Lady of the Crescent Moon

by Ingrid Hahn

  There were no excuses. He of all people should have had control. It wasn’t enough to say Sidonie did things to him that no other could. She did, as strongly as a fatal current. It was up to him to swim instead of drown.

  If he lost himself to her, he risked his ability to protect her. Worse, he risked neglecting the sworn duty of all d’Ambroisin men. He’d given her up once. It was going to tear his life in two when he had to give her up again.

  Closing off further examination of the subject, Roland removed his fur vest and rested the covering over her shoulders. “Sidonie, can you hear me?”

  She gave him a sharp look. His heart leapt, but, of course, what else had he expected? It would take more than an encounter with his brother to break a woman like Sidonie.

  But her expression faded to concern and she reached out to touch his forehead. He pulled away. “Never mind that.”

  “You’re hurt.” Her voice was soft.

  He had to resist her. Resist his urges. “It’ll heal.”

  “But—”

  “I said it’ll heal.” He pushed to standing, the chaos within him almost too much to withstand. How could he want two such disparate things? At once to keep her close, never let her go, make her a wife and a mother—all the things he knew he’d forever lost his chance at having.

  She came to her feet alongside him and passed her gaze over the room, the look in the clear blue of her eyes as methodical as it was calculating. No doubt she caught details overlooked by most others. “There’ll be salve here, I’m sure. Let me dress the wound.”

  “You’ll eat first.” On the long plank table at the center of the room, he uncovered leftover bread and broke the end for her. “Then perhaps I’ll allow you to attend me.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  He extended the food to her. “You must.”

  “I took some broth.”

  “Broth?” Oh. Upstairs, she meant. Before . . .

  He set his resolve upon setting those thoughts aside for later. “That won’t hold you.”

  She turned away, mouth twisting. “The only thing I must do is see your mother. He said ‘take her.’ Are you going to heed him or will you defy his command?”

  The enormity of her words was too much to absorb. Roland could only play for time. He held naught but a single weak card. “You must have questions after what you saw. Don’t you want answers?”

  She sighed and, with a wistful smile, tossed a shoulder. “I think I’ve seen enough to have them. It’s him, isn’t it? Why you stay. Why you’re not at court and care not where you sit in the king’s graces.”

  “It’s why I must never leave.”

  “Why you won’t leave again, you mean.”

  “I want to protect you. Pray believe me that no small part of me struggled the better part of the night with my desire to do anything I could to aid you. To leave with you and—”

  “I do not require your protection.”

  And yet, down below with his brother, Roland sensed she’d welcomed his presence as more than mere comfort. But he held his tongue. Pushing a person on a point of pride was an exercise in frustration.

  “I never asked to feel so strongly that protecting you is what I must do. But I can’t.”

  “It’s enough to know you have a duty here, a duty far greater than any you might have had by me. It was a mistake coming here.”

  His voice roughened. “Was it?”

  Their gazes caught. She swallowed and her words came out a whisper, but she didn’t look away. “Roland.”

  “Yes?”

  Her color heightened. “I’d like to—I’d like to say goodbye.”

  Innocent enough sentiment, perhaps, but a hidden suggestiveness put him on alert.

  He paused. Was this a flight of fancy born of his incessant yearnings to be as close to her as a man could be with the one he cares for?

  “You want . . .?” Roland lifted his brows.

  “Yes. A goodbye to remember.”

  She wasn’t asking for a simple good-bye. She was asking him to take her to his bed.

  Hot blood rushed downward. “Oh.”

  Roland turned and grabbed for a fire iron to stab into the flames before he was lost to good sense. He’d spent thirteen years carefully honing his ability to control himself. The efforts would not go to waste. If he touched her, he might never be able to release her again.

  A light pressure in the center of his upper arm sent him into alert. It shouldn’t have been this complicated. He needed her to go, but sending her away would mean meeting Death.

  “Do you want to?”

  His voice emerged with all the rough strain of holding himself back. “More than anything.”

  “I should hate for us to part as adversaries. Please. We can have this one thing. Let’s take it.”

  Her boldness heightened his yearning. Made his blood burn. Made him remember he was very much a male of earth and clay and the wickedest sins of the flesh. A male lacking a mate. He could deny his needs all he pleased. That didn’t erase them.

  He fought against the onslaught of fierce desire. “You’re trying to trick me. It won’t work. You can’t seduce me into bending to your will.”

  There was a moment’s silence, but her hand didn’t move. Her reply came gently. “I know that you don’t mean what you say.”

  “Oh, but I do.” He stabbed harder into the fire. A crackling log tumbled and her hand closed around his fingers. His knuckles turned white.

  “Let me have the fire iron.”

  He gripped harder. If he let go, he’d have no choice. Everything he channeled through the metal into the fire he’d have to pour upon her.

  “Roland.”

  The force of the anger he’d been trying so desperately to summon vanished in a whisper. She eased the iron from his grip.

  Maybe it was her tone. Maybe it was how simply she’d spoken and the intimacy of his name on her tongue. Maybe it was her arts and she was bewitching him.

  Oh, yes. Please. Let it be so. Let her be enchanting him with her dark powers. If that were so, he wouldn’t be responsible for the coils of lust in which he was bound.

  Enchantments worked one way in fairy stories. They worked quite differently in life. And Roland wasn’t a fool. No witch in the whole of the world could make a person do what he didn’t already wish to do—not in that way. That wasn’t how it worked. They could only provide the means to help a person find what he needed.

  “Roland. Look at me.”

  He turned. Sidonie stared into the depths of his eyes, her gaze a mix of gentleness and force so powerful she could have sent him stumbling backward with nothing more than a look.

  “Why are you fighting this?”

  “Because I won’t be able to keep you. You aren’t really mine.”

  “I’m nobody’s possession. I want this and I think you do too, at least as much as me. Maybe more.”

  A rosy pink had stained her cheeks. Shame from asking him to make love to her?

  No. Desire.

  A burst of male pride spilled into his veins.

  If he was going to do this, he would go in with his eyes open to the truth. Whether he wanted to or not, he needed her.

  The knowledge was a thousand pricks with a blade in his gut. His heart started pounding. Yes. He needed her. That was it precisely. And he’d have to let her go again. Even if she were his to protect, which she wasn’t, it wouldn’t matter.

  Thirteen years he’d told himself he didn’t need her—couldn’t need her. A lie. He did.

  Powerless, he claimed her. His mouth came down upon her sweet lips. Her body melded to his.

  Something in him he didn’t know could possibly have survived these past thirteen years flamed to brilliant l
ife.

  It could all be over in an instant. They’d have but a single chance. Roland reined in all his most masculine impulses to claim her with the force of a raging animal and broke the kiss. He let the side of his finger draw a slow stroke down her face, memorizing the shape of every peak and valley in the bones so prominent beneath the flushed smoothness of her skin. His.

  Sidonie took his hand within her own and kissed his knuckles. The graze of her lips sent an impossibly strong pang of desire shooting through the center of his being.

  “You’re shaking.” Still keeping his large hand encased with in her two smaller ones, she drew them to the center of her breast and clutched him against her heart.

  Roland gave a nod. “It’s difficult for me to restrain myself from doing all the things I desperately want to do to you.”

  “I don’t wish you to restrain yourself.”

  “But you can’t stay.”

  “No.” Her voice went plaintive. “I can’t.”

  “And I—” Roland’s throat squeezed. “I vowed to myself that I would never sire a bastard.”

  Her shoulders sank. “Oh.”

  “I couldn’t live with myself if I—if there were—”

  She put a hand over his mouth. “It’s all right. I understand.”

  He went to the table, tore a piece of bread from the loaf, then found butter Toinette always brought when she visited, and slathered a thick layer over the dense morsel. “What do you see when you peer into the future?”

  She glanced sideways, head dropping a notch. “I don’t know.”

  He brushed a strand of hair back from her brow. “You can tell me.”

  The air between them changed. Sidonie’s mouth drew into a worried pucker. “No, I can’t.”

  “The future is never more than a possibility until the moment comes and a choice is made. I know that.”

  “You don’t understand.” The line of her throat displayed the movement of a hard swallow. “Time has gone silent. I used to catch glimpses of what the possibilities were. Never further than a handful of hours. A day at most. But for the last while now . . . nothing.”

  “Perhaps there are too many uncertainties.”

  She went still, eyes going huge, lips parting. She stared off, the look in her face telling him her thoughts were leagues away from her physical present. Then she snapped her gaze back to him. “You are uncertain, aren’t you?”

  There was nothing uncertain about his erection. Utilizing a residual scrap of the niceties of his upbringing left in him, he bit back the vulgar pronouncement. “Not about you.”

  She studied him, at last shaking her head. “You want to protect me, but you don’t know what that means. You can’t keep me here, but you think you have to stop me.”

  When he pulled his hand back from her, she resisted slightly, but he slid away from her hold, unease taking root. After all he’d seen, after everything he’d come to know, hearing an uncomplicated truth about himself from her had no effect. No, it wasn’t her words. It was a sense permeating everything around them. A danger. Like an arrow was about to split the air and claim his life.

  Chapter 9

  Sidonie made no attempt at refusing his offering of food. She bit greedily and started to chew, any guilt she might have felt about those waiting for her in the dungeons in Paris obliterated by the feel of bread and butter in her mouth.

  Rationally, it couldn’t have been the best thing she’d ever tasted, but in that moment, she would have sworn oaths under torture claiming that it was.

  Roland gave her a dark look. “You’re as starving as a wolf at the end of a brutal winter.”

  Her dry mouth was complicating the chewing process. By way of apology for her manners, she raised her brows and looked at him wide-eyed. Before she could say anything, he’d placed a cup of wine on a smooth bare plank of the long table. “Sit.”

  She took a place upon the bench, managing herself as gracefully as possible with one hand to manage the long skirts while the other gripped her prize. She raised the wine and sent him a questioning glance.

  Roland shook his head. “No adulteration today.”

  The bread and wine vanished. She could have eaten a boar from snout to tail.

  “No more for now, I think, lest you become ill.” He replaced the cloth over the remaining loaf.

  She let a hand fall to her distended belly. She was heavy and warm from the hearty meal, all but drunk on nothing more than simple fare.

  Rising, she went to the door she’d used last night to slip inside, and surveyed the landscape. “There is much more here at Bramville than I ever expected.”

  “You mean . . .”

  She turned around to look at him.

  His expression shifted. “Come.”

  He took a woolen shawl from a peg, slipped it around her shoulders, and tucked her arm into his.

  This was what she’d expected least. The human closeness she’d found. It was a gift. If she found her death in Paris, she’d always have her time with Roland tucked in her heart.

  Under a flat gray sky, they roamed the neglected gardens overgrown with weeds. Below, the traffic on the river was about what was to be expected this time of year.

  They found themselves in the family burial ground staring at Jacques’s grave.

  Roland was a large man and in the outdoors, he looked like nothing more than the Norsemen who’d come to settle Normandy six hundred years ago. Sidonie had seen their kind at Le Havre when she was a girl—the living, modern people, that was. Not their ancestors’ ghosts. The busy port overflowed with different sorts from all over the world.

  “There are gateways between the world of the living and the world of the dead. Bramville was built upon one such gateway and we must protect it. That is, Jacques protects it. I protect him.”

  “How?”

  “I anchor him to this world. Help him remember.”

  She made no reply. Roland continued. “I wouldn’t have chosen to be my brother’s guardian. Indeed—” A heavy sigh escaped him. “I even fled from it for a time.”

  Sidonie shook her head, strands of hair blown about by an icy wind. She spoke carefully. What she knew about gateways was more than most, but her information remained incomplete. If Roland saw how desperate she was to learn more, she’d never convince him to allow her an audience with his mother.

  She didn’t fully understand Jacques’s role. “But there are gateways everywhere. Some are fixed, but many aren’t. They’re part of the natural order, opening when they’re needed, closing when they’re not.” Except during the hours of dawn and dusk, when the veils grew thin. Even so . . . “They don’t need guarding.”

  “By and large, yes. This one, the one on which the original fortress was built, this one is different. It’s not a wisp or a veil. It’s . . . a force. An entity. It’s fully realized unto itself. It’s like the mouth for all other gateways that shoot out of it like tendrils.”

  They fell silent.

  “Your mother must have known what your father did. He couldn’t have kept such a secret from her.”

  “It has grown in power since my father’s day.” Roland crouched and pulled the vines away from his brother’s stone. “That’s why Jacques looks as he does. That’s why we had to conspire to pretend he died.” Roland spoke as if mourning his burden. “Why my father needed me, a d’Ambroisin heir without d’Ambroisin blood to run the estate and protect Jacques. All Jacques can do is be keeper of the gate.”

  Roland rose, brushing his hands together.

  “That doesn’t answer what my statement was leading to, though, does it?”

  He snapped, dark irises flashing. “What other choice could I have made? Bramville is not safe.”

  “You could have told me. We could have decided together.” Ab
sently, Sidonie put her hands on her lower belly. Roland had said he didn’t want a bastard. She couldn’t fault him, it was his choice, and an honorable one.

  Meanwhile, she would be forever denied knowing what it was to have a child growing inside of her. But she’d chosen a different path. She was a witch and they rarely married.

  “Decided together?” He ran his fingers through his hair. “How could I have told you such a thing? I wouldn’t have been able to so much as begin. How could you have believed me? Think back to what we were then. How many words did we exchange, you and I? A dozen?” He scoffed. “I could hardly look at you without the acute pain of longing. I didn’t know the first thing about talking to a woman, much less talking to you.”

  “What about together not as one betrothed to the other but as—” Her voice dropped. “As husband and wife? What then?”

  “Is that what you wanted?”

  Her lips parted. Was that what she wanted? It had been what she’d wanted. Her life would have been so very different if it had gone as planned. But it wasn’t so difficult to imagine.

  She lived very differently now. Her dwelling in the south had been humble. There, the stones of the landscape were different. The sun was different. The winters were different. Even the language was different. She’d had to learn a new vernacular under Jeanne’s patient tutelage.

  Jeanne.

  Sidonie closed her eyes. While she was here eating fine bread slathered thickly with butter and drinking wine that warmed her bones, all the while longing to entwine her body with Roland’s, Jeanne and so many others were suffering.

  “Sidonie?”

  She opened her eyes and stared at the gravestone. “I—I don’t know.”

  He looked away. “It doesn’t matter. It could never have come to that.”

  Sidonie bit her lip, studying him. He was the perfect d’Ambroisin in every particular, even if he didn’t carry their blood. Loyal. Steadfast. Powerful. Self-sacrificing. And so fiercely protective as to be all but blind. “It’s not all on your shoulders. It doesn’t have to be. You shouldn’t have to bear this alone.”