by Karen Ranney
“You would have me live on an island, Hannah.” She turned and smiled at her friend. “And I will not do that, not even for you. But as I said before, it no longer matters what I feel or do not feel for him.” She stood and walked to the door. “He is leaving in the morning.”
She closed the door softly behind her.
Thomas Penroth looked down at the vista below him. The information his lieutenant had provided him had led them here. Harrington Court shimmered beneath the glittering rain. The great house would indeed be a prize to hand to Parliament. But even more so the man inside it. The Earl of Langlinais. The thorn in his side. The irritant worth marching his men and cannon in pouring rain.
He turned and surveyed his companions. The bulk of his troops made camp some two miles behind, just west of Lange on Terne.
“We will be in place by mid-morning? Even in this downpour?”
One of his aides nodded. “Yes, General.” The assent meant his men would be marched all night. Sometimes a necessity in battle.
He turned and raised his spyglass to the sight of the house again. He wished he knew if his earlier thoughts were true, that the earl was involved in a plot to seek help from the Scots. Regardless, Stephen Harrington would be cut off from any assistance, English or Scot.
The earl had evidently expected difficulty. He had dispatched one of his scouts just an hour ago. The earl should have taken the precaution of sending them out in tandem, Penroth thought. There was less danger of them being removed one by one. But the earl’s mistake would be to the Parliamentarians’ advantage.
General Penroth smiled in anticipation.
Chapter 17
Stephen placed the codex back into its coffer, locked it away where it would be safe. One last survey of his desk assured him that he had left nothing behind.
A branch of candles lit the way to his suite of rooms. The sound of muted laughter echoed through the corridor. A last tankard of ale, one final night of camaraderie before returning to war. The remainder of his regiment had arrived at Harrington Court that afternoon in preparation for a dawn departure. Wives had been kissed good-bye, sweethearts promised a safe return. He wondered how many pretty maids employed here would weep into the corner of their apron come morning.
He entered his suite, closed the door softly behind him. He’d not had a manservant since leaving London and had not felt the lack. In war there was so little privacy that he relished the moments when they came. A valet or personal aide would have been an intrusion. But tonight he felt too solitary. As if he, among all of the inhabitants of Harrington Court, was the only one to be alone and without companionship.
Sleep was not, surprisingly, difficult before a battle. Perhaps it was because his mind decreed that his body needed rest in order to fight for its survival the next day. Against a tree, on a sagging cot, huddled beneath a blanket, he’d managed to sleep. But tonight, he suspected, rest would not come as easily.
Until he’d received the summons from the king, he’d not realized how much anger had been a part of his decision to return home. Charles listened to men who flattered and fawned, not to men who’d fought the battles and faced death every day. Or he paid heed to his nephew, Prince Rupert, a man who did not mind using the men of the Langlinais Regiment of Horse as chess pieces or cannon fodder.
His respite from the war had not changed the nature of it.
He didn’t anticipate returning to it. Yet he would. Another inconsistency in a life filled with them. He was no Roundhead, yet he was considered as stern as a Puritan. He secretly questioned the Royalist cause; at the same time he was sought out and lauded by those who had the king’s ear. He hated war, yet his regiment was the most victorious of all the Royalist cavalry.
But the incongruities of his life stretched beyond the battlefield. His life in London had not been a celibate one, yet the last two years had been temperate. In a house filled with people he was lonely. He was a commander who counseled respect for women, yet his waking thoughts and nightly dreams were filled with images of a woman he was honor-bound to protect.
He should have said good-bye to her. Anne. What would he have said? What could there be said? Wait for me. The timing was uncertain. His survival was uncertain. Stay. A statement he could not have made. The message would have been clear, honorable intent. But he could not make promises to anyone other than the king.
Duty. Honor. Loyalty. They had never been such strict taskmasters as they were now.
Anne turned the door handle to his chamber, pushed it open silently.
He stood at the window, staring off into the distance. He might have been anyone in the shadows of night. A Roman soldier, or a Greek masquerading as a god. He might have been a pagan, his face bearing the lines of strong forebears. Men who’d lived in forests and worshipped deities, and who called upon the heavens to deliver them from the rumble of thunder and the fear of lightning.
She entered the room, closed the door behind her, each motion cloaked in silence. But her footfalls must have whispered against the wooden floor or her breath been too loud, because he turned.
He studied her in the faint light.
“You should not be here, Anne.” It was the voice of the commander.
She nodded, walked slowly toward him.
“No,” she said, agreeing. “I shouldn’t be. But you will be gone tomorrow, and that should not occur either.”
Her fingers reached out and brushed against the fabric of his shirt.
“Go away, Anne.” His voice was a ribbon of whisper.
She dropped her hand, but she didn’t turn and leave the room. Instead, she tilted her head back and looked at him. His eyes were dark with shadows. No twinkling stars, no hint of humor. Perhaps there was anger there. Certainly wariness. Prudence. Circumspection. All those various emotions that indicated that he was more adept at restraint than she.
She should have felt shamed. A woman of Dunniwerth was not to offer herself without benefit of marriage. Or if she did, it was to a man who was bound to her by oaths and promises. What of visions? And a sense of wonder? Were they not bonds as strong? What of the feeling that he and she had been destined to stand this way, in silence and in surrender, each battling their separate wills and their worlds?
The silence seemed white and fragile, a hush of snowflakes. Or the hours before dawn when even the birds still and bury their heads beneath their wings. Even the candles did not sputter but glowed quietly.
He said nothing else, spoke no further words of banishment. But neither did he welcome her. He might have been a statue. An effigy of stone that nonetheless breathed.
She closed her eyes. Let her heart speak. Or her mind. A hundred different times she’d seen him cascaded into her thoughts.
Stephen.
A boy, a youth, this man. Smiling, frowning, laughing, experiencing life in all its fullness. This moment was only another piece of a greater picture. A vision that she created with longing. A scene that she could replay a thousand times in her mind.
Stephen.
A cry from the soul. A fervent and nearly insane wish.
She felt, rather than saw, his movement. His hands reached up and gripped her arms. Not tightly, but not gently, either.
Her lashes fluttered open, her head tipped back.
His face was fierce, his eyes narrowed. His lips were compressed tightly.
“There are men coupling with women tonight. But they will not remember their names in the morning. Is that what you want, Anne?”
“Yes,” she said. “The coupling, Stephen, not the forgetting.”
He removed his hands from her as if her sleeves had grown fiery.
“I am neither a Puritan nor a despoiler of innocents, Anne. But a man somewhere in between. Go back to your chamber.”
His face eased into an expression she more readily associated with him. A carefully controlled watchfulness. As if he guarded even the look in his eyes.
She reached up and placed her hands on either side of his f
ace. “It is my life and my future, Stephen. It is not yours to guide or to protect.”
“Someone must, Anne,” he said gently.
“Do you think I have not thought about this? That it is something I do lightly?” Her thumbs brushed the corners of his lips. “Tomorrow you will leave, Stephen, and I will never see you again.”
Her words dared him to refute it, to say something calming, speech that hinted at a future between them. But he remained mute.
“If you send me from here, Stephen, let it be because you do not want me,” she said, the words pushed past the constraints of her pride. “Not because your honor bids you to.”
“You’re either too innocent or too brave, Anne, I don’t know which.”
“Courage is easy when you have nothing to lose,” she said. “And if my innocence is such a burden, then recommend one of your regiment to rid me of it. Give me an hour, Stephen. I will return more experienced, if that is what you wish.”
His fingers pressed against her lips.
She clasped his wrist, pulled his hand free.
The candlelight was reflected in his eyes. Where they had been watchful before, they seemed to glow like fire now.
“I can offer you nothing, Anne.”
There, the truth of it. The sheer barrier that stood between them. She did not rip it aside by asking him for more revelations of intent or emotion.
She had come to him in love. And carried her heart within her cupped hands. There had been bridges built between them, those of laughter and learning and Latin. She wished one more. A joining at its most elementary.
She wanted to have the image of him naked in her mind. A vision to carry for the rest of her life. A recollection that she might retrieve when she dreamed of him. She wanted to feel his skin against hers, to be indoctrinated into the sisterhood of women with lambent eyes and soft, curving lips. She wanted to bid farewell to him with the taste of his kisses still on her mouth.
She did not require his vow of love for that. Or his pretense. Tomorrow he would leave, and all the wishing and wondering and hoping wouldn’t keep him safe. She’d learned that. A silly girl had left Scotland, certain that circumstance would keep her from being harmed. Instead, Hannah had been injured and Douglas was missing. She accepted the responsibility, the knowledge that it had been her actions that had caused those things to happen. Just as she shouldered the guilt for them.
This moment was no different.
She accepted all that might come to her from this act.
“Give me what you can, Stephen. This night.”
She thought she might be able to hear his thoughts at this moment. He was perplexed by her, she knew that. And yet, as much confusion as she engendered in him, there was another emotion, too. One that thrummed between them as strong as life itself.
She held both his hands, cupped them together, and placed a soft kiss on the two joined palms. She laid her cheek against the bowl of them. “I don’t want to wonder,” she confessed. “For all the years left to me, I don’t want to wish I had come to you tonight and feel regret that I did not.”
His fingers curled against her skin. The rasp of his indrawn breath told her that he was not unaf fected. Not the statue he would have her believe him.
Her arms moved toward him. So slowly that they gave him ample warning. But he stood immobile and mute before her as she wrapped them around his neck. One more small step, and she was so close that a breath could not separate them. Her bare toes touched his boots.
For a moment he did not move, then his hand fisted in her hair, pulled her head back. This man was not severe, nor stern. Certainly not controlled. His breathing was as rapid as hers.
“Give me tonight, Stephen.”
His mouth descended on hers, his lips hot and hard and insistent. This was not gentle exploration but demand. There was darkness behind her lids, a heaviness in her limbs. She strained upward to meet the insistent kiss, to part her lips and inhale his breath and feel the touch of his tongue. Not seduction but welcomed passion. She was no innocent at the moment of her deflowering as much as a woman craving the same delight as this man. The fact that she had never experienced it meant little to her.
“I want to remember this,” she said, countering the ticking moments. “Make me remember.”
With each breath her awareness of him expanded, as did a sense of life itself. His finger beneath her chin tilted her head up at a better angle. The heat of his breath warmed hers. His heart mimicked the beat of her own. His hand upon her back felt heated, fingers and thumbs pressing against her clothed skin.
The fabric of the dress felt too coarse, too con fining, as if her body swelled and readied itself in anticipation for this act of mystery.
His palm curved around her breast. His mouth inhaled her gasp. Not one of protest, but rather awareness. Delight in a touch. His thumb brushed against her nipple, encouraging it to peak beneath the fabric. Her fingers spread wide then gripped his shoulders.
He pulled back from their kiss. She stood before him, eyes wide, staring up into his face. His hand still cupped her breast. There was a look in his eyes she’d never seen before. It was not gentle nor was it tender. A warrior’s gaze.
His thumb reached out and brushed across her bottom lip, as if measuring the distance from corner to corner. He was master in this, effortless at seduction. She closed her eyes at the feelings his touch evoked, then just as quickly opened them again. There was a look on his face, an inquiry in his eyes, a slight smile on his lips as if he contemplated her capacity for surrender. She answered not with a word but with a gesture.
When he would have moved his hand, she held her own over it. She pressed his hand upon her breast and held it there.
He smiled and slowly reached out and pulled her laces open. He undid the knot with practiced ease. Delicately. Slowly.
Her own breaths measured the movements of his hands. And silently implored him to hurry. With each ticking moment, he spun out the act, treating the baring of this inch of skin as an almost sacred ritual.
Finally, her bodice gaped open, the shift bared.
He bent and kissed her between her breasts, a soft kiss on the thin linen that covered her body. A brand of heat and lips and intent.
She trembled. Slowly, so exquisitely slow that she could count the heartbeats until he did so, he pulled down the shift and touched her bared skin with his fingers. Just that. A touch of one fingertip against her skin.
A slight smile was his reaction to her gasp.
Her head fell back, her hands clutched at him. But he gently brushed her hands aside, reached down and pulled her dress over her head. Just as quickly the remainder of her garments followed. In seconds, a fraction of the time it took her to get dressed in the morning, she was naked.
Her hands reached to cover herself, then fell to her sides.
It was not fear she felt at this moment but a melting warmth. As if Stephen had kissed her for hours and her heart still raced with the feeling of it.
“I’ve dreamed of you this way,” he said, a confession that stoked a fire deep within her. “I wondered if your breasts were full, the tips brown or pink.” A stroke of fingertip upon a nipple accompanied his words. “They are neither,” he said, “but a soft shade of coral.” His fingers measured the curve of her breasts, his thumbs brushed against the nipples slowly.
Her eyes closed, her fingers fluttered against his shirt like tiny butterflies adrift in the wind.
Remember this. A command that pierced the languorous haze that enveloped her. Remember how his voice sounded. Low and almost rasping. Breath less. The stroke of his finger upon her skin, the callused palm brushing against her breast, the fingertip so gentle upon her nipple.
And this. He kissed her between her breasts, his breath hot, his lips tender. And then upon her breast. Not shocking as much as delicious. He traced a path too slowly to her nipple. Her fingers pressed upon his cheek as if to hurry him. She felt his smile against her skin. Then only the touch o
f lips and tongue.
Both hands cupped her breast, framed it for his kiss. He glanced up, saw her watching him. The tip of her tongue brushed against her bottom lip. His mimicked the gesture upon the tip of her breast.
Her eyes fluttered shut when his lips encompassed her nipple, sucked gently. A ribbon of dark feeling ran through her.
“Sweet,” he said, and another sensation drifted over her, a heat unlike anything she’d ever known. It was as if she had been opened up inside and had been left vacant and black and receptive. Into this void he came and filled all the various parts of it with himself.
He straightened, kissed her closed lids one by one. Gentle insistence. She blinked open her eyes. Innocent or wanton, it no longer mattered. He held out his hand, and she put hers atop it. He led her through the doorway to his bedchamber. Then to his bed. Naked, she accompanied him, the journey one of blurred desire.
It was a word she’d heard. One to measure emotion. Fear and hate and anger and joy. They were all emotions, too. But she’d never known the meaning of this word. Desire. Or that it was this pow erful. She would have defied any custom or any country for him. For the touch of his hands and the seduction of his kisses she would have done nearly anything.
How could she bear more?
She put her knee atop the mattress, turned and watched him. He returned to the other room, retrieved the branch of candles. Placing them on the candlestand, he undressed quickly. Each garment being removed revealed more of him to her greedy eyes.
There were men of all sizes and shapes at Dunniwerth, and she had seen her share of bared legs and chests. They were burly men, her Scots clansmen. Tall and strong with arms like tree trunks.
Stephen’s muscles were finely honed, not from tossing cabers but from wielding a sword, riding a stallion. She studied him with none of the maidenly reserve he might well have expected from her, but with an utter and frank delight.
The candlelight cast shadows over him, illuminated him as he turned and tossed his shirt to a chair. His buttocks were round, with flat planes over his hips. A place for her palms. A thought she ached to test.
