It was entirely permissible among the people of Venn to weep with joy at sighting home after trials at sea. For the first time in weeks, Eloise sobbed.
* * * * *
After the public ceremonies in which he was officially embraced and returned to the fold of royal approval, Severin was included in a more private audience. There was a lull before things properly started. Court officials and nobles of highest degree stood around informally, refreshing themselves with wine while they waited for business to begin.
“Well,” said Arnauld, clapping him on the shoulder. “You’re looking better now, Severin.”
“Thank you, your majesty.” The bruises were certainly faded out, though some injuries would take longer to heal. And his right hand…after they’d crushed the fingertips, two of his fingers had turned black and refused to heal. The King’s own chirurgeon had amputated his smallest finger and half of the one next to it in order to stop the rot spreading.
“You understand it was necessary, don’t you?”
“Of course.”
“I would have taken your word for it, but you know that your innocence had to be established publicly, for everyone to see.”
“Yes. I know.”
“So.” He clasped Severin’s shoulders and hugged him briefly before thrusting him to arm’s length. “You will forgive me, won’t you?”
Severin looked him in the eye and said nothing. The room went silent.
“Come on, man.” Arnauld was vexed. “I want you to forgive me.”
He dipped his head. “I am your loyal servant, your majesty, now and ever. You know that.”
Arnauld’s brows knotted. “You used to be my friend.”
Again, Severin did not reply. That he could look the King in the eye like that and say nothing made every other man in the room goggle.
“What’s your price, Severin?” Arnauld’s teeth showed under his lip. “Money? Lord Chancellor,” he called over his shoulder; “the baron’s annual income from the treasury is to be doubled.”
“Thank you, your majesty,” said Severin mildly, coldly.
“Land? I’m not giving you land. I don’t want to risk you becoming ambitious like these other wolves.”
“Ambition isn’t my vice, your majesty. You know that.”
“Then you tell me, what is the price of your forgiveness?”
Severin curled his lip. “Because of what I did for you, you lost a queen. Because of me an innocent maiden will never now be wed. Because of me the Earl of Venn will never have an heir. My name is poison on every lip, your majesty. My price? Give me back my honor.”
“Your honor?” Arnauld took a step back, raised his hands and shrugged. “Then…you marry the girl.” He looked round the room as if expecting some challenge. “Why not? Give the Earl of Venn a grandson.”
No emotion showed in Severin’s guarded countenance, but something stirred in the depths of his hard black eyes. He tilted his head questioningly.
“Not a full marriage, of course,” amended Arnauld. “No land to come with it, Severin. I need to know that you are my man. Left-hand contract. But…take the girl. I command it, in fact. Give her your name. It’s better than none, isn’t it?”
“Sometimes I doubt that, your majesty.” Tightly, he smiled.
Chapter Six
They married in the chapel of Venn Keep, before the statue of Mithras the Oathkeeper. There were no guests, and the only witnesses were Eloise’s father, a handful of castle servants and his personal guard.
* * * * *
On her wedding night, caught in the undertow of her climax as if by fierce waves, Eloise sobbed into the coverlet of the marital bed, unable to stifle her tears. Tears that were the last dregs of a vat of loneliness she had carried within her. Tears of emotional exhaustion and shock. Tears, above all, of release.
At once Severin grew still, no longer thrusting into her. He laid one hand on the small of her back and held it there as she shook beneath him, then slid his fingers up her spine in a long caress. Her body had ached so fiercely for his touch, for so long, that pleasure rippled through her skin from his fingertips like an echo of her orgasm and she couldn’t help a low cry escaping her lips.
Instantly he withdrew his hand. Then he stooped over her, his lips to her ear.
Eloise swallowed her sobs, holding her breath so that she could catch his words. The official witnesses no longer mattered to her. All her longing was for some expression of affection. Some sign that he wanted her, that he’d yearned for her, that he took delight in their union.
His voice was ragged with strain. “It’s done.”
Then he pulled out. She saw his hand reach for her torn shift. First of all he wiped himself off on the white silk, then he swabbed the wet mouth of her sex, and finally he thrust the crumpled cloth out through the curtain of the bed and tossed it to the floor. She heard footfalls on the boards.
Her heart felt as if it had frozen in her breast.
“Good night, my lord de Meynard,” came the murmur through the curtains. Then more footsteps, and the sound of several people whispering, and the noise of a door opening and closing. Followed by silence.
Well, she thought nauseously, my bursting into tears isn’t going to have done anything to improve his reputation.
Without a word Severin rose from where he knelt behind her and descended from the bed. His throwing back the heavy curtain let in a draft of cooler air and a gleam of candlelight. Eloise rolled to her side, watching as her husband kicked his hose off and tracked back and forth across the room, ignoring her. He went to the chamber door and shot the bolt. Then he checked behind the window hanging and the arras, lifted the lids of the chests and glanced behind the screen that shielded the chamber pot. Firelight danced on his naked skin, clothing him with guttering shadows. Finally he turned back to the bed and walked all around, drawing back the curtains before stooping to glance beneath the frame. Eloise sat up slowly, wondering.
He was still hard. He hadn’t come to his own crisis when he took her, she realized. But he seemed to be ignoring the thick jut of his erection, even now as he turned back to her at last.
“Ella,” he whispered. She stared, trying to read his expression, but his face was as inscrutable as ever. Slowly he crooked the fingers of his hand in a tiny wordless gesture. Whether it was invitation or summoning was left for her to guess.
She was his wife now. What should she do but obey him? What, in truth, had she ever done except obey him—other than once, in an inn in Rounay? Sliding her legs over the edge of the bed, she dropped her heels to the floorboards. But her legs were less dutiful. Suddenly wobbly, they refused to take her weight and she sat back against the mattress. Severin was left to take the initiative, and he closed on her until they were almost touching. Eloise looked up, her gaze skating over his lean hips and his darkly erect cock, over his flat stomach and the black-flecked spread of his chest. There was such power in his frame that it made her feel fragile. Every part of him was hard and unyielding and ominous, and though her body ached for him she was acutely aware that she was more scared of him, now that he was her lawful husband, than she had ever been when he was a stranger. These days she knew only too well how cruelly he could hurt her—and that it would take nothing more than a word. Or the refusal to speak. She looked into his face, caught by those dark eyes and those wicked black brows, those narrowed lips that never gave anything away. He’d always been almost impossible for her to read, his private life carrying on unseen behind his visage as if in a house with all the shutters barred. She’d glimpsed only in rare moments on their journey together his passion and his anguish.
So it took her completely by surprise when he sank to his knees before her, almost between her open thighs, and clasped her hips in his hands.
“Ella.” His voice was hushed and strained.
She opened her mouth to speak his name but the word wouldn’t come to her lips. She saw her fingers steal out to stroke his temple. Severin grunted softly and
bowed his head, burying his face between her breasts. She felt his lips brush their inner slopes, and then the caress of his breath as he exhaled, shuddering.
“I’m standing by a river,” he said.
Eloise had no idea what he meant but she could hear his despair. She buried one hand in his hair as if she could pluck his thoughts from his head, and wrapped the other about his shoulders, filled with amazement.
“I’m standing by a river as darkness falls. I’m listening to the sound of the water rushing at my back and you’re telling me that you love me. Every word cuts me open. Every word, Ella. You’re telling me that you love me. And I know that I have betrayed you, and it is worse than anything I have done in my life. But I also know that this time…this time I will tell you that I love you too. I will tell you that everything has changed. That nothing else matters to me more. That we will leave the riverbank together and never look behind us. That I will never leave you. That we will be together, however short or long our lives.” His voice caught on something jagged. “I have been by that river for six months, Ella. Every night in the darkness. Every moment I’m alone. On the stinking floor in the royal oubliette under Kingsholme, with the rats running across my feet. I have never left that riverbank.” His fingers tightened on her. “I am still there.”
Stunned, she slipped one hand under his chin and tilted his face up so that he must look at her. Her heart hammered now, so loud and fast that she was sure he must be able to hear it. “Severin,” she whispered, the tears slipping from her eyes and wetting his cheeks.
“Little mouse…I thought that my duty to Arnauld came above all else. I was wrong. I made the wrong decision. Oh God…I should never have brought you home. Can you forgive me?”
Forgive him? For all his pride and blind devotion and obduracy? For all the hurt he’d put her through? Even as she moistened her lips she was nodding assent. “I love you,” she whispered.
“I know,” he answered, just as he had done on the riverbank. “And I love you, Ella. More than my life. More than my King. More than all the world.”
“Oh!” she breathed, shaping the sound more than giving it voice. Yet that Oh pierced into her, deep into her soul, growing greater and warmer and brighter as it rose, until her whole being was alight and trembling with the Oh of it. She wiped at the tears on his face even as more of hers fell to join them, then bent to press her lips on his. It was like finding each other after a shipwreck, it was like drawing air into throats that had been choked with brine. In the many tearful kisses that followed—blurred, fervent kisses that lingered and repeated and built upon each other, like the lapping of waves—she tasted the sea’s salt. She tasted his pain and his endurance and his terrible isolation, as bitter as her own. When their lips broke apart she raked her hands through his hair and kissed his face all over. “I never told anyone. Not a word. I did what you said, Severin.”
“I know. I know, my love, my little mouse. You were true, you were strong.”
“I was so afraid for you!”
He let out an exhalation that sounded like agony and his hand cupped her face. “You’re not afraid now, are you?”
“No.”
He wrapped his maimed hand about hers and kissed her palm. “You mustn’t be. Not here, not now, little mouse. You’re mine again.”
“I was always yours.”
“Ah.” He grinned crookedly, and if it hadn’t been Severin she would have said his expression was sheepish—with perhaps a touch of heat. “Yes. I remember.”
“Oh, before Rounay even.”
“Oh?” He arched a brow.
“Do you know what they say, here on Venn? That if you save someone from the sea, they are bound to you forever. That their blood will turn to salt water if they ever cast you aside. So I am yours, Severin de Meynard.”
“As I am yours,” said he, his fingers twining in her hair.
It was her turn to look questioning. “But I didn’t save you.”
“I think you did.”
Eloise didn’t know how to answer that. She put her fingers on his lips, tracing the soft curve of his smile as if to reassure herself of his reality. “Was it wicked of me to love you? I couldn’t help it.”
“Ella…”
“You know that I wanted you even before I knew you well enough to honor you? That was wicked, wasn’t it?”
His hand deserted hers and slid back to her hip, his grip insistent. “Well, then we are both equally guilty.”
“That night in Rounay. If I hadn’t…”
“I give my soul in thanks that you did, Ella. Don’t hint at remorse.”
“It’s not remorse. What if we had not? How would I have lived my life without you?”
Severin used her hair to bring her to his lips once more. His kiss was bruising in its admonishment. “The world has brought us here,” he whispered fiercely. “Here. Now. There is nothing else. No one else but you and me. Don’t let anything come between us and joy.”
She traced her fingers down from his temple, over his jaw, down his throat, onto his chest. The world blurred as the hunger for him filled her. “Yet there is something you haven’t finished.”
His voice had thickened. “Yes. I was thinking of that.”
He rose, lifting her and laying her back upon the bed so that he could move over her. That simple shift of position brought the heat bubbling to Eloise’s sex and a surge in her blood as her body prepared to welcome him. But he delayed, prolonging the exquisite frustration. First his lips found hers, and then they found her bare breasts, kissing those soft mounds as if they were holy, nursing upon her nipples until they were flushed pink and swollen and slippery and she moaned out loud with the sweetness of his suckling. In response, he bit her tenderly before making a sudden move down between her legs, spreading her thighs so that he could lick their soft inner surfaces, lapping at her clit until she moaned and bucked. Oh, his mouth—his kisses—the touch and the smell and the weight of him, the hardness and the tender gentleness. He was everything in her world. He was the rock beneath her and the sea washing around her, he was the hammering wind and the sky full of stars.
She was soaring.
The tormenting pleasure of his tongue was so overwhelming that she covered her face with her hands and arched her back, her hips writhing. But he didn’t let her fall. He raised himself again, looming over her so that he could look into her face.
“Severin,” she whispered, stroking him pleadingly.
“Oh God. I’m not a good man, Ella. You don’t need me to tell you that.”
“Aren’t you?” Her voice was husky with desire. Her hand sought his cock and found it sleek and rigid and eager, just as she remembered—and just as wonderful. Severin made a noise of deep appreciation but managed to stay focused.
“Not by the way the world reckons such things. But I swear I will try to make it up to you, Ella—all you have been through, all the hurt you have borne for my sake. I will make it up.”
Eloise circled her arms about his back. “You’re good enough for me,” she said, drawing him down upon her as she opened her body to him.
He didn’t answer except with a long-drawn groan. But he started making good on his promise. Bluntly searching all the slippery open parts he had readied, his cock head sent frissons of delight through her nerves as it sought out the wet hollow of her sex. It stung upon her abraded tissues as he pressed deeper, but as he found his mark and entered her, that ceased to matter at all. Stretching her wide, he filled her completely, all his weight and his girth and his strength nesting in the cup of her sex. She looked at him in glazed wonder, at the braced pillars of his arms and the hard muscles of his shoulders and the taut incline of his stomach. Already his skin was glistening with effort and she realized with an intuitive rush that it was the strain of holding himself back, of taking it slowly instead of ramming her so hard that she screamed.
“This is all I dreamed of,” Severin whispered, moving his hips in such a way as to thrust deeper into
her and at the same time grind down on her licked and swollen clit. Eloise let out an involuntary gasp as arousal kicked through her. “I will not fall first,” he warned.
And he is nothing if not a man who keeps his word. She understood then that there was nothing for it but to surrender—to him, to his impaling cock, to the heat pulsing inside her with every push of his hips. Rocking her beneath him on that great dark bed, he pushed the rest of the world away, thrust by thrust and inch by inch. Very soon there was nothing but his cock delving inside her and his arms about her and his face over hers. There was nothing but their hunger for each other, flesh and heart, and the more he filled her the more she hungered. Far sooner than she could have anticipated, in fact, her need built to a roaring storm front. She began to gasp and mew, and was grateful when he shifted his weight and put one hand over her mouth—it gave her the freedom to cry out.
With that he unleashed the full force of his desire. Groaning, he began to pound his cock harder and harder inside her. Skin slapped and slithered and wept salt. His thrusts were ferocious, but by then she could take it, she welcomed it, and in the end they fell together, more or less, in a hot tangle of limbs into the deep, dark ocean below.
Afterward they stretched out on the rumpled coverlet and Severin rolled Eloise to lie on top of him, her head upon his chest. She could feel the warm melt of their sweat binding them together and hear the strong, hard beat of his heart. Under her cheek the tight skin of one of those new scars cut a smooth track through the hair. Eloise didn’t want to imagine how he’d received it. She reached out and took his right hand, the one with the missing fingers, and she drew it to her lips to kiss it with awestruck gratitude.
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