Her Dark Knight

by Sharon Cullen

  She pushed against his chest to look up at him. “You need to leave before you’re discovered.”

  A slow smile spread across his face. “There is no need to be frightened for me.”

  His hand moved to her hip, soothing her. He murmured soft, disjointed phrases, his mouth so close to her cheek each movement of his lips brushed against her heated skin. She didn’t know when the movements of Christien’s lips went from speaking platitudes to gentle, delicate kisses. They skimmed her jaw, her cheek, even the tip of her nose. She swallowed, trying to quell the butterflies in her stomach and the sudden trembling in her legs that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with the man practically wrapped around her.

  He kissed her forehead and her lips. She squeezed her eyes closed, waiting for the pressure of his lips to bruise, for his teeth to bite. But the pain never came. Instead an entirely different sensation filled her. She’d never experienced any of this before. Never felt this inexplicable need her body was reaching for.

  He cradled her against his muscular body. Her breasts tingled and she nearly whimpered with an almost uncontrollable desire to rub them against him.

  Behind them her husband grunted as he ploughed into the other woman, but Christien’s light caresses and soft kisses became more important.

  She raised her head and pressed her lips against his, not knowing precisely what to do, only knowing she needed more. He sighed, his breath sweet against her skin, and kissed her back. Christien’s kisses were so much better than the painful kisses of her husband. Christien used his mouth and his tongue to excite, to invite, to cherish. Her husband used his to punish, to hurt and to dominate. She much preferred Christien’s way.

  When his tongue flicked out she didn’t press her lips together or struggle in panic as she’d done in the past. She opened her mouth wider and let him inside. He tasted of mead and mint leaves. His tongue caressed her, bold yet tender. She’d listened to the servants talk of such needs but never believed they truly enjoyed the act. Now she understood what they’d been speaking of.

  She didn’t know how long they stood there, stealing kisses while her husband stood so near. She lost all sense of time, knew only the warm liquid pooling between her legs and the clenching of her stomach.

  Eventually—too soon—Christien pulled away. Breathing heavily, he lowered his forehead until it rested against hers.

  “What you do to me, chérie. Never have I felt this way.”

  His words, mirroring her thoughts, brought tears to her eyes and she valiantly battled them back. They were alone in the garden. Her husband had finished his sport and the two left without Madelaine even knowing it. ’Twas foolish to lose herself like this when danger was so near. Her distraction could have easily cost Christien his life.

  All the warmth and tenderness evaporated. She slid from beneath his strong embrace and grabbed his hand.

  “You must go now, before he returns for me.”

  “Madelaine—”

  She pushed at his chest with all her might. “Go,” she whispered.

  He looked at her long and hard, his silver eyes nearly glinting in the light of the moon. Her heart leapt in fear, pounded with urgency. When her husband didn’t find her inside, he would come looking and he would be angry.

  “Please,” she implored. If anything happened to Christien, she would never forgive herself.

  He touched her cheek, a tender expression crossing his face and darkening his eyes. “Do you fear more for me than yourself?”

  She nodded mutely. Too scared to speak.

  “Ah, my lady.” He closed his eyes as if in pain and when he opened them, sadness had lodged there. Sadness and regret. “I will go, but know you are always in my thoughts and what is between us is not finished.”

  He pulled her close and kissed her quickly before he disappeared into the shadows.

  Present Day

  Lainie’s friend, Erica, leaned over the small outdoor café table, her fork in her hand and her eyes wide with happiness. “Peter and I decided to try to get pregnant.”

  Lainie smiled. “Oh, Erica, how exciting. I’m happy for you.”

  Erica sat back, still beaming. “I’ve wanted to for a long time but Peter never thought we were ready financially. I mean, who ever thinks they’re financially stable enough to have kids?”

  On Tuesday morning, when Erica called Lainie and asked her to lunch, Lainie jumped at the opportunity. She liked the tiny, bubbly woman who worked in marketing and Lainie desperately needed friends in this new city. Erica’s effervescent personality was exactly what Lainie needed to take her mind off the past weekend.

  She hadn’t seen nor talked to Christien since Sunday morning when he escorted her back to her apartment. She needed space and time to think about the bizarre circumstances.

  She’d been afraid to tell him of the dreams, afraid he would think she was going insane. But the dream in the garden was too much. The woman’s terror had been overwhelming and insidious, burrowing inside her until it became her own terror. She’d never been so afraid and it was worse because it wasn’t her fear.

  Confused, she’d wanted someone to talk to and Christien had been there. He loaned her his strength, held her until her body stopped trembling.

  And because she’d been vulnerable, his gentle probing shattered the meager defenses she’d put in place. When the story spilled out of her in fits and starts, he didn’t look at her like she had a third eyeball in the middle of her head. In fact, it had been the opposite. He’d been shocked for sure, but there had been something else in his eyes. Up until then he’d kept her at a distance, but after she told him her story she sensed…a closeness to him that hadn’t been there before.

  Except he thought she was reliving memories of a past life.

  So now who was nuts?

  Reincarnation? She’d immediately dismissed the concept. She didn’t believe in reincarnation. But the notion of a past life stuck with her, popping up at weird times. Was he right? Was this what the strange dreams were about?

  “We’ll start trying in December,” Erica was saying.

  “Why wait six months? Why not now?” Lainie brought her mind back to the present and took another bite of her Caesar salad. She glanced around at the other diners in the small outdoor café who were also enjoying the warm sun. Conversations ebbed and flowed, accompanied by the clink of cutlery and china. Normal. Everything was normal and it felt good to act normal for at least one hour out of the day.

  Her gaze passed over a man sitting at a table across the street. Her gaze jumped back to him. He was nursing one of those expensive, designer coffees and leafing through a magazine. The bright sun glinted off his blond hair and turned his pale skin pink. Dressed like every other man in the area—in dress pants and a white button-down shirt—he didn’t seem out of the ordinary. On the contrary, he seemed very ordinary—a businessman enjoying lunch on a nice spring day. Even so, Lainie’s heart thumped hard. Something about him seemed familiar.

  “Peter wants to pay off a few more bills,” Erica said, but Lainie barely heard.

  He’s probably a guy who works and lives around here, just like you.

  “Lainie? Are you all right?”

  She turned back to Erica and pasted on a smile. “Of course. I thought I saw someone I recognized. So tell me about the baby. Are you going to keep working after it’s born?”

  Erica shook her head. “Enough about me. What’s been going on with you?”

  It was on the tip of Lainie’s tongue to tell her new friend nothing was going on in her life, yet she hesitated, wanting—needing—to share something of herself. To pretend this was a normal lunch between good friends. There it was again, that word normal. Would she ever feel normal again?

  “I’ve sort of been seeing Christien Chevalier.”

  Erica put her fork down with a loud clang and stared wide-eyed at Lainie for a moment. “You’re kidding, right? Chevalier? The guy who owns the nightclub?”

  “Ye
s.”

  “My God, Lainie. He’s…” Erica’s brow scrunched.

  “Out of my league. I know.” She tried to tell him as much but he refused to listen. Sometimes—most of the time—she found it hard to believe Christien Chevalier was interested in her. But he’d as much as said it outside her apartment building Sunday morning when he claimed he would wait until she was ready for him.

  She’d been trying so hard to give him an out, to make him understand she wasn’t going to be clingy or needy. Instead of taking the out, he’d stepped away from it and she’d lost her heart to him.

  They were so different. He was rich. She was struggling to make ends meet. He’d been all over the world. She never made it out of Wisconsin. He was big-city sophistication and she was small-town rustic.

  Yet the differences didn’t seem to bother him.

  Erica shifted in her chair, preparing for a long talk. “So tell me. What’s he like? Have you slept with him?”

  Lainie laughed. It felt good to laugh and shed her somber thoughts. “He’s very nice. Very thoughtful. A little…” She searched for the right word to describe Christien. “Chivalrous. And no, I haven’t slept with him.” She’d been surprised to wake up in his home, however. She remembered him leaving to take care of business and being so tired. The next thing she remembered was standing in the middle of the room and him holding her tightly while she cried, the remnants of the dream still terrifyingly close.

  The dream. Madelaine and Christien in the garden, about to be caught by her husband. Even now Lainie shuddered at how close they had come to being discovered. It was almost like watching a soap opera on TV except it was so much more real and the intensity of the dreams was wearing her out.

  She didn’t tell Erica about the dreams though, or running to Christien after seeing visions of herself dying. She hadn’t even told Christien about her visions of death and neither would she. He might say she wasn’t crazy, but she didn’t believe him. How could she when she thought she was crazy?

  “But I have kissed him,” she said with a secret smile, her body warming at the memory of their kiss. It’d heated her blood until she was completely flushed. His arms around her made her feel safe. It’d been a long time since she felt safe. When he pulled away, he looked flustered, not an expression he wore easily.

  “Yeah? So tell me what it’s like kissing Christien Chevalier?” Erica asked.

  “It’s…” Like I’ve come home. Like I’ve been searching for something all my life but didn’t even know it until he showed up. “Nice.”

  “Nice? Nice? By the look on your face I bet it was much better than nice.”

  Lainie laughed and tried to put into words what kissing Christien was like. Except it wasn’t something easily explained. When he’d said “kiss me” she’d been tempted to throw everything away. To forget her responsibilities and be reckless for once in her life. He’d been so tempting and she’d been so tempted, but common sense prevailed and she walked away. She wasn’t sure how much longer her resistance would last. Her mind told her to stand strong. A relationship with this man would alter her life forever. Her heart said to grab what she could for the exact same reason. Either way, she knew she would never be the same again.

  Do you feel it? he’d asked the other day. Do you feel what is between us?

  She had felt it. This…connection…was the only word to describe what was between them, but even that didn’t come close. When she was with him, it felt right, like she’d been missing the other half of herself her entire life and had finally found it. It was as if she knew him, knew what made him tick, what he was thinking, what he liked and disliked.

  Was he right? Had she known him in another life?

  She shook her head and handed the waiter her credit card. Reincarnation only happened in the pages of books, not in real life. Lainie had to keep her head on her shoulders. Christien was wonderful and kind, but she had to stop him from distracting her. She had to think of her father and his needs and wants before her own.

  While signing her receipt, she glimpsed the man from across the street out of the corner of her eye. He was still sitting at the table, his magazine forgotten, the corners of the pages lifting in the warm breeze. He sat back, relaxed, hands on a flat stomach, watching the women walk by. Their gazes locked, but his moved on almost immediately.

  Maybe she was wrong. Maybe she’d never seen him before. Maybe this past weekend was getting to her, making her imagine things.

  She and Erica walked back to the office with the larger-than-normal lunch crowd. The sidewalks were busy on this warm April day.

  They paused at the corner to wait for the light to turn with a handful of people. Erica chattered about her weekend and the movie she and her husband had seen. Lainie turned to respond when suddenly she was shoved from behind. Her foot slipped off the curb. She cried out, catching a glimpse of a mini-van barreling down on them.

  Tires squealed. Someone screamed. The driver of the van laid on the horn. Lainie’s shoulder slammed into the hood. The impact threw her backward. She landed on her side and slid across the road. The asphalt ate through her clothes. Her head hit the curb and everything went black.

  Chapter Nine

  France, 1307

  Something inside Madelaine died the night Christien left her in the garden.

  She’d walked back to her bedchamber and gone to bed a young girl. When dawn broke, the young girl was no more, replaced by a disillusioned woman who no longer believed in the hope that had once grown within her.

  What is between us is not finished. His words were the comfort she sought and the hope she clung to that night. She naïvely believed he’d come for her and save her from the cruelty of her existence, but when she awoke the next morning she discovered Christien and his men had left soon after he’d walked away from her in the garden. He’d had no intention of coming for her.

  She withdrew into herself, speaking when spoken to, carrying out the duties of a countess in a large, bustling castle, but she was a shell of herself.

  In a way, she had Christien’s abandonment to thank for the change within her because deep inside, in the place she retreated to, she found the strength she’d been lacking.

  Her husband’s threats meant little. What more could he do to her that he hadn’t done before?

  When the count realized the hold he had over her was weakening, that his threats held no meaning, that he failed to reach the part of her where fear lived, he declared her ill. He called in a physician, forcing her to submit to a humiliating bodily inspection in front of him.

  Instead of the mortification she would have felt weeks ago, she burned with an intense anger the likes of which she’d never experienced before. She used her anger to feed her strength, clinging to it like a person drowning, knowing if she let go, she would no longer exist.

  She lifted her chin and stared at her husband, forcing all the coldness inside her to show through her eyes. He’d taken one look at her and winced, his black-eyed gaze unable to meet hers.

  But it hadn’t taken long for her indifference to incite his fury.

  “It seems, dear wife, the physician believes nothing is wrong with you. Physically.” He circled her, watching, waiting for her to show a chink in her armor, but she refused to give him what he was searching for.

  She simply didn’t care anymore. If he killed her, ’twould be best. Her life had become an endless road of sorrow, fear and pain. To end it would be a blessing.

  If Christien were going to save her from this, he would have done it long ago. The sad truth was she couldn’t count on him. She couldn’t count on anyone. She was on her own and in order to survive she had to become a different person. Not the naïve young girl who wrung her hands while waiting for someone to save her, but a woman who fought back.

  She lifted her chin and looked her husband squarely in the bottomless pit of those black eyes and discovered something she should have seen a long time ago. Her husband had no soul. Those black eyes were m
erely the window to what lay inside him…nothing. With a shudder of fear—the first real fear she allowed herself to feel since her night in the garden—she realized a darkness encompassed him. Something sinister and evil.

  His smile was cold and made his obsidian eyes gleam with anticipation. She’d seen that look many times before and it made her shiver inside.

  “Brother Lucien believes you need help of a different sort.”

  Her fear flared but she valiantly hid it.

  His teeth flashed in an evil smile. “Of the religious sort.”

  Dear God, no.

  “I believe time spent with Brother Lucien will cure you of your affliction, no?”

  She balled her hands in the folds of her skirts and took deep breaths to calm her racing heart.

  The count circled her again. “Mayhap your ill humors come from the devil himself.”

  She mashed her back teeth together. She was not the one with the evil inside her.

  He put his finger to his chin, his hard gaze raking her from head to foot. “Yes. I believe that’s what is needed here. A little education from the good brother.” He laughed and sauntered out of the room.

  Madelaine sagged against the cold, stone wall, fighting her tears. The protective barrier she’d erected over the past several weeks was not enough to stem the tidal wave of fear nearly buckling her knees. Mon Dieu, he was sending Brother Lucien to her.

  She could only imagine what Brother Lucien’s “cure” would be. More than likely ’twas something far removed from an exorcism.

  Tears rolled down her cheeks. Her mind flitted from one thought to another. She needed to escape. To run away before Brother Lucien came for her. But where to go? Her family? They would gladly take her in but they were so far away she had no hope of getting to them without help from some quarter. She buried her face in her hands and for the first time since learning Christien had left she allowed herself to cry. But the tears didn’t last long. Tears hadn’t helped in the past and wouldn’t help now. What she needed was action. A plan of escape.