna felt a flush warm her cheeks and invade her brow, and blamed it on the steam rising from the huge vats. “You … do not come from these parts, my lord?”

  “Mmm? No. No, I do not.”

  “Ahh. South, is it? I thought I heard a bit of the Gascon in you.”

  “I have spent time in Castile and Aragon,” he conceded. “But I make my home in Burgundy.”

  “Burgundy? A heathen place, to be sure. Have you family there, then?”

  He drew a deep breath, swelling and expanding the muscles across his back. “No. No family.”

  “And you earn your keep by fighting in tourneys?”

  “I run a course now and then to keep my eye sharp and my lance steady.”

  “You plan to fight Lord Robert, do you? Four years undefeated is he. You will have to know your business if you expect to meet him. And no faults either. No weaknesses.”

  She said this as she was inspecting the extensive scarring on his left hand and forearm. She had seen a similar injury once before, in a test of truth before a church tribunal when a man had been forced to plunge his hand into a tub of boiling oil to retrieve a crucifix from the bottom. If the hand was scalded or the crucifix was not recovered, he had obviously lied; if the hand emerged unblemished, he told the truth. Either way, the flesh of the arm was usually cooked through and turned as hard as the bone before eventually rotting and cracking off.

  Renaud’s arm, by comparison, still looked strong enough beneath the smooth tightness of the skin, but it carried less bulk than the right, a detriment Robin might be able to use to his advantage if they met in the lists at Gaillard.

  “Your arm, sir, does it cause you much trouble?”

  “Women do not usually look at my arms when I am lying naked before them.”

  The blush in her cheeks grew hot enough to dry her lips, and she worked the heels of her hands into the grooves beneath his shoulder blades as a reward for his impudence. There was no give to the muscles, no corresponding grunt of pain, and she realized she would be hard-pressed to say who carried more power in their upper body—Robin or Renaud—for his back was like solid plate armour and she had not found an excess pinch of flesh anywhere.

  “Lower, if you please.”

  “My lord?”

  “Send your magic fingers lower, if you please. My arse feels like a blister and my legs like two firesticks.”

  Brenna looked down. She was at his waist now, kneading her thumbs into the dimples at the small of his back. He gave a low, throaty growl of approval as she set aside the narrow strip of towelling, and she was thankful his face was still turned away, his eyes closed against the welter of heat ebbing and flowing in her cheeks. The towel had somehow preserved a modicum of modesty on both their behalf, but without it, he was a gleaming, magnificently naked beast sprawled on a bed of fur, and she was a witless fool who had gone too far to back away.

  She spread more oil and molded her hands to the shape of his buttocks. She stroked and kneaded and manipulated the marble-hard flesh until there was a fine sheen of moisture rising across her own brow, then ran her fingers lower again, sliding over the seemingly endless iron thews of his thighs and calves. When she worked her thumbs into the arches of his feet, he groaned like a dying man and shifted on the bed of furs as if it were a sexual encounter. When she started up the second leg, she saw his hands flex and curl into fists while he swore, then laughed softly and swore again.

  “You will prove the end of me yet, Goodwife,” he murmured. “Is there a price I could pay to lure you away from this place?”

  “Lord Randwulf is as fine a master as ever there is, sir. No price on earth could lure me away.”

  “And the sons? They look an arrogant lot.”

  She dug her thumbs into a pocket of nerves and was happy to hear him suck in a sharp breath. “No more arrogant than those who would mock them, my lord.”

  His head, cloaked by the glossy black waves of hair, turned slightly on the furs. “Your loyalty is commendable, but what excuse do you give the daughter?”

  “The daughter?”

  “The hellion. She dresses like a commoner, has the manners of a fishmonger’s wife, and likely could not entice a kiss out of a man without holding him at bowshot first.”

  Brenna’s mouth dropped open.

  “Even then, I doubt she would know how to kiss him properly.” He added softly, “Unless, of course, she could find someone willing to teach her.”

  “You, I suppose?” She realized too late that she had challenged him in her own voice, but before she could react or respond, his hand reached out and closed around her upper arm. His head came up off the furs and all she could see were the cat’s eyes, luminous gray-green glowering out from beneath the inky spill of his hair.

  “Dare I ask what the game is this time, my lady?”

  “N-no game,” she stammered. “I was—”

  “Yes?”

  “I was …”

  “Asking questions.”

  “Making polite conversation!”

  “Spying on me?”

  “Never! I was only helping Margery. She … she has a cut finger.”

  He scanned the room behind her and the look on his face was so blatantly sceptical, her eyes narrowed to violet slits.

  “How long have you known it was me?”

  “Since you stood in the doorway and watched. Your hair, I think—” His gaze raked appreciatively over the loosely flown curls. “It smells of apples.”

  “Lilacs, you dolt!” She wrenched her arm free and made a dash for the door. For such a big man he moved with shocking speed, and she was still two full steps away from making good her escape when she felt herself being scooped up in one strong arm. The other shot out and slammed the door shut behind her, and she found herself crowded into the shadows, her legs trapped between his, her arms caught and held immobile by her sides.

  As hot as his skin had felt beneath her hands, his body was twice that. As strong as she had imagined all those muscles to be, they were breathtakingly forceful in driving all the air from her lungs and pinning her helplessly against the wall.

  “I neglected to add foolish and reckless when I was listing your attributes,” he murmured.

  His voice chilled the nape of her neck and sprayed her arms with gooseflesh. There was only one lamp in the room and it was behind him, etching his oil-slicked shoulders and arms with a thin gold rim of fire. He towered over her, his face cloaked in shadows, but so close each breath fanned her skin and sent a shocking ribbon of heat curling down her spine and puddling somewhere deep inside her.

  “Let go of me,” she said, cursing the tremor in her voice. “At once.”

  He was silent a long moment. She could feel the renewed heat in her face, flaring as he studied her every feature in minute detail. The steam from the tubs had nowhere to go now that the door was closed, and it swirled in hot clouds around the lamp, dampening the light even more.

  “Will you please let me go,” she repeated in a stronger voice.

  “Please? Now, there is a word I had not thought to hear from those lips.”

  Brenna offered up a futile spate of squirming, but his hands were like iron manacles around her wrists and whatever leeway she had gained by her initial submission was lost again when his hips pushed forward to restrict her squirming.

  “I could scream and bring half the castle guard down around your ears,” she warned on a hiss of breath.

  “And what would they see? A woman intruding on the privacy of a man’s bath. A woman enticing a naked man to
a clearly dangerous state of arousal by stroking his body with shameful expertise.”

  She had avoided looking up to where she supposed his eyes to be, but she did so now and saw a faint glimmer through the shadows. “I did not intrude on your bath, nor was it my intent to arouse you.”

  “In that you have failed then, my lady, as you can plainly see.”

  She did not want to look down. God-a-mercy, she could feel him well enough. It should not have surprised her to discover he was big all over, and indeed, she had seen big men aroused before. But that had been from a distance, and usually from an objective point of view; sometimes with great humor, wondering at the awkwardness of carrying such a thing between the legs.

  Renaud did not appear to be the least discomforted. It was she who felt the intrusion of hard, thick flesh, and where it pushed boldly between her thighs, it found all those little ribbons of heat and started spinning them together in a tight, throbbing knot.

  “Shall we have the truth now?”

  “The truth?”

  “Did your brother send you?”

  “No! No, he does not even know I am here. No one does.”

  “No one? Foolish again, my lady,” he murmured, and now his mouth was close enough she could feel its warmth on her cheek. She drew back in an unconscious response, but there was nowhere to go, and when his mouth brushed her a second time, she knew it had been no accident.

  Exhaling very carefully, she said, “If you let me go right now, right this minute, I promise I will not tell my brothers what has happened.”

  “Nothing has happened. Yet.”

  His breath was a feathery caress over her mouth, and she gave up a small shiver of apprehension. “Actually, I … I came to apologize. Yes … to apologize.”

  “Really? Whatever for?”

  “Why, for my behavior this afternoon, for one thing,” she said on a faint rush. “I was rude, and … and …”

  “Insolent? Suspicious? Threatening?”

  “I was perhaps overcautious, I might grant you.”

  “How generous. You offered to kill my horse if I did not abase myself like a common dung collector before you.”

  She moistened her lips and risked another glance up. “I am truly sorry for that. I would never have harmed such a superb creature. If I resorted to such a threat, it was because you … you looked a villainous and dangerous sort who might have taken callous advantage of the circumstances.”

  “Villainous and dangerous? I confess I have been called both on occasion, but never at the same time.”

  “In any case,” she said with a small wriggle of impatience, “you must agree that a woman on her own must take certain precautionary measures.”

  “To safeguard her virginity?”

  “To safeguard herself from any violation.”

  “Meaning you are not a virgin?”

  “Meaning,” she snapped, “it would be none of your business to know one way or the other.”

  He offered up a small, dry laugh and studied her face again. It was her hair that was winning most of his attention this time. The dampness in the bath house had sent the tawny curls spraying in all directions, and where they met the moisture on her temples and throat, they were coiling into tight, dark spirals.

  “What are you looking at? Why are you frowning?”

  “I am looking at you. And I would not have guessed …” His voice trailed away and she looked up again, her violet eyes reflecting pinpoints of light.

  “Guessed what?”

  “That there was such a beautiful woman under all that mulishness, and that there might be another reason I would have cause to regret not pulling you down off of Centaur this afternoon.”

  “As if you could have,” she scoffed.

  He bent his head closer still. “If you believe nothing else of me, my lady, believe I could have had you on the ground, your bow and your back broken if I had wanted it.”

  She had grown accustomed enough to the mist and shadow to distinguish the dark slash of his eyebrows, the straight line of his nose, the rugged squareness of his jaw with its deeply clefted chin. She watched his mouth as it formed the words, and the tightness in her belly became a series of little fluttering convulsions that flooded her limbs with heat and turned her bones to jelly. Her breath lodged with a suffocating tightness halfway up her throat, and she knew a challenge would be futile. She believed him. He could have overpowered her then, just as he could overpower her now with laughable ease.

  “Who are you?” she asked in a whisper.

  “No one you would truly want to know.”

  “Have you come here to kill my father?”

  He did not even have the grace to look surprised at the question, but he answered it simply enough. “No.”

  “My brother?”

  “No.”

  “Would you tell me the truth if you had?”

  “At this precise moment, I would probably tell you anything you wanted to know.”

  Her limbs quivered noticeably as his dark head tilted forward and she felt the searching warmth of his lips on her neck.

  “Wh-what are you doing?”

  “Being truthful,” he murmured against her throat. “I do not want to argue with you anymore. And since you have apologized to me and I have apologized to you”—his tongue flicked languidly over the pulse beating rapidly beneath her ear—“I thought we might both take advantage of all this friendliness.”

  She tried to twist away, but the movement only bared a greater expanse of tender flesh, and his mouth was there suckling a warm, moist path from the crook of her shoulder to the soft pink curl of her ear. Her breath came out in a harsh gasp and her knees started to buckle. A streak of hot, stabbing pleasure shot from the nape of her neck to her belly, obliterating nearly every other sensation between. The only one that remained was the acutely tender eagerness that suddenly sprang to fill her breasts, gathering the nipples into tight little peaks that felt as if they could pierce through the layers of silk. There was no escaping the sinfully erotic pleasure, no comparison she could make with any other experience she had had thus far in her life. There would be no salvation for her either if she did not keep a firm grip on her senses.

  “I do not recollect receiving any apology from you,” she said, gasping as his tongue swirled treacherously into her ear.

  “No?” He frowned and for all of two racing heartbeats she thought she had won a reprieve. With the next startled hammer blow, he raised her hands above her head and captured both wrists in one hand, freeing the other to circle her waist and support her faltering legs even as he drew her forward over the solid shaft of his flesh.

  “Consider this to be it, then.”

  Shocked at the explicit, thrusting incursion, Brenna tried to cry out but his mouth was there to smother the sound. He did it with a thoroughness that stripped her of whatever breath and sense she had remaining, the kiss as bold and arrogant and uncompromising as the man himself. His tongue invaded her mouth, probing deep, penetrating what few defenses she could call to hand, silencing them with a bruising force that frightened her, for it was nothing at all like the chaste, chivalrous kisses she had exchanged with ignorant abandon before.

  This … possession was neither chaste nor chivalrous. He was intent on ravishing, devouring, conquering every silken recess of her mouth, and while she managed to squeak out a few shivered protests, she could not summon the strength or wit to make them sound convincing. Each lavish stroke had its erotic counterpart below as he wedged a knee between her thighs and used his flesh to chafe the growing knot of sensations she had been experiencing into a fiercely vibrant, shimmering heat. The silk of her bliaud was a feeble hindrance, sheer as a whisper, and the linen chainse hardly better. If anything, the sleek abrasion intensified the heat and friction, bringing Brenna up on her toes in an effort to ease the tightness in the cloth and stop the shameless waves of pleasure.

  A tremor in the massive body indicated her efforts had had the opposite effect, f
or now he could—and did—slide the whole length of his flesh between her thighs. He brought his hand up from her waist and molded the palm around her breast, groaning with approval when he found her nipples hard as pebbles, straining into each stroke of his long fingers. He groaned again, thick and low, and his lips slanted even more forcefully over hers, keeping and holding her breathless until her whole body was a mass of raw, trembling sensation.

  “Yield to me,” he whispered raggedly. “Yield to me and we can spend the night changing the opinions we have of one another.”

  Brenna’s eyes shivered open. She was hot and dizzy, a wildness was racing through her blood, the flesh between her thighs felt swollen and distended, aching with sharp, sweet sensations that promised pleasures beyond her comprehension.

  His hands were clamped around her waist, his fingers bruising in their attempt to control the desires raging through his own body. Her hands—when had he released them? When had they become tangled in the luxuriant mane of his hair? They were no less steady as she pushed … then pushed again, widening the gap between them.

  “No.” She gasped. “No, I cannot do this.”

  His hands tightened as he urged her lushly to and fro over the magnificence of his erection, angling himself upward so that he was, indeed, inside her if only by a silk-encased inch or two. “You can. And you want to, I can feel it.”

  “No.” She shuddered and swallowed hard. “Please, let me go.”

  With a small laugh, he ignored her plea and lifted her breast, holding it cupped in his palm while the heat of his mouth and breath soaked through to her skin. Brenna stiffened involuntarily against the instant, violent thrill, and somewhere inside her, the pressure built to an exquisite peak and sent a melting rush of sensation flooding through her body. Her hands came skidding down onto the hard ridge of his shoulders in a half-hearted attempt to dislodge him, but he only laughed again and started lifting the hem of her skirts.