Alex smiled at her in a way that suggested she’d impressed him. She felt ridiculously proud.
Gaspar regarded her stonily.
“When you come back for Marjolaina,” she told him, “bring a sling and plenty of rope—and a couple of strong men, fellows who aren’t afraid to work. Not those worthless curs of yours—dependable men. She’s heavy.”
Gaspar bowed, his jaw set. “As you wish, milady.”
“Good day, Gaspar,” she said in dismissal.
“Good day, milady.” Turning to Alex, he added, perhaps as a parting shot, “Young sir.”
Kicking his mount, he thundered off down the path.
Chapter 23
“Where have you been?” Milo called out the next evening as Gaspar entered the great hall.
Gritting his teeth, Gaspar turned to face the desiccated creature in the bed. “At the abbey.”
“So late?”
“Father Octavian...needed my help with something, and it took longer than expected.”
“You missed supper.”
“I wouldn’t have had the appetite for it.” Not after this afternoon. Gaspar’s hands curled into fists as he fought back the urge to fly into a mindless, screaming rage. He didn’t know how much more of this he could take. He wanted to strangle all of them—Octavian, Nicolette, Milo, and most of all Alex de Périgeaux, whose reappearance after all these years had ruined everything. If not for him, Gaspar could have gone ahead with his original plan to dose Nicolette’s wine and sire a child on her unawares. As it was, he was now forced to wait, playing Milo’s compliant retainer and Father Octavian’s...was there even a word for the role he performed behind the locked door of the abbot’s office? How much longer would this have to go on before de Périgeaux’s seed took root and he could implement the next phase of his revised plan?
“I was waiting for you,” Milo said. “I wanted some wine, and those two won’t bring me any.” He nodded toward de Périgeaux and Nicolette, playing chess at the high table; but for them, the great hall was empty.
Gaspar fetched Milo the wine and poured it down his throat until he was good and soused. Drunkenness made him more receptive to Gaspar’s notions, and the time had come to broach his idea regarding the problem of Alex de Périgeaux.
Softly, so as not to be heard by the couple across the hall, he said, “From the looks of it, they fancy themselves in love.”
Milo gazed toward his wife and cousin with a thoughtful, rather melancholic expression, and then drained his goblet.
“Has it occurred to you,” Gaspar asked as he poured a refill, “that she may not be content to remain here with you once she’s carrying his child in her belly? He may find it easier to talk her into running off with him this time. Then where would you be? With no heir to inherit Peverell, you’d be cast out of here and begging on the streets before you know it.”
Milo’s head wobbled as he shook it. “Won’t happen,” he slurred. “Alex won’t go back on his oath—I told you. And my wife would never go along with it. ‘Twould ruin her precious reputation—and she’d be giving up Peverell. Never happen.”
“You can’t be sure of that.”
“I am sure.” Milo swallowed some more wine and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I know them both—better’n you do. They’ll do what’s right if it kills ‘em.”
“Perhaps,” Gaspar murmured, glancing at Nicolette and Alex as they laughed over something. “But what if they don’t? People have been known to act contrary to their natures—especially in matters of the heart. What if he convinces her to follow him back to England?”
“Why should you care?” Milo’s gaze was remarkably astute, considering his condition. “You get to stay on here no matter what happens. Nicolette told me you got Father Octavian to name you steward. How’d you talk him into it?”
Talk? He wished all it had taken was talk. Gaspar chose to ignore Milo’s second query and answer the first. “I care because I’d rather serve as your retainer than Father Octavian’s steward.”
“Is it because of his...inclinations?”
Gaspar stiffened.
“They say he’s a sodomite.” Milo took another drink, staring at Gaspar. His gaze when he lowered the goblet was too knowing. “How’d you say you talked him into naming you steward?”
“It didn’t take much talking.” Gaspar wanted to punch that blearily smug look off of Milo’s face. “He wanted a military man for the job. I was the best candidate.”
“I see.”
“But as I say, I’d rather serve you than him,” Gaspar said smoothly, eager to get to make his point and deflect the conversation from its present course. “Which will be impossible if your cousin absconds with your wife. We must prevent that.”
“I assume you have a plan.” Milo lifted the goblet to his mouth. “You always have a plan.”
Gaspar glanced around to make sure no servant or soldier was creeping about. “He could take ill and...keel over dead. It happens all the time.”
Milo lowered the goblet slowly, his incredulous gaze trained on Gaspar. “Nay.”
Gaspar leaned closer. “Poison hemlock and white hellebore. Very difficult to detect in spiced wine.”
“Nay!”
“No one need ever know. And I wouldn’t do it till she’s with child, of course—”
“Nay! He’s my cousin, for God’s sake.”
“This is not the time for sentimentality,” Gaspar said between clenched teeth. “The man is a menace.”
Milo sat upright for the first time all day, scowling in astonishment. “You’re telling me you want to murder an innocent man with poison, and you say he’s the menace?”
“Innocent? He talked your wife into betraying you.”
“Because I asked him to!”
“You asked him to seduce her body, not her heart. You never asked him to woo her like some moonstruck youth. You never asked him to steal her away from you.”
“Alex is not going to steal Nicolette away from me.”
“Your faith in him is quite touching,” Gaspar said snidely, “but potentially disastrous. Spare his life and you’ll end up sorry.”
“I’m already sorry.” Milo sank back against his pillows, a sad-eyed living corpse. “Sorrier than I can say, for ever having relied on you...for letting you insinuate yourself into our lives this way.”
Gaspar backtracked swiftly, wary of losing Milo’s trust in him too soon. He needed that trust for a little while longer. “I can’t tell you how those words sting, milord.” He lowered his head contritely. “I’d kill myself before I’d relinquished your confidence. What I said, about the poison...’twas my concern for you, and our position here, that prompted such a rash idea.”
“You won’t do it, will you?” Milo demanded. “You won’t go behind my back—”
“Nay, of course not!” Gaspar said, reinforcing the denial with what he hoped was a credible expression of outrage. “‘Twas just an idea, nothing more, and a foolish one. I’d never dream of going against your wishes.” Not until Lady Nicolette was pregnant, at any rate. Until then, he must bide his time and put on as convincing a display of servile obedience as he could stomach—while keeping a close watch on her ladyship, lest she cook up any more clever schemes for keeping Peverell. He must not abandon his practice of following her if she rode away unescorted, especially at odd hours. So far the practice had proved most enlightening.
“Good,” Milo said, but Gaspar saw it all in his eyes—the skepticism, the apprehension. He knew, or at least suspected, the truth—that Gaspar would do what Gaspar saw fit, regardless of Milo’s instructions.
Gaspar might almost have been worried if he thought there was a possibility that Milo would remember any of this tomorrow.
“You’re troubling yourself over nothing, milord,” Gaspar soothed, pouring some more wine into his master’s goblet. “Drink up and get a good night’s sleep, and you’ll feel ever so much better in the morning. I feel certain of it.”
> Chapter 24
Alex looked up from his tablet to study Nicki as she fetched their apple cider from the stream, where it was cooling. He loved watching her—her graceful walk, the restrained elegance of her movements as she flipped her braids out of the way, then crouched and pulled the string attached to the flagon of cider.
A leaf spun down from the forest canopy above and landed on his tablet. Sitting up, he lifted it by its stem and twirled it. It was the pale red of claret, with just a smudge of rust near the tip. Dozens of similar brightly hued leaves littered their blanket, strewn by a breeze that had grown inexorably cooler over the past few weeks.
At Hauekleah, Faithe would be preparing for next week’s harvest feast to celebrate Michaelmas, the twenty-ninth of September, which marked the official beginning of winter on their Cambridgeshire farmstead. Faithe would supervise her staff as they decorated the barn with the last of the wheat sheaves. During the feast, she and Luke—and probably Robert and Hlynn—would dance in a circle with their devoted villeins, to the accompaniment of cowbells, tambourines and reed flutes.
Closing his eyes, Alex could almost hear it. It had its own distinctive, sound, the music of the Saxon peasants—whimsical and mellow and so oddly compelling that he only had to hear a tune once and it was burned into his memory.
Christ, but he missed England. He missed Luke and Faithe, and of course the children, terribly, but most of all he just missed England—the lush green smell of it, the damp richness of the soil, the robust people and their powerful connection to the land. Not that he’d been dwelling on it during his stay in Normandy; had it really been nearly three months already? He’d had other things on his mind, to be sure, and there could be no sweeter diversion than Nicki. But sometimes, as now, something would remind him of things English and he would feel an empty longing deep in his chest.
“What are you thinking of?”
Alex opened his eyes to find Nicki lowering herself to the blanket; she sat facing him, her knees touching his comfortably.
“England.”
Nicki nodded. She knew how he felt. He told her everything—everything he wasn’t bound by oath to conceal from her. They talked endlessly, here in their secluded haven by the stream, when they weren’t bending their heads over their lessons or making love beneath the sheltering trees.
She uncorked the clay bottle and handed it to him. It was wet and cool; the cider filled his mouth with its special sweetness, the taste of autumn. He passed the bottle back to her. She took a sip and recorked it. Without looking up, she said, in a soft, reticent voice, “You’ll be back in England for Christmas.”
It was unlike Nicki to bring this up. By tacit agreement, they never spoke of the future. But then, for almost a fortnight now, she had seemed unusually subdued. Perhaps it was the change of seasons that affected her so. Winter was coming, and by the time its grip was fully upon the land, Alex would be gone.
He took the bottle out of her hand and set it aside, then pulled her onto his lap and cradled her head against his chest. Kissing her hair, he murmured, “When we’re forced to part, I will miss you far, far more than I miss England now.”
“You’ll have other things to think about than me,” she said. “You’ll be back in the king’s service.”
“Soldiering doesn’t excite me anymore,” he said. “You excite me.”
“Aye, but you like the freedom of that life—you once told me so. No estate to maintain, no wife and children to be responsible for. You’ll stop thinking about me—”
“Never! I’ll think of you every hour of every day, until the moment I die. Never doubt that.”
She clung to him, and he to her. They held each other tightly, almost fiercely, for quite a long time.
“We shouldn’t dwell on your leaving,” she said, stroking his cheek. “We still have two months until you have to return to England.”
Unless she quickened with his child, in which case he was obliged by his oath to leave immediately. As much as he wanted to give her a son—both to bring her joy and to save her from destitution—he dreaded their inevitable separation.
“What were you writing?” she asked, with a cheerfulness he knew must be feigned.
With a sheepish grin, Alex handed her the tablet, on which he’d painstakingly scratched out Alexandre de Périgeaux loves Nikolet de Saint Clar.
Her smile of delight warmed his heart. Locking her arms around his neck, she kissed him soundly.
“Nicolette de St. Clair loves Alexandre de Périgeaux,” she whispered, rubbing her cheek against his. “And I’m so proud that you’ve learned how to write.”
“My spelling is abysmal,” he said. “Did I get your name right?”
“Almost. I’ll show you how to spell it correctly, and then perhaps you can write to me after you return to England.”
Alex looked away, remembering that blasted oath...You’ll keep your true purpose from Nicolette, and when it’s done, you’ll leave here and never contact her again—or the child.
“Do you know I love you?” he asked, drawing her close.
“Aye.”
“Do you really know it, all the way into your soul?”
She looked at him, her eyes like clear pools in the cool forest light. “My melancholy has rubbed off on you. I’m sorry.”
“‘Tisn’t your fault. Our humors are unbalanced.”
She touched her forehead to his. “How shall we realign them?”
He smiled. “I think I know a way.”
She returned his smile. “Do you?”
He glided his fingertips lightly over both breasts. Her nipples grew taut beneath the soft white wool of her tunic.
“Yes,” she breathed, shifting to straddle him as they sat facing each other. “I believe you do.”
He raised her skirt and reached beneath it; she opened his chausses. Amid whisper-soft kisses and breathless sighs, they sought each other’s warmth, their caresses lingering and gentle, as if they had all the time in the world, their bodies swaying in a slow dance of passion. When, at long last, he came into her, so slick and tight, he moaned in utter helplessness. No woman had ever fit him the way Nicki did; no woman had ever been part of him. How would he find the strength to leave her when the time came?
They kissed as the dance continued, the lazy, measured cadence of it intensifying the sensations, deepening the pleasure of their joining. Alex untied the cord that laced up Nicki’s tunic in front and loosened it. He tugged at the sleeves, lowering the gown to her waist and helping her to slide her arms free. But as he tucked his fingers beneath the straps of her undershift, he noticed something. “You’ve forgotten your herbs again.”
Old Edith had made her up a tiny bundle of herbs that Nicki wore around her neck beneath her tunic whenever they were together. She wore them to prevent conception, but Alex had never known such methods to work. Their true purpose, as he saw it, was to lull Nicki into thinking there was no need for him to withdraw when they made love.
Nicki touched her chest absently. “Ah, yes. I did forget them.” For a moment she just looked at him, her expression pensive, as if there were something she wanted to say. Presently, her gaze sobering, she reached behind her for her saddlebags, retrieved the bundle on its leather thong, and hung it around her neck.
This was the second time in the past week that she’d forgotten about it. Alex wondered if, perhaps, she secretly wanted to get pregnant, despite the damage to her reputation. Or perhaps it was simply that she’d been out of sorts lately.
He trailed the back of his hand lightly down her face and throat. “Do you want to talk?”
There was a glimmer of something when she met his gaze, but it was quickly extinguished. “Nay.” Locking her gaze with his, she hooked her thumbs under the straps of her shift and lowered the delicate undergarment past her breasts. Alex throbbed inside her, excited by this small gesture simply because she was so bashful about undressing in front of him. He loved to watch women remove their clothes just for him, an
d had asked her several times to do so, only to be shyly rebuffed.
Her rosy little nipples hovered tantalizing close to his mouth. He leaned toward one, but she whispered, “Wait.” She removed the embroidered sash looped over her hips and set it aside. Gathering up her tunic and shift, she pulled both garments off over her head, leaving herself in nothing but her stockings and slippers. High color blossomed on her cheeks; she bit her lip. Alex didn’t know whether to laugh at her silly modesty or weep with his aching love for her.
“Nicki, you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.” It was true. Her body had a delicacy to it, a lissome grace, that was unequaled in his experience. Her breasts were extraordinary, not large, but high and firm and perfectly round—so warm in his hands, so sweet in his mouth. He’d never seen a narrower waist, more supple legs.
Seeing her this way, naked in her braids and stockings while he, fully clothed, was buried deep inside her, aroused him intensely. She raised herself almost until they uncoupled, then lowered herself; and again, and again. The sight of his sex gliding in and out of her undid him. Moaning, he gripped her hips and tried to set a quicker pace, but she seized his hands to prevent that and resumed her maddeningly slow lovemaking.
He captured a nipple in his mouth and suckled as she moved sinuously, her eyes closed, her head back, her breath coming faster, faster. Fulfillment approached all too swiftly. Alex groaned, partly in despair that it should end so soon, and partly because of the escalating pleasure that held him in its grip. He held off as long as he could, shuddering as he strove to make it last. When she cried out with her release, it was all over.
“Oh, Nicki. Oh, God.” Holding her tight, he exploded with a suddenness that stole his breath. An anguished cry shattered the stillness of the woods, and he realized, as his climax ebbed, that it had come from him—or perhaps from both of them, together.
Lords of Conquest Boxed Set Page 132
