by Ann Lawrence
Gilles had spent seven days unsure if their first night had been a dream—one from which he might awake and find himself alone. Her soft sigh reassured him.
Was he too rough? He’d not cared about a woman’s needs for years. Doubts of his prowess as a lover rushed in. He’d bedded many women, rarely bothering with any one of them for long. His mind had never been engaged, let alone his heart.
Would this woman again find pleasure with him? How long before a man such as William noticed her, sensed her awakening to bodily joy? How well he remembered Margaret’s wandering eye, her pets at court, once she’d learned the ways of men and women.
His eyes traveled over Emma’s innocent face. With a ruthless will, he thrust his doubts aside. As he let his gentle stroking become stronger, her nipple grew even harder between his fingertips. He clasped it and tugged. Her eyelids fluttered; she moaned her pleasure. Satisfaction warmed him.
He climbed onto the foot of the bed and knelt tall and straight before her. Their eyes locked. He was unable and unwilling to break the contact as she reached up and put her hands on the back of his thighs. Her strong weaver’s fingers dug deeply into his muscles. As she kneaded his flesh, he moved his hands to rest lightly on her shoulders. He drew the thin straps of her shift down to expose the upper swell of her breasts. Her skin was smooth as satin and he stroked his fingers back and forth on the gentle swell.
Her hands grew urgent on him. His entire concentration lay on how to control his breathing, how to prevent himself from crying aloud with the sheer ecstasy of her hands running over him. When she slid them under his tunic and up his hips, he lost both his voice and breath.
She made short work of his ties, and he stood long enough to pull off his clothing and fling it aside. Her hands returned to her task, now on bare flesh. She wove a web of desire about them. He didn’t want her to see his desperate need, so he closed his eyes. They tumbled on the furs, hurried, wanting.
Cool breezes from a loose tapestry near the window dried the sweat of his brow as she put her tongue, hot like a brand from the forge, to his throat. A string of prayers and oaths hissed from his lips as she first licked then kissed his pulse.
He growled and held her beneath him. When she clasped her legs about his flanks, an expression of passion crossed her face and then transmitted itself to her hands. She clutched and kneaded his flesh. He wanted this night to be for her as their first night had been his.
His mouth worshipped hers. His hands caressed and swept over her full breasts. His manhood sought its place.
“Guide me,” he gasped out against her lips.
For a brief instant she did not understand; then she took him and held him, did as he bid.
He thrust in.
The heat of her burned him. He groaned aloud as he drew back and repeated the fierce plunge to ultimate pleasure. With agonizing slowness he moved. A nearly complete retreat, a pause of a heartbeat, a body possessing plunge. He owned her mouth as he owned her body—at least for this moment, in this place.
She touched him so deeply he wanted to shout, yet only hoarse moans escaped their locked mouths. A throbbing and beating built to a crescendo. He craved it. Sought it. Held it in check and waited for her. Sensations streamed through him as he kept his deep rhythm, kept the thrust the same. Her hips knew his pace without tutoring. She deepened his thrust with her own lifting hips.
When Gilles saw Emma’s eyes widen and glaze, when he felt the involuntary twist and churn of her hips, he changed to quick, stabbing thrusts, claiming her in the same unconscious rhythm of their two heartbeats. In hot, near painful bursts, he gave her his seed.
In total silence she rose up against his body one last time, flung her arms about his waist, her mouth hard against his chest, her cries lost against the thump of his heart.
He captured her wrists, shackled them with his hands and spread her arms wide, chaining her to the mattress. Where they touched, flesh burned.
Held immobile, she bucked her hips and arched her back off the mattress. Her nipples burned him like flames as they grazed his chest. The lingering pulses of her sheath held him captive, hardened him anew, enticed him to another body shaking climax, quick on the first, something he’d not experienced since his long-ago youth.
Gilles released her and knelt between her thighs. Her eyes met his as she remained outstretched, unable to move, though no longer fettered by his passions.
Then she was on him, her hands locked around his neck, her mouth on his. “I felt your power. You gave it to me,” Emma whispered between the caress of his lips and the sweep of her tongue.
“‘Twas just your woman’s pleasure,” he said into her mouth, kissing her back.
“Nay,” she cried. “I felt it. I felt it to my soul. ‘Twas your power and it burned through me. I never dreamed such ecstasy could exist.”
Silently he hugged her to him and urged her to sleep. Emotion choked in his throat. He was not an object for adoration. He was but a simple man.
* * * * *
In their first dawn together, Gilles rolled carefully from the bed. He went to the window and opened the shutters to let in a dull gray light. The rains had ended. He could not decide on a course of action. He had never given himself so completely, nor had a woman given so much of herself to him.
Turning back to the bed, Gilles swept aside the blankets and stretched himself atop Emma. No urgency drove his caresses. He woke her to gentle touches and warm kisses. Their lovemaking was protracted. They lingered over each touch. Each kiss was a slow and easy slip and slide of tongues that explored and learned instead of conquering and possessing.
Gilles rolled to his back and drew Emma over his hips. She rocked gently and felt the quiver of his muscles tensed between her thighs.
“I have never met such a man as you,” she whispered into the bright dawn morning as her fingers touched his forehead, lips, throat, traced the lines radiating from his eyes. His body gathered itself for completion, his chest tight, his heart pounding. Then she rested on him, still as a statue.
He trembled, his body shuddered, so near…on the edge of a precipice. She held him there, ready, aching.
When his breathing slowed and his hips relaxed beneath her, she began anew. The featherlight brush of her fingertips about his eyes was as arousing as the skimming touch of her breasts, the heated place that sheathed him. Finally, beyond what he could bear, he entangled his hands in her hair. He pleasured his hands and arms with the silk tresses. He cupped her head as she found her completion, tightened his fingers to hold her to him while his own heart roared and his passions were mightily spent.
She fell into a heavy slumber; he stroked her shoulder. His hand, sun-darkened and scarred, contrasted sharply with the alabaster satin of her skin. An old man’s hand, a young woman’s body.
His throat tightened. What had he done? She deserved the vigor of youth. He clenched his hand into a fist. The knuckles ached.
A score of years ago, he would have wed her. Nay. He’d still have married for wealth and power; he’d not have known what he was missing, nor valued it if he’d known.
Carefully, he settled her within the crook of his arm. He could not forget one fact today, here in the stark light of day. She was at the beginning of her life, he, at the close of his. He stared overhead at the scarlet canopy of his bed. She stirred, opened her eyes for a moment, then closed them and burrowed into his side, a smile on her lips.
I love you. He said it silently.
Chapter Ten
Emma stroked her hand on the fine wool that grew apace on her loom. It was perfect—he would wear it. The silence around her made her start. “Angelique!” She bolted from her stool and noted the sun was high. In a whirl of skirts, she fled across the bailey.
At the hall, she calmed herself before lifting the latch and entering the forebuilding. The sentries parted for her, their faces impassive. Still, hers flamed as she imagined that they did not challenge her because she was Lord Gilles’ favorite.
“Beatrice,” a voice said against her ear, hands encircled her waist. She struggled and turned in the man’s arms.
“Mistress Emma!” Mark Trevalin set her aside. “Forgive me. I thought, you looked j-just l-like…” he stuttered, face red.
She patted his shoulder and moved past him, scanning the people who crowded the hall for May.
“Do you seek your babe?” Trevalin asked, following her, still offering apologies.
“Aye.” She nodded. “Wherever can she be?” Emma stewed in a turmoil. It was hours since she’d last noticed Angelique. The babe’s presence among the weavers was now so commonplace that Emma had relaxed, stopped fearing some offense might be taken by another weaver. In truth, Emma had grown so relaxed, her weaving grew swiftly upon the loom. It was knowing Gilles would wear her cloth that made her work so diligently, that had allowed her to forget the child in her work. Now, she was racked with guilt.
“She is where she has been each morning these past three days, whilst May helps in the kitchen.” Trevalin gestured to the end of the hall.
Panic surged as Emma pictured Angelique wandering into the huge fireplace. Her feet flew as she ran the length of the hall. Her eyes searched among the men gathered at the dais.
Gilles watched her come. He reclined in his oak chair, pretending she did naught unusual. At his side, William Belfour and Thomas argued the accounting of the villeins. Bored stonemasons awaited their turn to hear what task Gilles would set in the restoration of the north wall. It had further collapsed, luckily not injuring any villagers this time.
Emma skidded to a halt, aware she had made a spectacle of herself before the company.
Silence fell. Heat surged into her cheeks as she spied Angelique. The child was curled in the crook of Gilles’ arm, her thumb firmly planted in her mouth. Her feet batted the air. An unnamed emotion assailed Emma as she watched the scarred warrior hand caress her daughter’s silky head.
“My-my lord,” she stammered. “Forgive my interruption. I’ll take Angelique. Surely she’s a bother.”
“A bother?” Gilles’ mouth stretched to a wide grin. “Mayhap it is this rough company that may be a bother to her.”
“Oh, never,” Emma disclaimed, stepping up on the dais.
“Then let her rest. She is quite spent from chasing poor Garth’s tail.” The men drew back from Emma as she sidled past them to Gilles’ chair. Her eyes rested on the old hound at Gilles’ feet and then rose to meet his. “Let her rest,” he repeated.
Emma’s hands dropped from their outstretched position. She curtseyed. “As you wish, my lord.” She was acutely aware that many observed their by-play, William among them. She whirled and fled.
William watched Emma cross the hall. He smiled for a fleeting moment. Gilles watched his bastard son watch his woman. Angelique shifted on his lap, reached out, and with an impish grin, snatched at the rolls of parchment on the table. Gilles laughed at his men’s dismay and pulled the documents from her busy hands. Angelique giggled and turned her smile on him.
Like a bolt from a crossbow, pain struck him in the heart. He gasped at the searing pain. The room was suddenly cold—nay, icy like the grave. Sweat broke out on his body, yet he was chilled. He looked from Angelique to William Belfour and back again.
William.
Gilles immediately knew that William must be Angelique’s father.
How could he have not known?
It took all his self-control not to howl with the pain of it. Gently, he urged Angelique to sit down in his lap. His hand trembled as he stroked her silky hair, hair as flaxen as William’s, not golden like Emma’s. He stared at the curved bow of Angelique’s lips, seeing the child William in the babe in his arms. His vision blurred a moment in his grief.
Of course William would have pursued Emma. He remembered her words, spoken so sincerely at the manorial court. She had given herself for love.
Love of his bastard son.
William was the man who denied his vows. Oh, not vows said on the church steps, or recorded in the manor records, but vows just the same. Vows of love. Some priests recognized such a troth as being as binding as a marriage sanctified by the church.
For Emma, denying them meant making a bastard of her daughter.
What a fool he was. He had worried William would notice Emma now she’d been awakened to passion! Awakened! She’d been taught by the master—long before ever he, Gilles, had touched her. Unschooled? Innocent? Never!
* * * * *
That evening, Gilles snarled at all about him. Emma followed her usual schedule, which did not include being in the hall when he was about. His eyes searched for her anyway.
“‘Tis shoddy work,” he snapped at Mark Trevalin. “We’ve many mouths in need of food, and you’ve no idea how much grain lies within?” He snatched the tally sticks from the man’s hand. “I will see to the count myself.”
He strode away to the staircase leading deep into the bowels of the castle and his storerooms. The harvest had been fat. He knew the sticks should indicate a far greater surplus of grain. Was there naught but incompetence surrounding him? Sourly, he moved along the rooms, counting the sacks of grain. A sound teased at the periphery of his attention.
He stood still, listened. It came again. A muffled cry. Someone in trouble. Gilles hurried to the end of the storerooms. There he froze. William stood, his braies and hose about his knees, grunting over a wench. In times past, Gilles would have snapped something rude and departed. This time he had stood in the shadows and watched his bastard son.
The girl was bent over some of the very sacks of grain Gilles wished to count, her skirts up, her buttocks plump and white in the torchlight. May, Angelique’s nurse, he realized. William stood behind her, and Gilles again felt that surge of heated jealousy as, with each thrust, the girl writhed and squealed and clawed the sacks of grain. Gilles watched it to the bitter end. He tortured himself with what he saw. It wasn’t the huge size of his son’s manhood, the frantic shrieks of the maid’s completion, or the triumphant shout of William’s that twisted the knife and honed the pain. Nay, it was his imaginings that substituted Emma’s sweet form for that of the wench. That was what rent his soul. It became Emma bent over the sacks of grain. It became Emma who panted and cried for more.
Reeling, Gilles hurried from the storage rooms. He needed to use one hand to guide himself in the near dark corridor. When he emerged, as if from a tunnel, he stumbled on the worn stone steps that would take him to the bright light and crowded hall.
Finally, he came to his senses. Choking back his bile, he stood like a statue on the top step, got a grip on his envy, got a grip on the murderous need he felt to draw his dagger and relieve William of his most prized possession.
In his anger, he snapped the tally sticks like so much light kindling. Emma had shown no favor to his bastard son. None. Before him. In fact, she seemed to actively avoid William. It took all his mighty fortitude to shake off his envy and control himself.
As he tended to his duties, he realized he could not lay with Emma in his present mood. He could not bear it should he sense she yearned in some way for a man more youthful than he—more handsome, more virile.
It did not help to know that William intended a marriage alliance with a powerful family, one wealthy enough to allow him to live at court. Everyone knew William’s ambition. For what other possible reason had William not wed Emma and claimed his child? A weaver brought nothing of power or monetary value to a man of William’s overweening ambition.
Gilles did not sleep in his chamber that night. Instead, he gathered some men and made the ride to Lynn. There, along with his men, he drank himself into a stupor at a dockside alehouse.
* * * * *
Emma wondered at Gilles’ mood. She’d waited for a few hours in his bed—alone. As the moon gleamed along the floor of his bedchamber, she realized he was not coming to her. After the sentry made his rounds, she climbed to her own chamber, plucked Angelique from May’s arms, and sle
pt restlessly until dawn.
He was not at prayers.
‘Twas midday when she heard the sound of numerous horses enter the middle bailey. She rose from her loom and stood in the doorway to watch the men dismount. Gilles strode with Roland and Mark Trevalin across the bailey, not looking in her direction. Something in his stride, the set of his shoulders, told her he was in a great hurry. He joined a group of his men, and their conversation was low, agitated, with much hand gesturing and show of exasperation.
Silently, she returned to her loom. When her work was done, she took Angelique and went to the hall, trailed by May. Heat swept her cheeks as she noted eyes following her progress to the tower stairs. At Lord Gilles’ doorway, she handed Angelique off to May with a kiss. When they disappeared, she raised her hand and knocked.
“Enter,” he called. Emma slipped into the room. Hubert nodded to her, gathered up a hauberk and helm, and left them alone.
“You look tired, my lord,” she said. In truth, he looked more than tired; he looked angry.
“I am not tired,” he snapped. “I am busy.” He wrapped a leather belt around his fist before shoving it into a saddle bag open on his bed.
Emma recoiled from the tone of his voice. “Forgive my intrusion, my lord,” she said and fled from his chamber. She stumbled on the worn edge of a tower step, but his hand was there to save her from a nasty fall. She twisted in his grip.
“Nay, Emma. Do not run away. I am not angry with you. Come.”
She followed him reluctantly. When he released her, she stood close by the door.
He sighed and resumed his packing. “I am off to York. I heard in Lynn that whilst traveling home from Crusade, Richard had the ill-begotten luck to be taken prisoner by that damnable Duke of Austria and he, in turn, has delivered him up to Emperor Henry. No one seems to know Richard’s whereabouts!”
“Oh, Gilles, will he kill King Richard?”
“Henry is likely to do anything. We barons will meet to discuss offering a ransom. ‘Tis all that is needed—Richard in prison—to bring Philip of France and John sniffing after his dominions.”
