The Mistress Of Normandy

by Susan Wiggs

  “In person,” he conceded, “you are a more earthly goddess.” He met her steady gaze. “Demanding, complex, difficult.”

  “Will you let your scruples get in the way of something we both want and need? How can it be wrong?”

  He looked down at his big, rough hands, the left one sleek with scars. Too soon, he must put a ring on the finger of another. “I can offer you nothing.”

  “You say you love me. Will you call that nothing?”

  “I don’t want to dishonor you.”

  “You dishonor me by denying my womanhood,” she said, her eyes flashing like quicksilver. “You refuse to acknowledge that I have a mind of my own, a body that sings for yours.”

  “That is precisely what I’ve been fighting. Already I love you too much, more than I should.”

  An errant breeze caused a blue flower to drift across her cheek; she caught the blossom with her hand and rubbed the petals thoughtfully over her chin. “Before I met you, I knew no love at all. Now you speak of loving too much. I do not understand.”

  In her voice he heard all the hurt and bewilderment of an orphan left to the care of castle folk. He yearned to gather her into his arms, to teach her love, yet at the same time he felt a terrible futility, for she would also suffer betrayal from him.

  He drew a ragged breath. “All my life I have had self-restraint schooled into me. A man who cannot control himself is doomed to be controlled by others. That is why I turn away from the chevauchées of my fellow knights.” Looking up, he met her wide, unblinking eyes. “Now you’ve catapulted into my life and shaken everything I’ve ever believed in.”

  “Touch me,” she said, and her compelling tone caught at his heart. “Touch me, and know that I am a woman, nothing more. Flesh and blood and bone—”

  Her words disappeared as, with a groan of fragmenting will, he closed his arms around her and pressed his mouth against hers. He tasted a powerful sweetness, felt the warmth of her awakening body as she slid her fingers into his hair. His own hands charted her supple curves while his tongue discovered the shape of her lips, the silky moistness within. His resistance peeled away like layers of heavy garments. He abandoned the knightly scruples and vows, the allegiance to an overambitious monarch, the woman who’d erected a military stronghold against him. He set his sights on a fair maid who’d confessed her desire, who’d asked nothing more than the meager gift of friendship, who’d stolen his heart with her unusual ways and sweet, sad smile.

  He lifted his mouth from hers but still held the warm, willing girl in his arms. She needed him, she wanted his love, and his heart closed exultantly around the knowledge. It was a relief to shed his ill-wrought principles—principles of a man who, until this moment, hadn’t understood so deep a love. With Justine, devotion and duty had held him in check. With Lianna, love and desire pushed him past the bounds of reason.

  He pulled back and stared into her passion-bright eyes. “If I make love to you now, you’ll hate me for it one day.”

  “I could never hate you.”

  “In sooth you could.”

  “Is lovemaking truly so disagreeable?”

  “No, it’s not that. It’s—” He broke off, then began again, loathing the necessity for secrecy. “You and I can never have more than these trysts. What if I get you with child?”

  Rather than looking alarmed, she smiled. “A child is a gift from God.”

  He thought of the cruel, raven-haired demoiselle. “Your mistress would beat you, cast you out.”

  “She’d never do that. Believe it.”

  “What about me, Lianna? I want more than secret trysts.”

  Her confused gaze caught his; he sucked in his breath. She spoke a single word, so softly that the breeze nearly snatched it from his ears. Yet he heard. “Please.”

  A groan of surrender rumbled up from deep inside him. He said, “Yes.” He caught her against him, kissed her hard. “Yes, I’ll make love to you.”

  Roses bloomed in her cheeks, and a smile curved her lips. “We won’t be sorry,” she said. Yet a shimmer of uncertainty glinted in her eyes. “But there is something I must explain.”

  As he plucked the flowers one by one from her hair, he asked, “What is that?”

  “I’ve had a scholar’s training in science and gunnery. But I know naught of pleasing a man.” Looking down at her hands, she added, “And I would please you.”

  With gentle fingers he lifted the rest of the flowers from her head. Bending, he inhaled the perfume that lingered there. “You please me simply by being Lianna,” he said.

  Her smile had the power to steal his soul and plunder his convictions. He slowly plucked at the laces of her smock, drawing the string out, parting the neckline. Her eyes were steady, calm, yet the glints of battered silver never quite left those misty depths. She was like a wounded bird who could not speak her pain to him, but who deserved all the tenderness he could offer.

  Aye, he thought, slipping the smock over her shoulders. He would be careful with this fragile creature. She’d fallen from a nest; he’d not be the one to toss her to the cat.

  The wide, square-cut neckline of her shift revealed the delicate lines of her throat and collarbone, the sheen of dew on her ivory flesh. He gulped a quick breath; the unique essence of her wafted to his soul.

  Reaching behind her, he loosed the laces of the shift and pulled the garment down. A dainty chemise remained. He bent and kissed her. All his life he’d envisioned this as an act performed in the darkness of a cool nuptial chamber. Yet here he was in full, glorious light, unveiling beauty beyond words.

  The chemise came away in his hands. She stood motionless, uncertain. The sight of her body, shining with purity, snatched his breath away. She was a harmonic poem of loveliness, a miracle of symmetry and form, from the rich mantle of her hair to her small bare feet. Shoulders and arms sleek and sturdy with delicate muscles. Small high breasts adorned with dawn-shaded tips. Hips flaring with a subtle femininity, womanly curls above her thighs. Her legs were long and finely made, the flesh pale yet kissed by roses.

  Rand was a stranger to a woman’s body. Tavern wenches and noblewomen visiting Arundel had often tried to seduce him, their desire honed by a challenge to possess the unattainable. Passionless, detached, his man’s body had resisted.

  But now, when he looked upon Lianna, he saw with his heart and soul as well as his eyes. And with his hands. He traced the curves of her torso, fingers grazing her breasts, her belly. A blush misted her throat and cheeks, but yet-to-be-discovered promises softened her lips and glazed her eyes with a lustrous sheen of passion.

  “Well?” she asked, folding her arms across her chest.

  Rand grinned at her almost childlike expectancy. “You are passing fair.”

  Her chin lifted a notch. “Is that all?”

  “You have a fine mind.”

  “Well!” Her pale eyebrows clashed, affronted.

  “You once bade me not to prate about your beauty.”

  “I’ve changed my mind. I would know what you think.”

  He took her by the shoulders and lowered his mouth to the curve of her neck. “You are magnificent.” His mouth moved lower, teeth grazing the ridge of her collarbone. “Your skin is like ivory, but warmer, more yielding—” he cradled her breast in his hand “—than the first lily of spring.” He lifted his head and stared into her eyes while his hands continued to caress her, reaching around to cup her hips. “I see something wild and fay in you, as if you were a creature conjured by a skilled sorcerer.” He bent again and took her lips with a hard, biting kiss, leaving them love-bruised and glistening.

  Her fingers shook as she touched the edge of his tunic, fingered the mail shirt beneath. Frowning, she plucked at the lace points. “Who the devil dresses you?” she asked. “Your laces are done up with knots like a friar’s scourge.”

  Rand yearned to share every aspect of his life with her, to tell her of Jack, his scutifer; of Simon, his squire; of all the people who belonged to his
other life. He nearly choked on the words crowding into his throat. He’d already said too much, lied too much. All he could offer was this flower-studded meadow, the tender spring grass beneath their feet and the gulls wheeling overhead, and the passion of a man’s body tested far past the tenets of knightly discipline.

  Driven by the need for secrecy, he tucked her head into the lee of his shoulder, tugged off King Henry’s amulet, and shoved it into a pocket of his tunic. He couldn’t allow her to see the talisman, to guess his mission. With bitter irony he recalled the motto carved around the jewel: To valiant hearts nothing is impossible. Yet like a distant comet, a future with the woman he loved eluded him. No, he thought. I’ll have her. I’ll find a way.

  He shed his clothes, the garments skimming down his marble-hard body. The late-afternoon sun bathed his skin with honeyed warmth—or more likely the fever came from within.

  Wide-eyed, she subjected him to unabashed scrutiny, and he had to remind himself of her empirical bent of mind. With a gaze of melting radiance she touched him, and with one finger, too, tracing the ridges of muscle banding his chest, arms, shoulders, following the path of golden hair down his middle, hesitating. Her eyes found his and her finger moved on, upward again.

  “I always thought you unconquerable, yet you bear half a hundred scars,” she said, finding a deep crescent at his shoulder.

  “Nicks,” he said gruffly. “Pinpricks.” In sooth neither sword nor arrowhead could inflict the exquisite agony imparted by her touch. She continued to map the contours of his body; he bore the torture like a martyr in the steely grip of an inquisitor’s iron maiden. His gaze searched her face, seeking the emotions written there, dreading to discover fear, regret.

  Instead she seemed eager with passion and endearingly curious as her hands discovered the way he was made.

  He took her hands and drew her down so that they were both kneeling, thigh to thigh, chest to chest, like supplicants in some pagan rite. He kissed her, a deep, mating kiss that left them both breathless.

  “What now?” she asked unsteadily.

  He wrapped her against him. What now? In wartime he’d seen women raped. In peacetime the act had been described in minute, lusty detail by Jack and scores like him, archers and noblemen alike.

  His hands glided down over her shoulder blades, her backside. “I want to touch you...all over...your body, your mind, your heart.” As he spoke, his fingers took flight, winging over her throat, her breasts, her belly, her thighs. Moving his mouth along the curve of her jaw, he added, “I want to make you forget where you end and I begin.” His manhood pressed against her soft flesh.

  “Nom de Dieu,” she gasped. “Can you do that?”

  He pulled back, cradled her chin in one hand. “I mean to try.”

  * * *

  Swept up in a great wave of wanting, Lianna wove her fingers into his sun-spun curls. His naked body blazed with power. She felt a clamoring need to be engulfed by this man, his noble goodness, the purity of his passion, the enchantment of his masculinity. A small inner voice reminded her that she was breaking her marriage vows. Aye, this was wrong by the laws of man and God, yet her heart knew it was right. Rand made her feel clean and brave and womanly all at once, and the promise he’d voiced, his promise to make her forget, was nigh as potent as the love words that spilled from his lips as he scattered kisses over her face, her neck.

  All the kissing, the touching, startled her. How much longer would he torture her with lusty words and loving hands? All ignorant, she didn’t understand this arousing loveplay. She knew only what Bonne had said, that men spread their seed like chaff to the wind.

  But there was hardly a breeze today. How was he going to plant his seed?

  His breath came in quick gasps; he stirred against her thigh. With an abrupt flash of insight, she envisioned a stallion covering a mare. Would he invade her body in that way? She fixed him with a rapt, helpless stare. Oh yes, said a voice deep inside her. Yes, she wanted him to.

  Pressing gently on her shoulders, he brought her down to the grass so that they were both reclining, she on her back, he on his side.

  His strong fingers glided over her breasts in a touch so light, so compelling, that suddenly she knew why his harp sang so sweetly for him. She heard a similar note of helpless yearning in her own voice. “Rand...”

  “I want to make you mine. Only mine.”

  An unwelcome remembrance of her other life, her life away from here, parted the silken fog of desire shrouding her. King Henry’s edict, Lazare’s betrayal, her uncle’s disdain—all the hurts of the past weeks, all the years of living without love, welled up into a great, aching cannonball of pain. A small sound erupted, soblike from her throat.

  He drew back, his princely face drawn with concern. “What is it?”

  She turned her head away and swallowed back the tale that threatened to barrel from her lips. “Nothing,” she whispered. “Just...love me.”

  He embraced her, and she felt as if he’d wrapped her in a mist-soft web of satin. “I wish,” he said, “I could pull the wounds from your soul and take them unto myself.”

  “Why?”

  He kissed her eyelids. “You know why. Because I love you with all the might of my soul.” His mouth closed over hers with new, prodigious force. His kiss was no longer sweet, but heavy with emotion, demanding with need. The nectar of his lips seemed, like a sorcerer’s philter, to draw the hurt from her, to heal her.

  She sighed. Her eyes fluttered shut. He’d freed her, at least for this breathless moment, from the haunting troubles that plagued her. Now she could give to him openly, without restraint. “Yes,” she said. “Love me.”

  “All over,” he said, repeating his pledge, his fingers rounding her breasts, grazing her nipples. “Aye, all over.” He bent his head, and she clenched her eyes more tightly, awaiting the welcome pressure of his mouth on hers; but she didn’t feel his kiss on her lips.

  Her eyes flew open. “Rand!”

  “Hush,” he murmured, and closed his mouth back over her breast.

  She felt like a slow match soaked in lime and sparked by red-hot steel. She shut her eyes again as something inside her began to burn. Ignited by his unexpected and intimate kiss, the inner match sizzled with gathering brightness and heat. Its core seemed to be in her belly, but the long, sparkling fuse of passion radiated in a hundred divergent directions.

  Rand sensed the change in her, the change from profound interest to unthinking passion. “Oh yes, love,” he whispered. “Let me touch you....” His hand moved downward, stroking, and he knew the wonder he saw in her eyes was reflected in his own. Flesh and blood and bone, she’d said, but she was so much more. She was magic and mystery, fire and fury, full of secrets he longed to unlock, one by precious one.

  He pressed gently at the inside of her thigh. She gasped, stiffened. He sipped the sweetness of innocence from her mouth and forced away a tiny, sharp blade of uncertainty. This was uncharted territory, this woman’s body of hers, its peaks and valleys unfamiliar to him. Yet his hands, guided by the timeless wisdom of a man deeply in love, skimmed and stroked and explored in a way that heated her flesh to a radiant glow and filled him with a rightness of purpose such as he’d never known before.

  There was the milk-pale skin of her belly, smooth and rich as cream, the lush, heavy warmth of her thighs, yielding at last to his gentle pressure the silk-spun nest of her womanhood.

  She gave a little yearning plea, wordless yet eloquent with desire. He braced himself on one elbow, the better to see, to touch. She was wondrous there, the magic, the secrets of her, so powerful.

  “Rand!” She grasped his shoulders hard. Her eyes grew wide with wonderment.

  He bent to feather kisses up her throat, to her mouth. “Aye, love?”

  “I...I don’t know. I just felt so strange all of a sudden, as if I were about to burst from my body when you touched me—” She flushed. “There.”

  A sharp, clear joy washed over him. He moved his hand
. “Where? Tell me. Teach me. Was it here...or here...or...?”

  “There,” she breathed, her body arching, lithe as a willow wand. “Aye, there.”

  Always he’d thought this moment would drive away all thoughts of anything but his own need. Yet like a supplicant bowed before some woodland divinity, he spared no thought for himself, but only for her, seeking her pleasure before his own.

  Loving her with his mouth and hands and heart, he watched her pleasure crest, felt it explode on a tide of warmth, caught and tasted her gasp of surprise.

  “Rand,” she whispered, “is that how it is between a man and a woman?”

  He smiled. She was so naive, so fresh. She brought light to the discontented darkness in his soul. “Aye, sweet love,” he said, “that is part of it.”

  She flushed. The clarion blue of the sky found a shining home in the pale-lashed silver of her eyes. “You mean...there’s more?”

  “Aye,” he said, bracing himself above her. “Much more.”

  She shivered. “Nom de Dieu.”

  “I shall be as gentle as I can.” Staring into the bewildered depths of her eyes, he realized she didn’t quite understand. With a tender caress of his finger, he showed her.

  “Rand,” she breathed as he pressed against her, “you have been as gentle as the melodies you stroke from your harp— Oh!” Something hard and hot, yet smooth as velvet, touched her. Then the tide of sensation that had been ebbing within her changed course, surging with fiery urgency to her center. Renewed desire washed through her, gathering force. She dug her heels into the ground and arched, crushing the grass with her shoulders.

  He probed, quested, touching her with fire. Comprehension dawned in her with explosive force. He was about to fuse himself with her in a way she hadn’t dared dream about. She wanted that, wanted to draw him into her body, her soul. With her hand she guided him to the place that throbbed for him.

  “Oh, Lianna,” he whispered. “Oh, love.” Above her she saw only Rand and the sky, the jewel tones of his eyes and the soft hazy blue of heaven. He became the archangel she’d once likened him to, lifting her to a mysterious firmament. He filled her with his passion and whispered, “This gift you give me, this gift of yourself...” His voice veered off on a ragged path.