What would her back be like? Would it have that same long gentle curve down to the sharp dip at the waist that most women shared? When she lay on her stomach, would the curve become more pronounced? He saw the delightful soaring slope down to the buttocks and mentally let his hand rest on the valley of the waist, then slide upward. In response she would roll over and his hand would follow the sinuous curve around her midriff, still traveling up toward the breasts and her breath would catch in anticipation…
Alaric expelled his breath sharply. He had been holding it. He blinked and focused on Raven’s back. He’d done it again, and now his body was throbbing painfully in response to his thoughts.
With a curse, Alaric closed his eyes.
Again, his mind returned to that moment on the verandah, earlier. The unexpected softness of her body against his arm. But what had he expected? Had he somehow fooled himself into believing that her body, like her mind, would be a hard, unforgiving rock?
The worst of it was that he could have avoided the entire incident. Outside the bathhouse there had been a splinter of a moment when he’d realized he was going to collide with her. He could tell himself forever that he hadn’t had time to avoid the collision, that he wouldn’t have been able to think or act fast enough but he would never be able to explain away the little spark of pleasurable anticipation that had flared in that moment. It was the anticipation that had locked his mind and let his body flow forward into the collision.
The tunic had slid off her shoulder, revealing one rounded shoulder and her upper arm. Her skin glowed in the ambient light. He’d seen the prominent collarbone and the beginning of the valley between her arm and side. Her scent had wafted up to him and in his mind he’d seen his hand reach up to slide the tunic farther down her arm, then slip under the edges, burrowing deeper, searching for the peak of her breast.
Alaric rested his forehead against Raven’s back and growled under his breath. He had been so close to doing just that. If he had not pushed her away from him…
“My lord?”
Alaric jerked upright and spun toward the corridor running between the stalls. It was Evadne. She looked ready to bolt.
Alaric tried to rein in his raging thoughts and shut down his body. He reached for civility as a prop. “Good evening.” His voice emerged low but comprehensible.
“Then…you are not angry?”
“No. Why would I be?”
“You have not wanted me these ten days past.”
Alaric suppressed a deep sigh. Not this. Not now.
“I came looking for you. I thought…perhaps I could change your mind.” Her head was lowered and she was looking up at him from under her brow. He may have once thought it coyness but he knew her better now.
“Don’t play falsely with me, Evadne.”
She considered him. “All right, then,” she agreed, all coyness evaporating. She picked up his hand and laid it against her breast, over the top of her tunic. The large swell of her breast and the distended nipple rubbed against his palm.
Alaric swallowed dryly. He tried to pull his hand away but her fingers were around his wrist and she defeated his feeble movement. “Evadne…”
“This is what you want.” Her other hand was fumbling at the junction of his thighs, under his tunic. She found the thick congestion there and smiled. “Yes,” she cooed. “Yes, this is what you want.”
He shook his head. “No.” But his denial contained no conviction, for her hand was around him and his thoughts were disintegrating. His will was draining away with them.
“Yes,” she whispered. “I know what you like.” She let loose his wrist, reached up to the neck of her tunic and gave it a sharp tug. The front ripped and fell away, revealing one breast. The other was still covered by his hand and the remains of her tunic.
Alaric took a deep breath and tried to steady himself.
“Take me, my lord.” Her knowing gaze measured his responses, while her hand worked around him.
His will lost, Alaric pushed her back into an empty stall and lowered her to the fresh straw.
* * * * *
Diana stood in the middle of the stable corridor, her feet iced to the spot. She had come looking for Alaric and had been drawn in by small murmured sounds. Now her gaze, her mind and her entire body were held captive by the intimate scene taking place in the stall. The couple in the straw had merely to look around and she would be seen but she could no more move than fly.
They were pleasuring each other.
The realization unlocked an entire room of understanding. Clues matched up to others and revealed patterns of meaning. She watched Alaric’s body moving against the woman’s, the muscles straining and Evadne’s own earthy responses.
She likes it. Diana had never known that mating could be enjoyable.
Her gaze kept straying back to Alaric and her body’s responses began to correspond with his. She was caught up in the rhythm. She recognized the primeval beat of her blood and that too, taught her another lesson about buried, ancient drives and inevitable needs.
Soon her thoughts fluttered away and she became a purely sensory creature. The couple in the straw strained for release and Diana too, yearned for it. She recognized with her newly awakened senses when that moment was near. When Evadne arched up with a cry and Alaric thrust against her with a groan that seemed to be ripped from deep inside him, Diana’s body halted.
The moment passed.
Diana gathered her wits together. Moving silently, she withdrew from the stable. Outside, she scrambled back around the outside walls of the villa, skirting the edges of the pits. She slipped through the gates and hurried toward the house but slowed when she heard the merriment coming from the dining room. She couldn’t return there. Not now. They would take one look at her and know something had happened.
She moved toward the bathhouse, leaned against the cold wall and let her head rest back. Her heart was almost hurting with the speed of its beat. Tension sang in her blood but it was beginning to subside and turn sour from lack of fulfillment. She closed her eyes and tried to calm her breathing.
Now she could put a name to mysteries that had puzzled her of late—the heavy air of expectancy and her distraction. Why hadn’t she guessed? How could she have been so blind? She wasn’t ignorant of the ways of men and women, after all. There were plenty of rutting animals and spring births for her education, even if Lucilla had not enlightened her on the ways of men and the practices of the marriage bed.
Why hadn’t she seen what was happening to her? Because the red cloud obscured everything.
Diana had only to acknowledge that colored specter for it to move closer. She could feel it hovering and tried to ignore it. She looked up at the waxing moon and willed herself to concentrate, to solve it.
She could scarcely believe that the activity she associated with cows and marriage beds could apparently bring so much pleasure. Her own responses to Alaric, now that she recognized them for what they were, hinted at a fulfillment that she could only guess at.
Oh, it explained so much!
There were Alaric’s odd reactions too. Tonight he had pushed her from him. Was it distaste? Was that it? For his hand had moved against her just before he had thrust her away. Did he not like what he had felt? After all, he had gone straight from there to Evadne’s arms.
Diana recognized where her thoughts were leading. Did she want Alaric to come to her?
Unbidden, a picture formed in her mind. Alaric, his body pressed against hers, his hands smoothing their way along her thighs. His body would be hot as it had been tonight and his movements urgent.
Diana gasped in a breath, trying to push the picture away. No, she could not allow this! It was impossible. Alaric was—
A man.
A Celt—
A man who would know much about pleasing women.
—who served Arthur.
He would be amenable to a casual alliance.
He had the power to take away from her everythi
ng that she had worked for.
She wanted him.
“Diana?”
Diana jumped and her breath escaped in a squeak. Sosia stood at the end of the verandah. Diana could just make out her silhouette in the poor moonlight. “Sosia!” She lifted a hand to her forehead to wipe at the sudden moisture there. Her hands were trembling and her heart thundering in an unpleasantly hollow way.
“You are well, my lady?” Sosia asked. “I saw you come back to the villa but you did not enter.”
“I’m fine. I’ll come inside now.”
Sosia merely nodded. Her departure was as silent as her arrival. Diana stood up. She felt cold and ill-used and she longed for the warmth of the library.
She might want Alaric because of some ancient base instinct but she must never let him know. She would continue to treat him exactly as she always had and she would avoid being alone with him as she had been tonight on the verandah.
Diana was almost to the library when a thought brought her to a horrified standstill. Tomorrow morning and every morning after that, she would be alone with him in the library. He came to her. There was no way to avoid him.
It was a long while before Diana remembered to start walking again.
Chapter Eleven
For the second morning, Diana hurried to finish her breakfast before Alaric appeared. She rushed about fastening her shoes, tying her hair back, all while listening for the knock that heralded Alaric’s arrival.
She almost made it. She was fastening her belt when the brief quiet knock sounded at the door. In the heartbeat between the door opening and Alaric stepping into the room, Diana wished with fanatical fervor that it would be anyone else but him. Sosia, Minna, or any of a dozen people who might need to confer with her. But even as she wished, she knew it was him.
His gaze settled on her.
Diana let the belt drop unfastened. Her heart had begun to patter again.
“Good morning,” Alaric murmured.
“Good morrow.”
He was sitting down, picking up his breakfast as if all was normal but nothing was normal anymore. In the space of a few stolen moments in a stable, everything had changed.
How can he simply sit there?
But he doesn’t know how things have changed.
Diana fastened her belt, trying to act as she always had, but she couldn’t remember how she used to behave. All she could focus on was her newfound knowledge.
“I-I cannot linger.” She picked up her cloak. “I have plans that demand I leave as early as possible.”
“What are your plans?”
“They are nothing to you.”
“Perhaps. But I can think of only two things that require you to leave early. One of them is to start in the fields to catch up on the work that you have sacrificed these two days past.”
“Then the wind has failed?”
“If you are not aware of that, then you are not about to work in the fields. That means you are going to Eboracum.”
“Perhaps, but that has no bearing on your day.”
“On the contrary, it bears greatly on my day. Why are you going to Eboracum?”
“It is market day today.”
“You have purchases to make?”
If she said yes, the natural question would be where she had found the money to buy anything. Alaric knew there was not a single coin on the estate. “I go to see Felecius, the old man who is wise in the ways of farming and running an estate.”
She’d hesitated for too long. Alaric spotted the lie, she could see the recognition in his eyes. Exposed, she waited for his retribution.
“Then I will come with you,” Alaric told her.
“But—”
His brow lifted in silent query.
But I go to get away from you! She swallowed back the protest, dismayed. A whole day in his company? No, this was not what she had intended at all. “Why must you come with me? There is nothing in Eboracum for you.”
“There is not,” he agreed, “but hunger makes a man desperate and the demands of a hungry family will make him vicious. At this time of year, there are many hungry men roaming the byways.”
“I have been to Eboracum and back over a dozen times in the last year and I was always alone.”
“Then you are more foolish than I gave you credit for.” Alaric stood up. “If you insist on going to Eboracum today, then I will accompany you.” A small smile played on his lips. “Unless you have suddenly realized that your visit to Felecius is not as urgent as you thought?”
Diana recognized the challenge as clearly as the call of a battle horn. If she declared she would remain on the estate today, then he would know that she had been bluffing all along.
She went to the door. “You’d better hurry with your meal. I’m leaving immediately.”
* * * * *
For over four hundred years Eboracum had been the military capital of Roman Britain and the headquarters of both the Sixth Victorious Legion and the ill-fated Ninth Legion that disappeared without a trace during a routine patrol north of Hadrian’s Wall.
Diana’s great-great-grandfather had been a centurion in the Sixth Legion. That was before he’d become a lawyer with offices in the Basilica of Eboracum and made his fortune using army discipline to work long and hard, while his wife put aside every coin he made. With that fortune, he had bought the estate less than half a day’s ride south of the city.
The walls still stood but Eboracum now lived in the evening shadows of its former greatness. No more plays or pageants were held in the forum and the public baths were falling into disrepair. Sophisticated villas stood empty and crumbled from neglect and the extremes of weather. Nearly everyone who lived in Eboracum was Roman, yet the old ways were disappearing.
The markets were part of the old ways but they brought people and resources together and were necessary. When Rome was forgotten and Eboracum called by another name, there would still be a market here, Diana suspected.
She remembered walking through the markets when she was quite young. If a ship had arrived from the mainland, bringing exotic overseas goods, Diana’s mother would bring Diana and her sisters to Eboracum on a special outing, always accompanied by an armed slave or freedman. There would be treats—sweetmeats, fruit and once, figs from Rome itself. It had always been a place of strange sights and excitement and that held true even today.
Diana breathed in the many aromas, listened to the babble of merchants and buyers and almost smiled. Even the grumbling protest of her empty stomach in response to the smell of cooking meat did not take away her pleasure.
“You like all this, don’t you?” Alaric asked.
It was the first time he’d spoken voluntarily since their departure from the estate. While she had been caught up in memories of childhood, she’d actually forgotten he was there. The uncomplicated happiness her memories evoked drained away at his reminder.
“Like this?” What an odd question. “I don’t know if I like it but it reminds me of when I was young.” She looked around. “The market is much better in summer, though. There are more people and much more for sale.”
She saw Alaric grimace.
“You don’t like people?”
“I don’t like this many people. Not all in one place.”
“You do not have many more people drawn together during battle?”
“That is different.”
“How?”
He frowned. “There is only one purpose on the battlefield. Here there are many purposes, many people about their business. One can be alone here, even among people.”
“You don’t have markets where you come from? Guent?”
“No.”
“How do you acquire things?”
“We make what we need.”
“And those things that you cannot make, that come from afar?”
“We do without.”
“Oh.” It was another odd idea, doing without. Although she’d had to do without in one sense for well over a ye
ar now, that was induced by lack of money. She had taken for granted that, given funds, she could acquire just about anything she cared to name. “In that respect, we Romans do better than you, don’t we?”
“In that respect,” Alaric agreed evenly.
She cast about for something else to say but could find nothing. Besides, she didn’t want to talk to him in the first place. She didn’t want him here. Why didn’t he have the decency to realize that and remain silent like a guard should?
He was taking his guard duties seriously. His sword was strapped to his waist—a huge thing with a plain hilt and burnished cross-guard, nestled inside a flat, unadorned and well-worn leather scabbard. Tucked into his belt was a long, slim knife with a wicked point. Although he carried no shield and wore no helmet, he walked differently. It was a fluid, easy gait, as if every muscle in his body was fully relaxed, conserving strength, so he would be ready if called upon.
The same wariness emanated from him that came from wild creatures Diana had disturbed in the forest on occasion. His presence by her side eliminated the jostling from passersby that Diana had grown used to. She noticed quick, startled glances many of the stallholders and customers sent him and some would hastily step out of his way. Perhaps it was his ready-to-spring alertness that frightened them. He seemed to be watching everyone, instantly judging them friend or foe, threat or not.
Yet he could still spare enough attention to talk to her.
“Does my presence grate on you so much?” he asked.
Startled, Diana mis-stepped and nearly put her foot into a gutter. She glanced up at him. His expression was without rancor.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she lied.
He smiled a little. “You don’t want me here.”
Diana took a deep breath for courage. “No.” Now he would ask why.
Diana by the Moon Page 13
