“You’ll ache more before this is done, I fear.”
“So I am told.”
Jocelyn didn’t miss the lad’s quick, deferential glance at his new master. She could see it had taken de Rhys only a few days to earn his respect and that of her small troop.
Even less to earn hers.
She couldn’t help but think of how it had taken him mere hours to change from the filthy, ragtag slave she’d purchased in El-Arish to the steel-voiced knight who’d ordered her to remove both her clothing and his. To this day Jocelyn wasn’t sure how he’d turned the tables on her so swiftly.
Now he was back in his own milieu. He ordered the disposition of her men with the instinctive air of one used to command. They sensed that he knew whereof he spoke and followed without hesitation where he led.
Confident that she could leave them in his care, she addressed the sergeant of her guard once more. “Sir Hugh should arrive late this night or early in the morning with supplies and reinforcements.”
“Aye, lady. Sir Simon told us.”
“Until the morrow, then.”
“Until the morrow. God keep you.”
Simon fell in beside her as they retraced their steps. Smiling, she commented on her observation that he’d won the trust of her men.
“Your name falls readily from their lips.”
“Not nearly as often as yours does.” He held a branch aside for her. “They do you credit, lady. They’re well trained and quick to follow orders.”
“That’s more Sir Hugh’s doing than mine.”
“I beg to differ. Everyone in a keep, from the boys who muck the stables to the most senior knight, take their tone from their lord. Or in this case, their lady.”
She acknowledged the truth of his comment with a shrug that in no way made light of the burden she carried night and day. She’d been born to high honors. They were her right, and her constant, unceasing responsibility.
Her steps slowed and she paused in a patch of shade. In truth she was in no great hurry to return to the queen’s tent. It was a noisy, crowded place. The nobles who’d supported Melisande in her struggle to hold on to the reins of power still deferred to her judgment. Her son’s adherents were no less loath to seek the advice of one who’d ruled so wisely for so many years. Even Baldwin had made an appearance at his mother’s tent soon after they’d encamped, with promises to return again to share the evening meal.
When he did, Jocelyn would ask to speak privately with him. She hadn’t forgotten the reason for her hasty journey. How could she? With this latest incursion by the Fatamids, an alliance with the Emir of Damascus had become even more crucial. Her chest went tight at the thought of the firestorm that would erupt when she revealed her altered state and—she prayed!—unsuitability as a bride for Ali ben Haydar.
Swallowing her fears, she ran a palm over the scaly bark of a low-hanging branch and lifted her gaze to Simon’s. He’d removed his helmet and pushed back his mail hood, leaving his hair to stand in sweaty spikes. She had to dig her nails into the bark to keep from reaching up to smooth the strands.
“Will you remove to the Templars’ camp when Sir Hugh arrives?”
He didn’t pretend to misunderstand her. They both knew they’d been gifted by these few extra days together. They dared not tempt fate by demanding more.
“I think it best.”
“Do you…? Do you wish me to ask the king if he’ll stand sponsor to you with the Grand Master? It would speed your initiation.”
The blue eyes looking down into her darkened. “I can’t ask more of you than you’ve already given me.”
How she ached for this man’s touch. Longed for his kiss. Was she so perverse that she wanted only what she could not have?
“I could give you more, Simon.” The words spilled out before she could stop them. “I could beg the king for a different boon. Ask him to speak with the Grand Master about releasing you from your father’s vow.”
She saw hope flare in his eyes, swiftly come and just as swiftly gone.
“I won’t forswear myself.”
His insistence on clinging to the shreds of his father’s honor stirred a welter of most contradictory emotions in Jocelyn’s breast. Admiration and frustration. Pride and despair. Atop all swirled the realization that by holding fast to his vow he would be lost to her forever.
She’d been raised by a grandsire who would cut off his arm before he would lift a sword against his sworn liege. Three days ago she would have wagered all she owned that her grandfather’s blood ran true in her. Never had she dreamed that she would ask—or allow—a man to go back on an oath once given. Yet she couldn’t hold in an urgent plea that he rethink his obligation.
“You’re not responsible for your father’s sins, Simon.”
When he stood stubbornly silent, her frustration flared into reckless determination. She pressed her hips against the low-hanging branch, tipped her head and laid her palms on his broad chest.
“Nor should you allow him to bind you to a life of celibacy.”
Still he wouldn’t speak. Goaded, she dug her fingertips in the leather surcoat covering his mail.
“You’ve given me a taste of the pleasures a man and woman may share. Do you not wish to show me more? Do you not want me, as you’ve made me want you?”
Hundreds of armed men were camped within shouting distance. Smoke from their cook fires and from the pyres of Blanche Garde drifted on the air. Yet the thick branches and screen of green, rubbery leaves gave her the illusion that there were only the two of them. Alone. Together. This one last time.
“Let me speak to the king,” Jocelyn pleaded. “Or to the queen. If you prove yourself here, they would grant you a holding. You could take a wife. Have sons and daughters to give you comfort. Hell’s teeth, Simon, don’t you want someone who will love you and—”
With a snarl, he fisted his hands around her upper arms.
“Yes, I want that! And you, Jocelyn. I ache for you. So much I must needs use every ounce of my will to keep from spinning you around, bending you over that branch and dragging up your skirts so I might bury myself in your hot, wet flesh. Is that what you wish to hear?”
It was! Of a certainty, it was!
Her triumph must have shown in her eyes because the face so close to her own hardened. She read his intent even as he swooped down to cover her mouth with his.
The kiss was meant to punish, and it did. His lips ground against hers. His fingers dug into the flesh of her upper arms. She felt their bite before he loosed his hands and banded an arm around her waist. Widening his stance, he hauled her hard against his chest.
Too late Jocelyn realized she’d prodded a sleeping dragon. She couldn’t escape its ferocious assault. Nor, she admitted as her blood pounded in her veins, did she wish to.
This wasn’t the cold, dispassionate knight who’d ordered her to remove her robes. Nor yet the skilled lover who’d brought her to such exquisite pleasure. This was a man with his blood up. One who at the least sign of surrender would take her as violently as he’d threatened.
She came within a hairbreadth of that surrender. Every part of her ached to feel again the exquisite torment of his fingers stroking her flesh. His rigid shaft stretching her. His length filling her.
Yet even as she opened her mouth to the brutal assault of his tongue and teeth, she knew she couldn’t destroy what she admired most in this man. Whether she willed it or not, he held his honor dearer than his life. And would come to hate her if she stripped it from him.
Gasping, she tried to pull away. He countered by shoving a hand through her hair to hold her head still. His mouth took hers.
“Simon!” Jocelyn broke her lips away as she pounded his unyielding form. “Simon, I beg you…”
It took some moments for her protests to pierce his unleashed lust. When they did, his head came up. His eyes burned into hers for long moments before he thrust her away almost violently.
“Get you back to the queen’s
tent.”
She couldn’t leave him like this. In a futile effort to soothe the fearsome creature she’d released from its chains, she held out a hand.
“Simon…”
“Now, woman!”
Jocelyn could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times she’d cowered in the face of danger. This was one of them. Grasping her skirts in shaking hands, she fled the copse of almond trees.
Simon didn’t call her back, although keeping silent took every shred of his iron will.
She wanted him. As much as he wanted her. She’d ripped the truth from the depths of his soul, and now he must live with the echo of that raw admission for the rest of his life. Every time he knelt in prayer, he would have to force his mind to God instead of thoughts of her. Every time he swung a sword in battle, his enemy would have the face of the man Jocelyn would soon wed.
The thought of another man’s hands and mouth on her took everything that Simon was and twisted it in knots. Not for the first time since Jocelyn had taken him to her bed, he considered forswearing himself. According to the Bishop of Clairvaux, such an act would condemn his dissolute sire—and himself—to eternal damnation. Right now, with the taste of her still on his lips and his blood clamoring for more, Simon would count the cost well worth it.
Slowly, like the insistent rays of the sun burning through a gray mist, reason reasserted itself. Even if he did abandon his honor and all thoughts of joining the Knights Templar, Jocelyn was the Lady of Fortemur, with all the honors and chains that came with it. Neither the king nor his mother would consider giving such a rich prize to the landless younger son of a knight whose very name carried the stink of dishonor.
His face as bleak as his soul, Simon spit out a foul oath and turned toward the camp.
Jocelyn’s chest didn’t stop heaving or her knees shaking until she was in the shadow of the queen’s tent. Even then she had to fold her arms around her waist and pace outside until her heart slowed its frantic hammering.
It had yet to resume a regular beat when a page scurried out of the tent and held up the flap. A moment later, Queen Melisande herself emerged. Her jeweled coronet sparkled in the waning light, as did the gold and silver stitchery in the surcoats of the two nobles who followed her out.
Jocelyn was too unsettled to join the queen. Succumbing to a cowardly urge, she tried to duck behind the tent. She’d taken only one quick step, however, before Melisande spotted her.
“Lady Jocelyn?”
She dipped into a curtsy. “Majesty.”
“What have you been about?”
“I was seeing to the disposition of my men.”
The queen’s delicately arched brows drew into a straight line. Hooking an imperious finger, she commanded Jocelyn to approach.
“Why are your cheeks so flushed?”
“Are they flushed?” Shrugging, she tried to feign nonchalance. “I must have walked overfast.”
The face stamped on so many of the coins minted in the Kingdom of Jerusalem over the years took on a hard cast. Melisande didn’t posses the straight, classical nose or willowy neck sung of by troubadours. But her red-gold hair showed only a few traces of silver and her grip was firm as she pinched Jocelyn’s chin between thumb and forefinger and tipped her face to the light.
“Don’t play me for a fool, girl.” She cast a swift look at the pages, squires and courtiers observing their exchange with great interest and lowered her voice. “Do you think I don’t recognize the scrape a man’s whiskers leave on a woman’s cheeks and chin?”
“My lady…”
“Speak me no lies. Where have you been?”
“To see to my men. I swear it.”
“And which of those men put his mark on you?”
Dear sweet Lord! Jocelyn was fully prepared to accept the consequences of her desperate measures to avoid marriage to the emir. She’d known she would draw the king’s ire down on her head. The queen’s, as well, since Melisande concurred in the match.
But she would not have their wrath fall on Simon. Cursing the perversity that had made her tempt him to such violence that he’d left his mark on her, Jocelyn scrambled for an explanation that would satisfy the queen without endangering Simon. She could find none.
When she remained mute, Melisande’s eyes narrowed. “By all the saints! Are you besotted with some lowly knave who—”
She broke off and sucked in a swift breath.
“The knight who rode with you. The one who says he’s pledged to the Templars. I saw how he looked at you, and you at him. Is that who put this red in your cheeks and such despair in your heart?”
Fear for him drained whatever heat had been in Jocelyn’s cheeks. Cold to her bones, she shook her head. “If you sense despair, Majesty, it’s because of the marriage you and the king force on me.”
The queen’s mouth hardened. “You know how important this alliance is. So important that the king sent an urgent missive to the emir requesting he meet us here and claim his bride.”
“What?”
“Ali ben Haydar marches even now to join his army with ours.”
Feeling as though the ground had just shifted under her feet, Jocelyn made a desperate appeal. “Please hear me on this, milady. I cannot go willingly into marriage with him.”
“I understand your reluctance,” the queen said in what she obviously intended as a soothing tone. “Truly, I do. But too much rides on this union for us to give way to the tears and vapors of a frightened virgin.”
Jocelyn swallowed, dragged in a deep breath and lifted her chin. When her eyes met those of the queen, she didn’t speak. She didn’t have to. Melisande guessed the truth almost immediately.
“Oh, you foolish, foolish girl,” she hissed. “What have you done?”
“I—”
“Not here! Come inside. We must needs speak privately about this.”
Her heart stuttering, Jocelyn followed Melisande into her luxuriously appointed tent. As she’d assured Simon, the royal matriarch was well used to traveling the length and breadth of the kingdom. That in no way prevented her from bringing with her all she required for her comfort.
Persian carpets in rich jewel tones covered the ground. Hammered-brass lamps hung on chains from the tent poles. Folding chairs were arranged around strapped campaign trunks that doubled as eating and writing tables.
The queen’s scribe sat at one of the trunks, scribbling furiously with a quill. Her chief lady-in-waiting directed a page on the proper way to set out gold plates and goblets on another trunk. Melisande wasted no time in dismissing all three.
“Leave us, Lady Sybil. Take the others with you.”
Her tone invited no question or hesitation. Lady, scribe and page hurried to obey. When the flap dropped behind them, Melisande herself splashed wine into two goblets. She thrust one into Jocelyn’s hand and drank from the other before giving the younger woman a look that sliced like a claymore.
“I’ve known you since you were in swaddling clothes. Your mother served me well in the first years of her marriage. Your grandsire fought at my father’s side. So do not think to fob me off with lies or half truths.”
Pinned by her unrelenting stare, Jocelyn could only nod.
“Now, tell me what in the name of all the saints you’ve done.”
Chapter Ten
The moment Jocelyn had schemed for and dreaded in equal parts had arrived. Yet now that she’d come to the point of revealing what she’d done, she was caught in a trap of her own making.
Why in God’s name had she taunted Simon into such rough kisses? His beard had all but branded her. Now she would have to dance over dangerously hot coals to shield him from the queen’s wrath.
“I wrote to you and to the king both regarding my feelings toward marriage to the emir,” she began.
“Yes, you did. Several times.” Melisande waved an impatient hand. “If ben Haydar had desired any other holdings but yours, we would have offered him a different bride. But Fortemur will give him
the access to the sea he’s long desired. And you, Jocelyn, are Fortemur.”
“I won’t be if I wed the emir,” she retorted with more heat than wisdom. “I’ll become but one of his many wives, shut away in a harem. I will not live such a life, milady.”
“Will not?” The queen’s head snapped up. “You forget yourself, girl! You are a royal ward. You will wed who we say.”
“I do not forget. How could I?”
She struggled to keep bitterness from coloring her voice. Melisande had put the needs of her kingdom ahead of her own since the day of her birth. Somehow, someway, Jocelyn must convince her that those needs could be met by other means than this loathsome marriage.
“I could grant the emir’s caravans right of passage through my lands. Mayhap a portion of the port taxes. Surely that would satisfy his demands.”
“Grants may be revoked. Wives may not. In most cases,” the queen was forced to add.
“The emir doesn’t want a wife.” Jocelyn couldn’t control the bitterness now. It came from deep inside and spilled into her voice. “He wants an untried virgin to take to his bed. One he may bloody his shaft on. It’s said he gets no pleasure unless he causes pain.”
“Where did you hear such salacious rumors?”
“Where did I not! It’s common knowledge, Majesty.”
“It’s gossip of the most mean sort.”
Her tone was so cold and unyielding that Jocelyn knew she had to take another tack. In a last, desperate attempt, she appealed to the queen’s piety.
“As you reminded me not moments ago, you’ve known me since I was in swaddling clothes. Like you, I was taught from my earliest days to manage my holdings. Now you would have me relinquish that authority and give my birthright to a nonbeliever.”
“A nonbeliever who tolerates all faiths.”
Jocelyn’s heart sank. Piety, obviously, ran together with politics in the mind of a woman who’d given every day of her life to maintaining Christian control of the Holy Land.
“Need I remind you that this union has the blessing of the Church?” the queen continued coldly. “The Patriarch of Jerusalem himself reviewed the marriage contracts and is satisfied that you’ll be allowed to practice your own religion.”
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