Griffith calmed his instinctive fight reaction, then exchanged a glance with Art. Together they sheathed their knives and offered identical, boyish, and, they hoped, innocent grins.
“Lady Marian, lass, ye surprised us,” Art said.
“Old habits.” Griffith patted the pillow that hid his knife.
“I heard your voices, and I thought…” She shuffled her bare feet on the cold board floor.
“Sure, and we’re glad to have ye join us.” Art winked his one eye and created such an odd effect that she smiled, if only briefly. “Er…did ye want to talk about what we were talking about, or did ye have another topic in mind?”
“I didn’t understand what you were talking about. You were speaking in Welsh again.”
“So we were,” Griffith agreed heartily.
“’Twas only a dull discussion of how Welsh ale is superior to English ale.” Art poured Griffith’s discarded cup full and offered it to her. “Ye’ll want a taste before ye agree.”
She stepped forward, her gaze on the mug, and Art lured her with a low, pleasant chuckle. “’Twould be treason to agree without a taste, but ye’ll see what makes the men grow strong and the women grow beautiful when ye try Welsh ale.”
She took another step. “But that’s English ale. How will I compare?”
Art struck his forehead with his palm, as if the quandary had just occurred to him. “Ye’ll have to come to Wales with me, I trow, to make it fair. Ye’ll like Wales. The mountains are rugged and beautiful, with Snowdon towering above them all. The people are kind and generous, poetic and full of song. Castle Powel is set on a hill above the rugged Atlantic coast, where the waves pound and the seabirds sing. Aye, my lady, ye must come to Wales with us.”
Griffith watched as she wavered, wanting to make the last step but frightened of the consequences.
And he didn’t want her to make it.
All well for Art to entice her with a silly challenge and a bit of laughter. Art didn’t see the braid that draped over her shoulder and imagine the red hair loose. He didn’t imagine her comb as it dug into the waves and tamed them. He didn’t observe the flex of her slender fingers and imagine them wrapped around a sweet Welsh bundle of a babe. He didn’t look at her long, bare feet and imagine them placed on his legs on a cold winter’s night. Art wasn’t imagining the pleasures a man imagines when he’s wanting a wife.
But Art knew Griffith was, and he was intent on making it well-nigh impossible for Griffith to deny them.
Her gaze was still fixed on the mug. She seemed frozen in place, and Art could wait no more. He took the final step, clasped her hands around the mug, and urged, “Drink.”
“I can’t,” she said. “I’m cold.”
“Ye’re shaking, lass,” Art observed, then hurried to the fire.
She was shaking. Griffith could see it. She shook in ripples, in waves, like someone fighting to repress some emotion too great to contain. He grasped her wrist and found it trembling in his hand. Other signs of distress were visible, too. She bit her lip. She looked at him, then her glance slid away.
His bold, valiant Marian was afraid.
Without his realizing, he softened the grip of his fingers, softened his normal rough growl. “What bothers you, sweetheart?”
She flinched away as if burned. “I just wanted to…ah…”
Leaning off the mattress, he put his hands over hers and lifted the mug to her lips, helping her as he would Lionel.
“Drink,” he whispered, and she obeyed.
When she finished, he placed the cup on the table and again asked, “What bothers you?”
Her gaze slid up his body beneath the covers, lingered on his bare chest, then reached his face. “I had a…oh…the baby was sleeping, and I didn’t want to wake him, so I…”
Comprehension began to dawn on him, but he encouraged her. “Why did you want to wake the baby?”
“I didn’t want to wake him. Only hold him for a wee bit.”
She shivered, and he knew the heavy wrap she wore could not be keeping her warm.
Art elbowed his way forward. “I’ve wrapped a stone, warm from the fire, and I’ll place it here, in the middle of the bed.” To Marian he said, “I’ve an assignation with a sweet widow in the laundry, and I must be going, but Griffith will take care of ye.” He shoved the foot warmer between the sheets and rapped Griffith sharply on the leg in the process. “Won’t ye, Griffith?”
“Arthur, don’t go,” Griffith commanded, but Art slid out the door without a backward glance. “Damn the man! I hope she sucks him dry.”
The wrist in his hand trembled more, and Marian whispered, “You’re angry.”
“Nay. Not at you,” he assured her, but he couldn’t tell her to sit on the bed and warm her feet on the stone. He could scarcely keep from kissing her palm, and the years of celibacy drove him like a spur in the flank of a spirited horse. Grimly he pulled himself under control, reminding himself he was the rider, not the ridden.
Tugging at her wrist, she said, “But you’re right. I shouldn’t have come down. I’m sorry. Let me leave you in peace.”
He kissed her palm. “I’m concerned about you. You had a nightmare, you say?”
Never realizing his ruse, she covered her eyes with her hand. “It was awful. They were burning the cottage, and I couldn’t find Lionel, and when I found you, you’d been stabbed through the heart.…”
With his free hand, he drew her fingers from her eyes and felt the dampness of her tears. Saw them glisten on her cheeks. Heard her sniffle. He put his hands to her waist and lifted her onto the high mattress. After tucking the blanket around her sock-covered feet, he tightened the tie of her robe, then said, “Sit beside me.”
“Why do you do that?” she burst out.
“What, lass?”
“Toss me around, make me do what you wish, then tell me to do it?”
He chuckled, comfortable with the press of her hip against his, pleased with the formidable barrier of sheet between them. Urging her down on the pillows beside him, he said, “Lie down. I’ve found you get your way when you don’t give people a choice.”
“Especially not women?” she asked peevishly.
“Especially not weak-minded folk,” he corrected. Before she could respond, he asked, “You couldn’t hold the babe, so came to hold me instead?”
Her shivering diminished. Instead she squirmed, and his whole body clenched. She was frightened, emotional, vulnerable. Every maid had been warned of the dangers of frequenting a man’s sleeping chamber. And Marian herself had discovered the truth of it—Lionel proved that. But she had overcome her reluctance at least enough to come to him.
Only in the throes of fear, but she’d come to him.
So he would contain his outrageous impulses and give her the human contact she craved.
After sliding his arm around her shoulders, he pressed her head down until it rested on his bare chest. She resisted, of course, but she never had a chance against his strength and her need.
“Rest on me,” he murmured.
With a sigh, she relaxed. Her breath puffed along his skin, her hand smoothed his crinkled hair from beneath her nose. “I only wanted to look at you,” she whispered.
He smiled at the top of her head, glad she couldn’t see the countenance her confession engendered. “All the lasses like to look at me. ’Tis only a privileged few who get to touch.”
His uncharacteristic teasing did bring her head up, but he gently pushed her back down and asked, “Can you hear my heart?”
“Aye.”
“’Tis not stabbed through. ’Tis healthy enough to—”
She kissed him.
Oh, just a light and innocent touch of her lips. Just the skin in the middle of his chest. Just the skin over his heart.
But it broke another of the reins that restrained the cavorting horse that rode him…that he rode.
She laid her head back down, and he thought he couldn’t draw a breath big enough to fill
his lungs. She could hear the betraying race of his heart, he knew, but he didn’t know if he cared. The glory of her fiery hair drew him, and he lifted his hand. Touching her forehead, he stroked his palm slowly along. On their own accord, his fingertips wandered around her ear and down to her neck. They stroked down her back to the very tip of her braid. Then he lifted his hand and began again.
“Lass, have I told you how beautiful your hair is?”
“Nay.”
The word was scarcely audible, but her breath warmed his nipple, and he closed his eyes against the pleasure of it. “How long is it when it’s unbound?”
“It reaches my…ah…”
His hand patted her posterior, then surreptitiously released the ribbon that bound the end of her braid. “That’s what I thought.”
“I can sit on it when it’s loose. It would be longer, but…”
He pulled the wool wrap back from her shoulder and massaged her through the thin material of her dress, and she broke off as if she were confused.
“But?” he encouraged.
“When I was a child, I hated the color. Everyone teased me about it, so I took some scissors and—”
“You’re too impulsive.” He wondered how he had the gall to chide her when they lay entwined on his bed at his own behest, and he was carefully unplaiting her hair.
“When I was young, perhaps. By the time I was five, I well knew my duties and had control of my mad impulses. My father saw to that.”
He wanted to ask her what it was, then, that had landed her flat on her back in some man’s bed, but that would anger and alarm her, and he found himself unwilling to sacrifice the warmth, the small talk that was teaching him so much. Maybe it was the near darkness, their isolation, the strangeness, but they were talking.
Not snarling, not snapping, but exchanging information—and he liked it.
“Your father?”
“Aye, before he placed me with Elizabeth, he personally drilled me in my duties to my patron.”
“Personally?”
“Of course.” She chuckled. “But for no honorable reasons, I assure you. ’Twas only to advance the fortunes of the family. The House of York seemed secure then. I was to make myself indispensable to Elizabeth, to remain totally loyal to her. And I did.”
“For your family?”
“For Elizabeth,” she corrected. “She loved me more dearly than a sister.”
“And your father loves you not at all.”
“My father loves me as well as he can love. Mayhap not at all.”
As he pulled his fingers through her hair like a comb, he said, “You take his lack of affection well.”
She shrugged. “One can’t miss what one has never had.”
Remembering his own warm relationship with his parents, he wondered…But she was right, of course. She wasn’t suffering.
“If my father had had one drop of affection for me, he wouldn’t have sent me away from my home, and I wouldn’t have been there to help Elizabeth.” She shook her head. “Now she was impulsive. She would do anything for love.”
His fingers tightened on her shoulder. “And what would you do for love?”
He meant—had she given herself to help Elizabeth?
But it sounded like a personal appeal.
She was warm now, he knew it. Her toes touched the stone, and her body absorbed heat from his. Yet a fine trembling began in her again, and she lifted herself on her elbow to look into his face. “What would I do for love?”
She seemed to absorb his needs like a disciple and in her gestures responded to his unspoken query.
He wanted her to love him, to give him everything she’d ever given to another man, and more.
“I can’t,” she whispered.
“I would never force you.” But he seduced her with a smile and never gave a thought to his battered countenance. The Griffith he saw reflected in her eyes was painted in all the hues of adoration and beauty.
“’Twould be disaster.”
“’Twould be”—he laughed, deep in his chest—“magnificent.”
Triumph swelled in him when she responded. Her unbound hair sifted around them in a slow cascade of autumn color, and she leaned forward.
He’d tasted her before; now he savored her. Her open lips, the peach color of her cheeks, the spicy scent of cedar lingering in her long stored dress. The sound of her wrap hitting the floor, the rustle of her bows as he untied them, the firm, long, athletic legs that kicked the dress down, the fire of her pubic hair. “If this be the mouth of hell,” he murmured, “I would die unshriven.”
She laughed, huskily, pleased and amazed. “I like you, too. Your chest hair and your…all your body hair is black.” Her fingers skimmed through his head hair. “This is dark brown. Do you dye it with walnut juice?”
Too indignant to remember, for a moment, their first meeting, he protested, “Nay!”
Then her gurgle of laughter reminded him, and he punished her with a kiss that started at her lips and slid in slow, careful increments all the way down to her toes.
He didn’t perform any extraordinary feats of lovemaking. He scarcely touched the places she longed to have touched—it was a punishment, after all. But she didn’t seem to realize how he’d cheated her. The soft cries she muffled in the pillow, the clutch of her fists in the covers, the arch of her body, tense as a drawn longbow—they proved an innocence her lover had left untouched, and Griffith set out to make this time the first time, the best time.
She faltered, “You shouldn’t…”
“Forget your back? That’s true.” Pushing her onto her stomach, he worked his way up to the nape of her neck.
She liked it, and she showed him by the strength of her embrace when he turned her to face him again. He pressed her into the mattress, using his whole body to brand her whole body with his ownership. He pushed his hands into her hair on either side of her thrashing head, held it still, and looked deep into her eyes. “You are mine,” he said.
As with everything else, she erred in her reply. “For now.”
It wasn’t the answer he sought. He wanted to teach her that what burned in him would burn forever, but in her face he saw the rebirth of sanity—and he couldn’t stop now. He was out of control, crazed with desire and desperate for her. He knew, without conceit, he could create in her the same desire, the same desperation, for although he might not be the world’s most accomplished lover, he was her mate.
Though he already held her, he directed her, “Hold still. Let me show you.…”
Everything.
With a kiss that wrung whimpers from her, he taught her the finer points of pleasure—taught her until she forgot her inhibitions and her sanity.
This was worship, direct and simple. Her hands slipped and fumbled, she blushed and looked astonished, she seemed shy and overwhelmed, and she made him feel like lord of the heights. He monitored her as if he were initiating a virgin, and she reacted like one, right up to the moment he began to enter her.
“You’re so tight,” he murmured. “You’re so tight.”
Something about that bothered him, but conscious thought had been blocked by pleasure. Shivers ran up his spine, and he could only fight to control himself. He kissed her deeply, touched the breasts that had proved so sensitive, and stroked the one place he’d not yet touched.
He’d been saving it, depending on that final, sensual pleasure to push her over the edge.
And it did.
She moaned deep in her chest. She panted, she writhed, she bucked at him, and the muscles inside her sucked him in.
At least that’s what he imagined, but he’d obviously gone mad, for he would have sworn, have sworn, he broke through her maidenhead.
She moaned, but her moan spoke of pain, not passion, and he reared up to look at her.
The pinched mouth, the trickling tears, the tightshut eyes, told the story.
She had been a virgin.
By the saints, she had been a virgin.
> 8
She tried to stifle her shriek, but it was too late.
What had she done? Sweet Mary, what had she done?
Did he realize?
Could she hide it?
Opening her eyes, she looked.
He looked back, and he was furious. His gaze wasn’t friendly, but it was hot. Aye, so hot. Then he smiled with all his teeth, and said, “I hurt you, but sweetheart, ’twas unavoidable. Now…now I’ll show you real pleasure.”
When they finished, the bed was destroyed. The pillows had disappeared, the sheets were untucked, the blankets kicked off. If it was cold in the room, she didn’t know it, for his revenge for her deception had been, as he promised, real pleasure.
More pleasure than she could tolerate.
Like a stained-glass window whose components had been scattered never to be gathered again, she couldn’t seem to pull all the pieces of herself back together. She groped for deceptions with which to cover herself.
But he gave her no time to think, to plan. He leaned over her, stroked her throat until she opened her eyes, and mocked, “All those years of riding astride—for nothing.”
He’d found satisfaction. She didn’t know much, but she knew that. His roar of primitive rapture had been part and parcel of the greater picture he’d created with her. Yet now his gaze poured heat over her, and when she groped for a blanket to cover herself, he stopped her.
Her voice quavered. “What do you mean?”
He smiled again like the beast he’d proved himself to be. “Riding astride didn’t break your maidenhead.”
She jerked in nervous reaction.
“I know.” His voice lingered over the words.
She tried again for the comforter. Again he denied her.
“I’m cold,” she complained.
“I’ll cover you.”
But he didn’t mean with the blanket. He pulled her half under him, and like his eyes, his body burned, too. She tamped down the panic, prepared to face the consequences of her stupidity, but not the consequences of her passion.
He commanded, “Tell me again how you came to have Lionel.”
Outrageous Page 12
