“Nay, but my thanks to you. I must be on the road southeast. I have lost days and must make haste to London to meet the priest at the church door for your sister’s wedding.”
“As you wish.” Geiss bowed and backed towards the door.
Moments later, they opened again. Geiss stood in the centre holding the arm of his sister, Blanche. He led her through and turned once more to leave them alone in the silent chamber.
Will’s good eye absorbed the rich sight of her like food for a starving man. She must have been in the stables for straw was in her hair and poking from her linen gown. Her hair—all that burnished gold she wore with such a fiery match her character—stood wild about her lovely face. Her eyes, dear god, those portals to her frightened and outraged soul, met his with pained affront. “You knew I would come here.”
“I did.”
“Are you always so careful of your tasks?”
“I am.” He sauntered forward to circle round and round her. “You could have predicted that.”
She looked straight ahead, never at him. “I should have.”
He wanted her to see his anger at her. Wanted her to be wary of him. “I will not be so deceived again,” he growled at her.
She did not move. “I will not be so naïve again.”
“I will not give you the chance.” He stepped near her and the aroma of horses and fresh hay on her lavender scent nearly sent him to his knees with desire. He pressed his chest to her shoulder.
She shivered and stepped away.
He followed and restrained her with one hand to her shoulder. “You will not escape me again.”
“I will not give up,” she told him on a whisper. “I won’t!”
“Where would you go?” He stood behind her now, his two hands on her shoulders, inviting her to accept his possession.
She sank backward but only for a moment. The brief contact was delicious sin, her buttocks plush but muscular against his rising cock. “Why would I tell you where I could venture, my lord?”
“T’would be your undoing,” he said softly into her ear, then pushed her fragrant curls from her long throat and skimmed his mouth along its length, “when you know I can find you.”
She gave a breathless mewl as he thrust his hands around her waist and with one hand to one heavy pointed breast, he pulled her backwards into his embrace. “Is this the new way to influence wayward brides?” she asked with more curiosity than anguish.
He lifted her off her feet, overpowering her, his one hand filled to overflowing with a luscious breast, and kissed her nape. “Aye. ‘Tis what can happen when a woman does not agree to meet the bridegroom of her own will.”
“She can find another man who appeals to her…” She turned in his arms, her hands twining up around his shoulders. “More than her groom?”
“‘Tis not what I planned,” he told her honestly.
“Is it what you want?” she asked, her expression more of a woman who needs affirmation of love than a countess playing for advantage with her captor.
“Aye. And I should not,” he whispered. “But I cannot stop.”
Rising up on tiptoe, she bound herself more securely to him. “Nor I. For who will ever know you kissed me?”
He arched his brows at her. “Or that you kissed me?”
She met his taunt with rolling eyes. “You mean, then, there will be more than one kiss?”
He shook her, growling at the delay that fuelled her temptation of him, his cock hard as an iron plough between them. “As many as we wish.”
She closed her eyes and puckered her large pretty pink lips, lifting her face up for his perusal.
He growled. Bent her backward over his arm and put his mouth to hers in a forceful kiss that pressed her lips to her teeth. She clutched at his tunic. He hauled her closer, raised his mouth and this time went to her with the soft seductive lure of a lover. He tasted her mouth, a sweet strawberry treat, swollen and lush. He stabbed his tongue inside her silken cavern and enjoyed the tangled dance of mating with her own tongue. He sucked her lower lip, kissed it and with the tip of his tongue, outlined that mouth that drove him to madness with need.
He pulled away and she hung in his arms, her mouth red and ripe and open. Her eyes drifted to seek his. “Will,” she said with more breath than sound, “what is all this?”
He swept her into his arms and sought her brother’s lordly chair. He sat and tenderly laid her in his lap, her legs up over the armrests. He cupped her chin, adoring the lost hazy look of desire in her features.
“You reduce me to a mindless mass, my lord.”
He tipped up her face and kissed her with the full ardour of his unleashed regard. “As you do to me, my Blanche. But I should call you Blaze. No pale white milky froth for you. Who taught you how to kiss like that?” he asked with a jealousy he could identify, though he’d never felt such with any woman.
“None.” She traced his lips with a warm fingertip. “I but followed your lead, Will. Blaze,” she chuckled. “Could you kiss me again and we’ll see who goes up in flames first?”
“A red–haired witch,” he mourned, raising his face to ask for god’s help.
She rubbed her breasts against him. “Then you should know because you are the devil’s own temptation to me.”
“Am I?” He found that amusing. Cool, indifferent and rational Earl of Greystone. He had been called all three and worse. “Never a word of devilry in my life until I come upon you and want to be inside you.”
She frowned. “Would I be a fool to believe you, my lord?”
He took her hand and led it between his legs. Her hand, so warm and gentle on his shaft, made him bite his lip. “Believe this.”
She squeezed his rod and nearly jumped from the chair in surprise. “Praise Mary. I have never believed in anything so much as that.” She caressed him again. “Can that be all you?”
He covered her breast with one hand, found the nipple and pinched her. “The same as this can be all of you, my dear Blaze.”
She wiggled in his lap. Her legs drew together and he could not stop himself from pushing up her skirts as he ran a hand from her knee to her thigh to her moist and curly chat. “Open your legs, Blaze.”
She complied, her eyes drifting closed as his fingers tangled in her short curls.
“Wider.”
She obeyed.
He smiled, kissed her throat as he traced her slit, up and down, up and down. She had a lovely cunny, with plump lips to cushion a man. “Let me in to caress you, Blaze.”
She spread wider.
He steeled himself to slowly, slowly delve one finger inside her liquid walls. And oh, god—he pressed his face to her shoulder—she was drenched with welcome for him. He sank inside further and stroked her, curved his finger to touch her inside and she bucked. “Easy, my Blaze, let me delight you.”
“Aye, do!” She lolled in his arms.
He flung up her skirts and gazed at his tanned hand near her red curly mons, his index finger buried in her to the hilt. “Will you let me fill you with another finger, mon amour?”
“Aye, now, now!” she beseeched him and sought to crane her neck to see his ministrations. “Oh,” she swooned, “you are masterful.”
“True. See how much more so I am.” He extracted one finger and inserted two. She took them with ease. He began a rhythm then, in and out, in and out, that made her moan and made him crazed for more.
“Is this how men service their wives?” she asked breathless.
“How men should service their wives.”
“I have never known this.”
He puffed up with pride to give her this. Damn, he would give her more too. His cock, if he dared. Did he?
Oh, Jesus. He looked around.
Not here, man!
Not now.
What of your plan, Greystone?
He scowled. Ceased his caresses of her hot, wet cunny. Pulled his fingers out and inhaled the aroma of her sweet arousal. Kissed her shoulder, her throa
t, her cheek.
Oh, Christ. To have done this to her and to himself. And now to have to leave her, unfulfilled and hating him.
For hate him, she would.
“What are you doing? No,” she caught his wrist. “Do not stop. Please, I have never…” She paused and seemed to have sensed his change in mood because she struggled to push her skirts down and sit up.
“Listen to me, Blanche.”
At the reversion to her true name, she swallowed mightily and looked as if she would burst into tears.
“We are going onward. This…this was…an aberration. Unplanned. I did not plan to seduce you.”
“But you did. It happened. What are you saying?”
“We must leave.”
She struggled to stand and he helped her. When she had her balance, he rearranged her bodice and brushed her gown into the right folds.
She avoided his gaze. “I will help my brother and his wife with the entertainment for tonight’s supper.”
“There is no need, Blanche.”
“I do not visit without helping,” she explained in a perfunctory manner.
“Nay, my dear,” he said, wishing to call her Blaze and recall the passion of the previous moments, but knowing what he now said would drive it from her mind like an arrow through her heart. “We leave now for London.”
“Now? Impossible!” She had some of her natural fire back. “Only two more hours or so before night falls. We would not get too far on the road.”
“Nonetheless,” he pronounced the word like law, “we leave now.”
She examined him, pink staining her cheeks from their desire, grey suffusing her expression from her sorrow. “I will get my clothes.” She turned to go, a woman attempting to gather round her some dignity with a man whom she had allowed to caress her most private parts in abandon.
“I will come with you.”
She put out a hand to ward him off.
He shook his head. She would not care for him at all after this next. He knew it. But he knew no other way around it.
“Stay where you are.” He commanded her and stunned, she obeyed.
He marched to his travelling bag and flung open the flaps. Inside, he extracted that which he had brought just for her, for this occasion when he saw her again and would not let her go.
She stepped backward at the sight of the links of iron.
He walked forward, the chains clinking as he moved.
“I will not wear that,” she told him with less fright than he expected. “I do not have to wear that.”
“You do. You will.”
“You will shame me before my brother and his family? To chain me to you?”
“If you but let me put them on and remain serene while I do it, I am certain I can apply them without them showing beneath your cloak.” He twined one around her wrist.
She jerked backward. “Is this what you do, Greystone? Chain women after you seduce them?”
He stared into her incomparable turquoise eyes. “I have never had to do so. Women always come to me.”
“I will never.”
After what they had just shared, after the bliss he had seen written on her features at his touch, her statement cut him to the core. Still, his duty drove him to declare, “That is for the best.” For you and I are not chosen to find happiness together. Love affairs are for blithe spirits who can dream. Not for two people who know that even in the marrying, there is no love that can endure politics and law subject to a tyrant’s whims.
Chapter Four
Blanche pulled at the bodice of her cloak, stuck to her skin with the pouring rain. She groaned, her body and her soul drenched in misery. Since this morning when the party of six set out from a hostel north of here, the downpour had soaked her hair, her clothes, her slippers. Now the chill of sunset set her teeth to clattering and she glanced in anguish at Will’s profile as they rode towards the town of Derby.
“‘Tis not much farther, Blanche,” he shouted above the din of the storm.
A crash of thunder split the air and she jumped.
He winced as he caught sight of her alarm and in his solemn gaze, she saw sorrow for what he had imposed on her.
She pulled herself up in hauteur and nudged her horse forward with knees to his flanks. At least the move gave her something to do with her body other than weep for want of William Dunwick’s hands on her again.
She blushed with the remembrance. God in his grave, could she not forget his caresses? So gentle, so persuasive. She’d never known their like from her husband. Indeed, that man thought a woman was a vessel to fill. Quickly. Quietly. As infrequently, thank the Lord, as he could coax his shaft to stand and emit the juices of which he was so proud.
Lightning cracked above them and a tree ten yards hence split with the strike.
“Come!” Will dragged at her chains and her mount’s lead to take her towards another broader tree.
She yanked away from him. Silence had been her manner here with him and she would not relent now. Certainly, not to show him fear.
“Nay! Lightning never strikes the same area twice!” he entreated her and hauled her forward.
Her horse complied and she fumed, the animal trotting along and making her cunny lips thrill to the pounding they got.
Will reined in her horse beneath the dripping branches, and the animal had her facing her captor. “Blanche, I will find us good shelter tonight.”
“A promise?” she could not help but ask, her voice, so long unused, a rasp. He had found them shelter each of the preceding nights. All of it interesting, tantalising for how they slept…which was together. He said that was to assure himself of her safety. She knew it was to assure himself of her proximity. He did not know it assured her of a new ripe hell each time he laid her down. The first night, he put his back to hers as they shared a decent bed in one knight’s poor castle, her chains firmly tying her to him. The next night, the bed was a straw mound in a peasant’s stable. It was so tiny, Will caught her to him, her back to his chest, his arm heavy and possessive over her hip. His body warm and comforting. Her imagination inspired by his nearness, his manly musk, and her body’s maddening desire to turn to him in the bed and kiss him to madness.
A sensuous smile curved his lips as if he read her thoughts. “You are not listening, Blanche.” When she blinked, he added, “I said I always keep my promises.”
Ignoring the argument that statement might lead to, she tipped her head towards the horizon and the bleakness of their view so shrouded by the curtain of rain. “There does not seem to be much for you to choose from in this village.”
“I know this town. The Trinitarian monks care for the church here and run a monastery.”
“Ah, but they will not take in a woman.”
“For me, they will.”
“How so?” she asked, not surprised but curious what endeared monks to a diplomat and adviser to the king.
“Two of the priests here once lived in Jerusalem. The order, you see, ransomed Christians held captive by the infidel during the Crusades.”
She caught a note of dismay in his voice. “How did you come to meet them?”
“I was sent by Richard to strike a deal with Saladin and the sultan would not let me go. Two priests came to bargain for me.”
She smiled, sympathy for his plight filling her. “Terrible to be at another’s thumb.”
Will reeled her in closer to him. Here, she could inhale his aroma that even with the rain and soot of days drew her like a magnet. “I know this well, Madame. A captor must always dominate with prudence.” He pulled her hood higher over the crown of her head. “I must get you inside somewhere and warm again.”
“I agree.” And if you would touch me again, I might go up in flames. She cleared her throat and peered into the distance. “Please let us go. This storm will not cease and I am sopping wet.” She pressed her thighs against the damn horse. In more ways than one.
* * * *
“This looks a cosier place
than last night’s,” he offered her as his two friends, the priests, hurried off to fetch them supper and a tub to wash.
She shot him a glance of reproach. “Cleaner, too.”
He took the jab with equanimity. She could prod him all she wanted and still he would not bite. She wanted to rile him. He would not give it to her. Aye, what he did want to give to her was a cock so high, so hard, so cursedly needy of filling up that juicy cunt of hers that he was crazed with it.
He strode to the fire that Father Julian had set for them in this far corner room of the inn. Palms out to the fire, he felt his damp clothes begin to dry. The length of chain attached to Blanche’s wrist went taut. Would that he could make use of this damn thing to bring her to heel.
She sneezed.
“Come warm yourself here,” he ordered, as he spread his legs and eased his cock and balls of their constant pressure to bed her. “I want you healthy. Do not be a child.”
“I am not a child!” she countered as she stomped over to stand next to him. “Oh, god.” She put up her hands to feel the heat. “This is divine.”
The play of the flames over her body struck him like the lightning that still raged outside. Her complexion, so pale, was rosy gold. Her dark lashes, so thick, were now a dark red. Her hair, loosed from her netting and damp about her shoulders, glowed like an auburn sunbeam. His eyes skimmed down her form and there, poking beneath her linen gown, stood her nipples. Outlined by the moisture in the cloth, her areolas were huge pebbles. The gown clung to her hips and thighs, making him grind his teeth at thought of the luscious curves. Could he ever measure all her charms with two hands? Nay. Never. She was too lavishly endowed, too beautifully arranged by God for one man alone. And certainly not this one man.
He shut his eyes against the enthralling sight. He shifted, his cock rising to proclaim a desire he could not suppress.
“Does not Father Julian wonder why I am chained?” she asked, intruding on his frustration.
“The man has seen so many ills he does not broach matters that do not concern him. And he knows me, let us not forget.”
For Her Honour (Swords of Passion) Page 3
