Lords of Conquest Boxed Set

by Patricia Ryan

  “My plan changed,” she said matter-of-factly. “Had to. The sheriff caught wind of what I was up to, so I had to come up with something different.”

  “Something different.” The sheriff was on to her? Apprehension shivered up Rolf’s spine, crawled over his scalp, chilling him right down to the bone. “What do you mean?” he asked, swallowing past his strangely thick tongue. “How did you kill her?”

  “By fire.”

  Fire. That smoke. Rolf sniffed the air, or tried to; his nose and throat and mouth felt numb, dead; he couldn’t smell anything. The wineskin slipped out of his fingers and fell to the ground.

  “‘Twas an ugly house,” she said in a drunken voice, swaying slightly on her feet.

  “You set fire to my house?” Rolf’s voice was as oddly slurred as hers. He tried to grab the front of her shift, but she wasn’t where he thought she was, and he ended up grasping two of the silken hangings and pulling them down. “You goddamned crazy bitch! Tell me you didn’t burn down my house! And—Christ, all my silk!” He’d be ruined—ruined, just like his father. “Tell, me, damn your eyes!”

  She was laughing, damn her, laughing, but then the laughter degenerated into a fit of gagging. Elswyth sank to her knees, clutching her chest, her breath coming in quick strident gasps.

  “What’s wrong with you?” he asked, even as his own chest tightened and his breath emerged in huffing little puffs and his vision swam and he knew oh God what was wrong oh God no, no, no—

  “One of...the reasons,” Elswyth wheezed, “they call it the...Qu-Queen Mother of Poisons...is because it’s so h-hard to detect in, in, in—” Her body jerked, shuddered, her lips drawing back in a grotesque grimace, her eyes wild, blood trickling from her nose.

  “No!” He was cold, so cold, an icy river crackling through his veins, his teeth clenched in agony, a mad shriek filling his ears, can’t breathe oh God can’t breathe no no no no—

  Had to get help, had to get out of there. He took a lurching step and slipped on a puddle of silk, his legs wobbling out from beneath him, flailing, thrashing, hands clutching at the shimmering pennants, yanking them down around him.

  He landed slowly with a hard dull silent thud, everything sideways now, silks floating over him, over both of them in celestial fluttering wings of bloodred, crimson, plum, pink, ruby...her face with its flat empty eyes right there in front of his, beckoning him to join her in eternity so they could spend their future together.

  I need to be with you always. Forever.

  He really had underestimated her very badly.

  * * *

  The silk traders’ market hall was unusually quiet in an odd, strained way when Undersheriff Nyle Orlege arrived shortly after his midday meal to question Rolf le Fever.

  He strode through the front entrance of the massive stone enclo¬sure to find dozens of men in fine silken tunics clustered around one of the booths, conferring in hushed tones—except for one black-haired fellow jabbering away anxiously in what sounded like one of the Italian dialects.

  “Does anyone know where I can find Rolf le Fever?” Nyle demanded in his most booming, don’t-ignore-me voice.

  Heads turned, surveying him with interest, especially the manacles and chains dangling from his belt. Looks were exchanged; slowly the crowd parted, carving a path into the booth around which they were gathered.

  The first thing Nyle noticed as he walked toward the booth was that some of the sheets of red and purple silk hanging there had been torn down and lay strewn about haphazardly. He’d just about decided some drunken youths had gotten in here during the dinner hour and vandalized the place when he caught a whiff of death—all too familiar in his profession, especially in high summer, when bodies ripened within minutes.

  And then he saw the legs emerging from beneath the careless heaps of silk, two sets of them, a man’s in yellow silk chausses and bejeweled boots and a woman’s, bare and filthy.

  “Bloody hell,” Nyle said.

  Chapter 24

  “How does your leg feel?” Joanna asked Graeham as she unlocked her front door.

  His splints had come off this morning. It was late in the afternoon now, and they’d had a full day, much of it on their feet. First had come Thomas’s funeral at St. Giles, the lazar-house where he had finally succumbed to his terrible burns after six long days—though he’d been sedated with sleeping draughts most of that time, and died peacefully. Then, this afternoon, Olive and Damian Oxwyke had been quietly joined in matrimony at the door of St. Mary Magdalene on Milk Street, and Joanna and Graeham had been there to watch.

  “‘Tisn’t bad at all,” Graeham said, following her into the salle. Unencumbered by the splints, his natural gait was graceful in a powerful, long-legged way, but it had grown a little stiff as the day had worn on.

  Joanna smiled as she hung up her mantle and unpinned the veil she’d worn over her braids. “You don’t need me to rub it, then?” When Master Aldfrith had removed the splints, he’d recommended a nice firm massage to ease any discomfort in the leg, and had sold him a liniment for that purpose. Catching her eye, Graeham had smiled and said that seemed like a splendid idea.

  “Cheeky little vixen.” Graeham came up behind her and cupped her breasts through her violet kirtle, caressing them until she felt breathless. Nuzzling her hair, he said, “I’m aching to be rubbed.”

  “No, really, if you don’t want me to...”

  With a growl of mock exasperation, he swept her up, causing her slippers to fall off, and carried her into the storeroom, where the liniment was. It was cool and shadowy in here, the windows having been shuttered all day.

  Setting her on her feet, he unbuckled his belt and pulled off his tunic. He sat on the edge of the cot—where he no longer slept, having shared her bed in the solar for the past week and a half—and tugged off his boots and chausses, leaving himself in his shirt and drawers.

  “I was surprised to see Lionel Oxwyke embrace Olive after the nuptials,” Graeham said, stretching out full length on the cot. “Especially given what it cost him to terminate Damian’s betrothal to that young girl.”

  Elswyth’s letter to her daughter, in which she confessed to every detail of her mad scheme to join herself for eternity with Rolf le Fever, had nevertheless made no mention of Olive’s liaison with the guildmaster, or her pregnancy. Damian, who knew about the illicit relationship—it was the secret Olive had been so distressed to have him unearth—proclaimed to the world in general and his father in particular that he had sired Olive’s unborn child and meant to make her his wife posthaste. Lionel Oxwyke was, of course, livid about the situation, but custom and the Church were on the young couple’s side; for a woman to quicken with child outside of wedlock was no grievous sin—provided the man did the right thing and married her.

  “I’ll bet I know why Master Lionel has warmed up to Olive the way he has,” Joanna said, opening the little jar of fragrant liniment. “A few days ago, she told me she was going to concoct some sort of elixir for his stomach. It must have worked, is all I can think.”

  Graeham smiled. “Did you see the way Olive was looking at Damian while she spoke her vows?”

  Joanna smiled. “And the way he was looking at her—aye. Rolf le Fever will be a distant memory soon enough, I think. By the time that baby comes, they’ll have forgotten who really fathered it.”

  “Love has a strange kind of power,” Graeham said. “It seems to be able to change the very nature of things, like alchemy.” He met her gaze and then looked quickly away.

  Joanna turned her back to Graeham and sat on the edge of the cot by his legs, facing away from him. Graeham had not spoken to her of love, had not returned her whispered declaration after they’d stumbled out of Rolf le Fever’s burning house. Perhaps he hadn’t heard it.

  Perhaps he had.

  She wouldn’t say it again, she’d decided, not until she heard it from him. She knew what was in his heart; the magic that swirled around them was too powerful to be coming from her alon
e. He loved her. He must love her.

  Perhaps it troubled him that he was a soldier, and unlanded. Perhaps he thought he didn’t have any right to fall in love, or that it was unwise to have done so. Certainly it was unwise; no one knew that better than Joanna, and she had no easy answer as to what the future held in store for them. All she knew was that she loved him, and she couldn’t fathom that he didn’t love her back.

  He would tell her when he was ready. Pray God he did so before he left for Paris.

  He planned to leave—he and Ada le Fever—on the fifteenth of July, which was but four days hence, and had written to Lord Gui to expect them in Paris no later than the twentieth. Ada, who’d spent the past nine days recuperating at St. Bartholemew’s Hospital, was nearly recovered from the effects of the slow poisoning Elswyth had subjected her to since Christmastide. Joanna visited her every day, gratified to see her cheeks blooming with color, her eyes sparkling with renewed vitality. No longer confined to bed, she’d taken to helping the nuns nurse the other patients, an activity she seemed to find great satisfaction in. Although never keen on logic and philosophy, as her sister Phillipa was, Ada thought she might like to study medicine when she returned to Paris. Perhaps, she’d speculated, she could even talk her papa into sending her to the great medical school at Salerno, where women as well as men were educated to become physicians.

  “Joanna?” She felt Graeham’s fingers, warm and rough, on the back of her neck and closed her eyes to savor the gentle caress. “You’re very quiet suddenly. Is anything wrong?”

  “I don’t know,” she said softly, but immediately amended it. “Nay. Nothing’s wrong.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “It’s been a long and trying day.”

  His hand stroked a comforting path down her back. “Any day that begins with the funeral of a friend is trying.”

  Joanna nodded. She’d wept uncontrollably as Thomas’s shrouded body was lowered into the ground; Graeham had held her, whispering words of solace her in a voice choked with emotion.

  “He died trying to save Ada and me,” she said.

  “‘Twas how he wanted to die, I think—not as a thing, eaten away with disease, but as a man, the best kind of man. He was trapped in that ruined body, but his soul is free of it now. He would want us to rejoice for him, not mourn him.”

  Joanna forced herself to smile. “I know that.” Scooping up a dollop of the translucent balm, she set the jar on the other side of Graeham, where she could reach it, and rubbed her hands together to warm the liniment. He sighed when she smoothed her hands down his leg from knee to ankle, and up again. “How does that feel?”

  “I could take a firmer touch.”

  He’d told her that just last night, about a different kind of touch. Joanna grew warm at the memory of their uninhibited lovemaking.

  As she massaged him, she felt the taut muscles of his calf gradually relax.

  “A little higher,” he said.

  Scooting back, she dipped up some more liniment and rubbed his knee, his thigh.

  Graeham lifted his shirt, untied his underdrawers, opened them; he was fully aroused. “A little higher?”

  He took her hand, slick with the oily balm, and closed it over his straining shaft. She stroked him, not needing to be told to use a firm, steady pressure. During their long, breathless nights together, she was learning the appetites of his body, just as he was learning hers.

  He whipped off his shirt, kicked off his drawers and sat up. “Where do you ache?” he asked softly, pulling at the cord that laced up the back of her kirtle.

  Suddenly short of breath, Joanna answered him with a sigh as he unlaced her. He peeled the gown off her shoulders, untied her shift and tugged both garments down to her hips as she slid her arms free. Her braids hung over her chest. He gathered them behind her, untied them and trailed his fingers through her hair until it hung in a rippling sheet down her back.

  Her heart thudded in anticipation when he reached into the little jar and scooped some of its contents onto his fingertips.

  “Where, Joanna?” he whispered into her ear, tucking himself up behind her, his legs to either side of her, their feet on the floor. “Where do you ache?”

  She gripped his thighs, waiting.

  “Tell me.”

  She shook her head, thrumming with need but reticent, even after all those nights with him, to give voice to it.

  Banding an arm around her waist, he touched a balm-slicked finger to her left nipple. “Here?”

  She hitched in a breath, nodded.

  His lips grazed the back of her neck, scratchy-soft kisses, one after the other, while his hand slid warm and slippery over her weighty flesh, stroking, squeezing. He caressed her other breast the same way as she arched back against him, her breath coming faster, her breasts swelling beneath his touch.

  “Where else do you ache?”

  She whimpered, her fingers digging into his thighs.

  Dipping into the balm jar again, he rubbed his fingertips together to spread the thick ointment over them and slipped his hand beneath the garments bunched at her waist.

  Joanna held her breath.

  His first light, probing touch incited a spasm of pleasure that made her flinch. He tightened his arm around her waist to hold her still and worked the balm into her aching flesh, at first gently, almost tenderly, then pressing into her and stroking her deep, finding her wet, so wet, his sex slick and rigid against the small of her back as he held her tight for this sweet assault.

  She struggled against him, moaning, the mounting pleasure as acute as pain. “Stop,” she gasped as the pleasure quivered through her, building fast, ready to spill over. She clutched at his unyielding arm, ropy with iron bands of muscle. “Stop, wait.”

  “Nay,” he murmured in her ear. “I want to feel you come like this.” He slid his finger deep inside her, ground his palm against her.

  She shouted as her climax overtook her, hard and jolting, a shock of pleasure that crested over and over as he prolonged it with his insistent caress.

  Her ears rang as she slumped back against him. Swiftly he withdrew his hand and stripped off her kirtle and shift, leaving her in naught but her black silken stockings.

  Scooping her up in his arms, he laid her on her side, with him behind her. He wrapped one arm around her from beneath, closing it over a breast. His other hand brushed her bottom as he reached between them. She felt his fingers between her legs, opening her, and the hot, sleek pressure of him pushing into her from behind, impaling her in one stroke, both of them slick with balm and trembling with need.

  Leaning over her, he kissed her cheek, his breath harsh in her ear. “I wish I could stay,” he whispered, something almost hopeless in his voice. “I wish to God I didn’t have to leave you.”

  Finally she asked what she’d avoided asking for so long, hoping she wouldn’t have to, hoping he’d simply tell her. “Will...will you come back?”

  Graeham’s hand, resting on her hip, tightened fractionally. She felt his chest rise and fall against her back. “I’ll return to England in a few weeks.”

  “For good?”

  Again he hesitated. “Aye.”

  “Truly?” Filled with joy, she twisted her head to look at him, but he lay down and buried his face in her hair.

  “I’ll miss you,” he said.

  “‘Twill only be for a few weeks, and then you’ll be back.”

  He said nothing. She felt his erection wane within her.

  “I’ll miss you, too, Graeham, but we have four days together until you have to leave. We should make the best of that time.” She took his free arm and draped it over her waist, guiding his hand between her legs.

  She writhed as he caressed her, swept up once more by an unstoppable tide of arousal. From within her came an insistent thickening as he swelled and filled her. He rocked into her, deep, gliding thrusts that drove her closer, closer...

  She clawed at the bed covers as her climax neared, cried out as it
overtook her. Gripping her hip, he drove in hard, his stabbing thrusts ever more urgent.

  “Oh, God, Joanna.” He rolled her facedown and bucked savagely against her, one hand fisted in her hair, groaning in an almost despairing way. It seemed to Joanna that he was in the grip of something dark and desperate, an animal compulsion to mate, to claim.

  All too abruptly, he uncoupled from her. Seizing her roughly, he turned her faceup and fell on her, an anguished moan rising in his throat as his release shuddered through him.

  He shivered afterward; she held him, stroked his back, his hair.

  He raised his face to look at her; there was something haunted in his eyes. “Did I hurt you?”

  She smiled and laid her palm against his raspy cheek. “You could never hurt me, Graeham.”

  Closing his eyes, he nestled his head back in the crook of her neck. “Yes, I could.”

  Chapter 25

  “Isn’t it beautiful here?” Joanna asked her brother as they strolled with the other wedding guests from Ramswick’s little stone chapel, where Robert and Margaret had just been married, to a clover-festooned meadow bisected by a stream, where the bride ale would be celebrated.

  “You could have been mistress of all this,” Hugh said, indicating with a sweep of his hand the sprawling farmstead, green and gold and perfect beneath an afternoon sky studded with puffball clouds.

  Joanna didn’t need Hugh to remind her of that. She’d thought of little else since they’d arrived at nones for the wedding. Ramswick was her idea of heaven—sheep-dotted pastures, well-tended fields, woods and streams and a lovely little village of thatched cottages. She felt a sense of peace here. She felt at home here, much more than she did in noisome, crowded West Cheap—although, of course, she’d seen to it that Ramswick would never be her home.

  Nodding toward the bridal couple, walking hand-in-hand at the head of the procession, their heads bent together in laughter, Joanna said, “Look at them. ‘Twas always meant to be. They belong here, together.”