“So it would seem.” He watched as she swallowed and tapped her index finger on the book. Was she nervous? “Where did you read that Latin edition?”
She looked up as if a little startled at his interest. “My father’s house in the country, where I was born.”
He raised his eyebrows in question.
“It’s in Essex,” she said. “An old rambling sort of house that sits on a low hill with meadows all around. Much too big for our family’s means now, I’m afraid. The Radcliffes—my family—have rather descended from our height in the time of the Tudors.”
He realized that he knew very little about her, this woman he’d impulsively dragged into his darkness. “You were an only child?”
“Oh no,” she replied. “I have an older brother, Henry. Seven years older, actually. Though he was sent off to school, so I didn’t see him very much except at holidays. But I had a very good friend from the neighboring estate. Katherine.” Her voice hitched.
“Katherine?”
She nodded and inhaled. “She died this last fall. Quite suddenly. It was … a shock.” She looked up at him, tears pooling in her eyes. “She was married to the Duke of Kyle. That’s how I became friends with Hugh.”
He frowned at the name, his chest tightening. “You fell in love with your friend’s husband?”
“No!” Her eyes had widened. “Good Lord, no.”
“But you were going to marry Kyle,” he said softly. “That’s what everyone thought. That’s why the Dionysus assumed you were the bride at the wedding.”
She nodded. “Yes, we had a sort of understanding—nothing was ever said aloud, mind you—but we both knew that eventually he would propose to me. But then he fell in love with Alf—the woman he made his wife.”
“Ah.” He studied her, the still posture, the slim, white hands, the calm face. Had she not felt any regret when the man she’d thought would marry her turned to another woman? Jealousy? Rage?
Did it matter?
He had her now. She was his and he would not let her entertain other men—in body or thought.
Even if that made him a cad.
The door to the room opened and he turned to see Ubertino coming in.
The manservant grinned when he saw that Raphael was awake. “Your Grace! Praise God you’ve woken. I will tell Nicoletta to bring her soup and I will fetch some water.”
“Thank you,” Raphael said, and the manservant left again.
He turned to see that his duchess was stroking the cover of the book she still held.
“What part had you come to?” he asked.
She glanced up. “I beg your pardon?”
“Polybius.” He nodded at the book.
“You’ve read it?”
His lips twitched. “In Latin. And Italian, but a bad translation.”
“Oh.” She blinked. “I’m reading about the sack of Carthage. It was a brutal time. So many killed.”
“It was warfare.” He hesitated, but he was curious about what she thought. “Have you come to Hasdrubal’s wife?”
“Yes, I have.” Her pink lips drew down. “For a woman to do such a thing—to fling her two children into a fire and then jump in herself, cursing her husband? I think she must have been mad. Or much too proud.”
“You didn’t find her suicide noble?”
“No.” She stared at him. “Do you?”
He shrugged. “Carthage had fallen. The fate that awaited her and her children was rape and slavery. I can understand a proud woman choosing death over such a life.”
“And her husband?” she asked, leaning a little forward, her cheeks pinkened with passion at her argument. “What about cursing her husband, the father of her children?”
He felt his own face grow stony. “Hasdrubal surrendered to the Romans instead of fighting to the death. More, he begged for mercy. His wife had no obligation to stand by such a man.”
“Had she not?” his duchess asked softly. “By wifely love or honor or simple decency? She took his children—took herself—away from him at the moment of his greatest defeat.”
“Madam, I say he was a coward and she a noble lady.”
“Then I return,” she said softly, “that he was a man trying to live while she had given up all hope.”
He stared at her. Where did she find such naïveté? His lips curved in a mirthless smile. “There was no hope to live for, only slavery, rape, and death. The honorable thing to do was what she in fact did: suicide.”
“No.” In her fervor she placed her hand over his on the coverlet, though he thought she didn’t notice. “No. While there is life there is always hope. Where you see a coward begging for his own life, I see a man who despite his pride has decided to persevere. Remember that the siege of Carthage went on for three long years. Had Hasdrubal truly been a cowardly man he could have surrendered at any point during those years. Yet he did not. He fought. Only when the walls were breached and the city fallen did he throw down his sword. That is not the act of a coward.”
“And his wife?” he asked quietly, “What of she? Should she have lived as a slave? Perhaps as some Roman soldier’s whore?”
She lifted her chin. “Yes, I think so. To kill oneself is—”
He sneered. “You place Christian morality on a pagan queen.”
“No, let me finish.” She drew a breath, thinking, perhaps composing her thoughts. “In my view it is a waste to kill oneself, even if one is raped and degraded. Hasdrubal’s wife was the mother of two sons. She was a person in her own right. Even in slavery there is always the prospect, however slim, of escape. Of rising up and rebelling against those who have hurt you.”
He looked at her and wondered if she’d ever suffered in her life. Had ever found the thought of death preferable to the thought of living another day.
Dear God, he hoped not.
“And if she did escape slavery,” he said gently. “In this hypothetical world where Hasdrubal’s wife never flung herself on the fire, never sacrificed her children, let us grant her escape and let us grant her the impossible fortune of finding her husband again. Do you think that noble man, who begged on his knees from the Romans who had destroyed his city, would accept her back? Would he caress her face and never ask about the men who had rutted on her body when she was in captivity? Could he take to his bed again a wife so thoroughly defiled?”
“I don’t know,” she replied quietly, “but he should. Whatever might happen to her wouldn’t be her fault.” She looked him in the eye, her gaze gentle and ruthlessly earnest. “Just as if you had not rescued me from the Lords of Chaos, what might have happened to me that night would not be my fault. If I had been able to escape them afterwards, I would have. And I would not have taken my own life.”
His heart stilled at the mere thought of her hurting herself.
He was a fool. Of course this debate harkened back to her recent capture. To her near rape. What must she have thought when she’d been kidnapped? When she’d been hooded and dragged before the Lords of Chaos and made to kneel in front of a sacrificial stone?
She must have been out of her mind with terror.
And yet she’d controlled her fear. More, despite her firsthand near experience, she now passionately argued that a woman ravaged and raped should never give up hope. Should fight to stay alive despite all odds.
He was amazed by her perception.
Awed by her bravery.
He turned his hand over and gripped her fingers. “Your pardon.” It wasn’t naïveté that had driven her argument. It was something far nobler. “I would never blame you, my duchess, if you were thus abused, and I would never wish for you to take your own life.”
He lifted her hand and pressed his mouth to her palm, and as he did so he had a sharp, visceral memory: He’d kissed her before the fever had overtaken him. Her lips had been soft and yielding to the invasion of his tongue. She’d tasted of tea.
He wanted to taste her again. To lick across her prim little lips, make her open her mo
uth and moan.
But that was folly. He could not let himself slip, even a little bit. She was pure and he was not. He had to make sure his stigma never touched her.
He let her hand fall from his lips, looking down so that she might not see the lust in his eyes.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
She started to say more, but at that moment Nicoletta entered the room. The maidservant held a dish of steaming soup and a cloth over her arm. Behind her was Ubertino with a jug of hot water.
The manservant beamed at the sight of him. “I think you will want to sit, Your Grace.”
Raphael nodded as the Corsican helped him to sit up.
Nicoletta and his duchess discreetly retired to the dressing room.
Raphael unbuttoned his banyan, noting that it was stiff with blood at his shoulder. He wrinkled his nose in disgust at the mess.
He glanced at the dressing room door, making sure it was closed before he spoke. “How has my duchess fared?”
Ubertino brought the chamber pot to the side of the bed. “Her Grace has spent most of her time nursing you.”
And sneaking into rooms where she didn’t belong. “She hasn’t ventured outside of the abbey?”
Raphael sighed as he relieved himself. He shook his prick and drew the banyan closed.
“No, Your Grace.” Ubertino covered the pot and stowed it away behind the screen.
The door to the dressing room opened.
His duchess cleared her throat pointedly from the threshold. “If you spend your strength chatting with Ubertino, you’ll not stay awake long enough for Nicoletta and me to wash you.”
She proposed to put her hands on him herself? The mere thought had his belly tightening.
He turned to her, scowling. “I don’t need to be bathed like a bloody babe.”
He couldn’t afford the temptation.
“Actually you do.” She crossed to the bed and handed him the bowl of Nicoletta’s savory beef soup. She smiled sweetly. “You haven’t washed since the night I shot you. You’ve been lying in a bed with dried blood on your banyan and the bedclothes. You stink.”
He narrowed his eyes and took a bite of the soup. He could have argued with her further, simply to impress upon her that it was he who was in charge, but he was tired. Weak and susceptible to her lure.
And besides. He did stink.
He ate half the bowl of soup in silence as Nicoletta bustled about the room, muttering to herself in a scolding voice.
When at last he pushed the bowl aside, Ubertino hurried over to take it.
Raphael caught his wrist. “Have there been any callers? Anyone on the grounds?”
“No, Your Grace,” he replied. “The men walk around the outside of the abbey and have seen no stranger.”
Raphael nodded and released him. “Good.”
Ubertino bowed and left the bedroom.
He lay back against the pillows. This injury was ill timed. He needed to find a way to continue to burrow into the corrupted apple that was the Lords of Chaos. With the spring revelry over, they wouldn’t have another meeting for months—not unless the Dionysus called a special meeting. Perhaps if he—
“Sit up a little,” his duchess murmured in his ear.
He opened his eyes. She was close, her hands reaching for his arms. Apparently she was serious about this washing.
Foolish, foolish girl.
He pushed himself up, ignoring the stab of pain in his shoulder.
She placed several cloths under his head. “You can lie back.”
He raised an eyebrow at her.
She merely pursed her lips and turned to wet a cloth and rub soap into it. When she faced him again, her shoulders were squared, her expression calm and determined.
She started with the left side of his face. The unscarred side.
Naturally.
He watched as her brows furrowed slightly, the warm, damp cloth moving gently over his cheek, across his jaw, up to his forehead.
She blinked and hesitated.
“The scars bother most people,” he said softly. Stiffly. “It isn’t anything to be ashamed of. Let Nicoletta do the other side. She is used to them.”
“No.” She inhaled and met his gaze, her blue-gray eyes resolute. “I’m not bothered by your scars.”
She lied, he could tell, but somehow that made her insistence on doing this thing all the more … courageous? Yes, courageous. She didn’t do it as some sort of penance or as an act of charity—he could tell by the set of her lips, the steadiness of her hand, the smoothness of her brow—but perhaps because it was simply the right thing to do.
He had married a woman far nobler than he.
He nodded and closed his eyes and suffered her touch again.
The cloth was cool now against his skin, stroking from the unmarred side of his forehead to where the scar started over his right eye. She didn’t hesitate—he gave her that. The cloth swept over the scar and down his face. She must feel the snaking rope. The unnatural smoothness. Yet she continued, wiping down and over his mouth with its twisted lip to his neck. He heard her wring out the cloth and then it returned, wiping the soap from his face.
He opened his eyes and looked at her.
Her cheeks were pink. Did she sense his heat? The control with which he held back his limbs from seizing her?
She blinked. “We’d better do your hair next.”
He raised both eyebrows. He had no notion how she and Nicoletta proposed to do that without setting the bed awash in water.
But they somehow wedged a basin, padded around the edge with a cloth, under his head.
His duchess caught the tip of her tongue between her teeth as she carefully poured warm water over his hair. Her lips were very pink. Plump, with a prominent Cupid’s bow on the upper one. Her mouth gleamed softly with moisture.
His eyelids dropped as he considered what he wanted to do with that mouth.
She was working soap into his hair now with strong, slim fingers that massaged his scalp.
He clenched his jaw to keep from groaning.
She scrubbed backward through his hair, stroking, pressing, and he found his eyes closing like a lazy cat’s. He’d not been touched like this by another since …
Well. Not for a very long time.
She lifted her hands away, and then the clean water was poured over his head. He felt her slick the excess water from his hair and then pat it with a cloth to dry it.
The basin was removed.
He opened his eyes to see her licking her lips nervously. “I … er … We should remove your banyan. At least the upper portion.”
If he were a man given to mirth he might’ve grinned then. She was playing in the flames of his control. Did she not understand her own peril?
But her blush had deepened and she was deliciously out of sorts.
He simply could not resist—either his own urges or her innocent befuddlement.
He spread his arms and said gravely, “Be my guest.”
Chapter Six
Now the Rock King lived so deep in the barren stone wasteland that few had ever seen him. In fact there were those who said he did not exist at all. The stonecutter pleaded with Ann not to go, for he feared she would never return. But Ann’s love for El was strong and determined. In the end she set off with half a loaf of bread, some cheese, and a pretty pink pebble her mother had thought lucky.…
—From The Rock King
Iris swallowed. Dyemore’s voice was rich and husky, his eyes mocking as he held his arms out in challenge to her.
Well, he was her husband, wasn’t he? And an ill man besides. She’d spent the last two days tending to him with the help of Nicoletta. Bathing him was a simple necessity, nothing more.
At least that was what she told herself as she bent her head to the task of unbuttoning his banyan. She couldn’t help but notice that however brisk and no-nonsense her mind’s voice might be, her fingers trembled.
Perhaps that was only to be expected.
It had been some time since she had last undressed a man.
Then, too, her late husband had been in his middle years, while Dyemore was a man in his prime, only a little older than she, if she had to guess, and of course he was quite, erm … that is …
Well.
He was quite robust.
Iris tried not to notice how robust Dyemore’s chest was as she and Nicoletta pulled first his left arm and then, very gingerly, his right from the banyan sleeves. The coverlet was pushed to his waist, covering his lower half discreetly.
By the time they were done taking the upper portion of the banyan off him, his forehead was glazed with sweat and he was panting. She exchanged a worried glance with Nicoletta. Iris didn’t want to exhaust him—he’d already been awake for some time, considering he’d been in an insensate fever for the last two days.
But she was concerned that the filthy sheets and the blood crusted on his arm would deter his recovery.
Best to get this over with as quickly as possible so that he might sleep again.
With that in mind she turned to the fresh basin of warm water that Ubertino had brought to the bedroom while she and Nicoletta had undressed the duke. She took a clean cloth and wetted it, then used the soap that the maidservant had supplied. It was the same soap that Iris had bathed with, and the heady scent of oranges filled the air.
She inhaled and turned to the man on the bed, eyeing him and his broad chest. There seemed to be quite a bit of bare skin laid out before her. She swallowed and decided to start with his good arm. She placed the soapy cloth on his shoulder, briskly stroking over smooth skin, trying not to notice how firm the muscles beneath her fingers were.
She kept her gaze strictly on her hand.
Still, it was impossible to ignore the elegant sweep of his collarbone, the bulge of his upper arm, the way a single vein ran along the inside of his forearm …
She realized that her hand had slowed along his arm. The room was very quiet. Nicoletta had left with the dirty water and Ubertino was somewhere, perhaps fetching more clean water. She and the duke were alone in the bedroom with her hands on his body.
She daren’t raise her eyes to his.
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