“Still in her tent, I believe.”
“Has she been told?”
“No. I thought you would like to be the one to inform her of her uncle’s death.”
“It is not a duty I relish, but yes, I think the news should come from me.”
Since she was never far from his side it took Michel only a few moments to locate Elena, where she sat waiting for him near the entrance to his tent. She looked up surprised when he stopped in front of her.
“Come walk with me,” he invited and assisted her to her feet.
Fear immediately entered her eyes at his unusual demand. She gripped his hand in an effort to get him to slow down and looked up at him wide-eyed. “Is something wrong? Are you going to send me back?”
Michel slowed his pace and stared down at her upturned face. “No, I’m not going to send you back. You may stop asking me if that is my intent whenever I seek you out.”
“Then why did you want me to walk with you? And you never seek me out,” she tacked on, disputing his assertion.
He waited to reply to her query until they passed through the shadow of the surrounding trees in order to provide her a measure of privacy for her grief at the news he was to deliver. He stopped just inside the tree line and turned to face her, his hands reaching out to grip her shoulders, “I’m sorry Elena, but your uncle died last night.”
Puzzled by her lack of reaction, Michel wondered if perhaps she hadn’t heard him. The maid had an annoying habit of daydreaming in his presence so he was often forced to repeat his remarks to her. He was loath to be forced to repeat the news he’d just delivered, however. “Elena?”
“Yes?” she whispered.
“Did you hear what I said?”
“Uncle Barnabas is dead,” she repeated dutifully.
“Yes.”
“What will happen to me now?” she asked dazed, unaware seemingly of the tears streaming down her cheeks.
Sighing at her obvious distress, Michel pulled her into the comfort of his arms. She burrowed close against his chest and wrapped her slender arms around his waist and gave into the sobs that shook her slight frame. Long minutes later, after the storm had passed he continued to stroke her silky hair in a gesture of comfort and reassurance while she rested her cheek against his chest and drew deep, broken breaths, with the occasional hiccup thrown in.
“Will I be allowed to offer my farewell to my uncle?” she asked softly.
“Yes, I will arrange for you to attend the funeral,” he promised her.
“Will you come with me?” she asked, still avoiding meeting his glance by keeping her cheek resting against his chest.
“Yes.”
Her voice dipped lower until it was only a hushed whisper that escaped her lips when she asked him fearfully, “Are you going to let him keep me?”
Michel was forced to bend his head in order to hear her. “No, I’m not going to let the baron keep you. Your uncle placed you in my care upon his death. You are my responsibility now. I won’t let anyone hurt you.”
She lifted her head to meet his glance, her eyes probing his to discern the truth of his words, and whether or not she could rely on his promise. “If you leave here, will you take me with you?”
“You would leave your home?” he asked surprised.
“Yes, you are my home now. I do not wish to stay where you are not.”
Michel was stunned by Elena’s solemn declaration. She was too young of course to know of what she spoke. She was still a child whose only family had just died leaving her completely alone in the world. It was perfectly natural for her to want to cling to him. She’d grown accustomed to him in the time they’d spent together but when her grief passed he was quite certain she would think differently about things. He had no home. He’d spent his life traveling from one place to another, his restless spirit never finding ease in any single place. Whether Calei would prove anymore of a home to him than his Saxon father’s magnificent estate he could not be certain.
“My life is not a gentle one, Elena, nor one you would find to your liking.” He thought it only fair to warn her. He knew she was attracted to him and that she considered herself half-betrothed to him. The fact he rescued her from the grip of evil men and had kept her safe and warm and well-fed in the interim no doubt clouded her innocent feelings towards him. She was too young to distinguish her feelings of gratitude from those of the love a woman feels for a man. Surely there was a nobleman’s son in Calei she would find an acceptable husband when the time came. Until then he would continue to keep her safe from the Raulfs of the world. At the very least, he owed her uncle that much.
“I am not a child,” As if sensing the direction of his thoughts, Elena repeated her earlier fierce declaration. Drawn from his distracted musings, Michel’s lips curved in an amused smile.
“As you wish,” he echoed his own answer from their earlier exchange, and his grin widened at Elena’s obvious frustration at his mocking dismissal of her claim. As much to silence the budding argument he could see brewing in her expressive eyes as to appease her, he bent his head to lightly brush his lips across hers. When she made no move to evade him, but simply stood close within the circle of his arms, her lovely face upraised and her serious glance clinging to his, Michel contrarily elected to accept the challenge she threw at him. His hold tightened around her and he folded her soft womanly form closer against his chest, dipping his head to breath in her feminine scent until his senses were swimming in it.
Cursing himself for his stupidity in starting something he was in no position to finish, he rebuked his body’s ready response to the maid’s alluring femininity. This was hardly the time for him to allow his masculine lust to direct his course. For a moment his will tried to force his passion into compliance, but for once his body was successfully resisting his will’s restraint. The maid declared she was not a child.
Perhaps it was time to put her claim to the test. He had done his best to ignore the brewing attraction between them. He had acted the part of an honorable guardian around his young ward, but how was he supposed to continue to ignore Elena when she followed him around twenty four hours a day, with those serious eyes of hers following his every move, and regarding him as if he was the center of her young life?
Michel took his time, giving Elena every opportunity to back away from the consequences of the gauntlet she threw at his feet. When he bent his head to claim her lips in a kiss far different than the innocent exchange they previously shared, she didn’t back away, though he was quite certain she read his intent in his eyes. If anything, she leaned closer into his embrace until her soft breasts were pressed against him, arousing his manly passions to an even greater degree as he was uncomfortably reminded of his long abstinence.
The maid he held was the innocent. He was the experienced one, but afterwards when he thought back on their first taste of shared passion, he would swear he had been the one who was seduced by her alluring femininity and not the other way around. It should have been Elena’s thoughts that swam with the heady promise of newly ignited desire. It should have been Elena who lost all sense of where they stood just inside the line of trees shielding them from the curious eyes of his men.
But it was he who stumbled beneath her intoxicating mixture of innocence and allure. He who grew so disoriented by the taste of her, by the eagerness with which she offered herself to him, that he temporarily lost the will to maintain a safe distance between curiosity and true passion. For a moment, Michel allowed himself to surrender to the lust she roused in him.
He ravaged her soft lips, taking what she so willingly tendered, unaware in her innocence of the jeopardy she courted. Unable to resist such rich offering after long months of fasting, Michel drew her ever closer against his hard frame until he knew she must be aware of his straining manhood perched at the entrance of her woman’s heat, with only a few layers of thin cloth and his quickly faltering control shielding her virginity from him.
Finally, after being forced
to wage a fierce battle to regain his control, Michel drew back, framing Elena’s flushed face with his hands. Slowly she lifted heavy lids over glazed, languorous eyes. “Don’t stop,” she whispered, turning her face in his hands until her lips brushed his calloused palm, and her tongue trailed over his hard flesh.
He should set her apart from him, Michel reasoned, even as his body urged him on, advocating for him to take what the maid was so innocently offering him. His mind pushed back against his body’s urging. He could not allow his thoughts to become clouded by passion. He had a war to fight, a throne to win. How had the very near child he held managed to do to him what no other woman before her ever had…to lure him to the brink of temptation, to turn his back on his hard-won control over his passions? And she a young innocent with no comprehension of the danger she courted.
As if sensing the silent conflict raging within him, Elena took matters into her own hands. She brushed aside the constraint of his hands on her face that held her apart from him and wrapped her slender arms around his neck, drawing him back down to her, parting her lips as theirs met to trace his bottom lip with her tongue as he taught her. When he drew in a sharp breath at her boldness, her tongue slipped inside his mouth, to taste, to tantalize, to duel with his, and he was lost. Michel tugged Elena’s clinging form deeper into the forest, all the while his lips clung to hers, their tongues dueling, mating, until on a sigh of surrender, she leaned her head back and let him simply take whatever he sought from her.
He knew he should be mindful of her innocence. He should draw back, set his young ward away from his embrace, but he was a man who’d been constantly surrounded by her femininity in almost every waking moment since he freed her from that ridiculous sack. She’d followed him around with those dusky, doe’s eyes always on him, wondering, curious, needy, eager for his attention, desperate for his strength to shield from the evils besetting her. He thought he was immune to her constant, silent presence, but at night his dreams betrayed him. More than once he’d woken in his tent fully aroused, with her name on his lips, and the memory of her eyes on him, the invitation he read in hers not solely a product of dreams fueled by manly fantasies.
She’d seduced him in her innocence until she somehow managed to take up residence in his heart without him even being aware of his defenses being penetrated. Discovering he was not as immune to her feminine appeal as he previously convinced himself he was, did not sit well with him. He was angry enough by the ease with which she ingratiated herself into his life, without any encouragement on his part, to take his frustration out on her now.
So against his rational urging to the contrary, he allowed himself to feast on her young flesh, intent on sating himself, resolved to satisfy his curiosity and then free himself from her shimmering magic she wove so skillfully around him. His lips trailed over her soft skin, across her closed eyes, along the line of her fragile jaw, down the long column of her throat, tasting, arousing, both the seducer and the seduced. When his hand reached up to cup her soft breast through her thin gown, he gloried in the telling moan that escaped her parted lips. His thumb brushed across Elena’s erect nipple and she moaned again, staring up at him with heavy, dazed eyes.
“Show me, teach me to please you,” she begged him, and Michel was forced to close his eyes against the promise he read in hers, lest the temptation become too much for him to withstand. Elena’s eagerness to please him, to be with him, only drew him deeper within the circle of her bewitching innocence.
Feeling his control slipping through his mind’s slackening grip and into his aching loins, Michel gathered himself with an effort and removed his hand from the temptation of her softness.
“No,” she protested tearfully, and when she would have reached for his hand to replace it on her aching breast, he captured it within his gentle grasp and raised it to his lips.
“This is not the time for us to give reign to the attraction between us. Your uncle is dead. I will not take advantage of your very near grief and your maidenly innocence. When you give yourself to me, Elena, it will not be with the pain of loss and the fear of being alone clouding your thoughts and influencing your surrender.”
“My thoughts are not clouded,” she denied, and then at the challenge in his gaze steadily holding hers, she added in a burst of honesty, “at least not by grief or fear. But I can see your attention is once again far from me and these precious moments between us. When I give myself to you, Michel, it will not be with the weight of your responsibilities distracting you from our coming together as a man and woman.”
He nodded, his eyes filled with new admiration as they acknowledged the answering challenge in her words and her direct gaze maintaining contact with his. He could see the evidence of how much her little burst of bravado cost her. Such was the fierceness of her blush, her pale cheeks appeared as if she’d spent too much time beneath a summer sun, but still he was impressed when she didn’t lower her gaze from his even as he stroked his knuckles across the smooth, flaming color.
Sighing with reluctance, Michel set her away from him and waited impatiently, clamping down on the urge to draw her back into his suddenly bereft arms, while she clumsily steadied herself and set her gown and hair to rights. When he would have led her back to the camp, Elena tugged on his hand and he raised an enquiring brow in her direction.
“With your permission, lord, I would like a few minutes to be alone with my grief. I would sit by the river bank for a while and offer my prayers for God’s blessing on my uncle that he may be granted peace and eternal rest, and speedy passage through his sojourn in purgatory so that he may enter into the promise of heaven.” Sensing his uncertainty at the thought of leaving her alone, Elena added, “You may send a guard to keep an eye on me. I will not wander off. I will stay right there beneath the shadow of the tree with that large branch reaching over the river.” She pointed to a spot not far away and Michel reluctantly nodded his permission.
He bent his head to brush his lips across hers and admonished her sternly. “I expect you to keep your word not to wander off and I will indeed send a guard, or perhaps two, to keep an eye on you.”
She smiled at his gentle kiss and wonderingly lifted the fingertips of one hand to her lips as if she could capture his caress and keep it there. Where the woman emerged just moments ago, the child was back in her place, her soft gaze clinging to his as if he was the embodiment of all her innocent, maidenly dreams. As he watched her walk away, Michel could feel himself being pulled inexorably deeper beneath the spell of Elena’s bewitching purity, then shaking his head to clear his thoughts, he chided himself for his foolish thoughts. It had indeed been too long since he’d indulged in the company of a woman if he was suddenly finding himself bemused by a doe-eyed innocent who seemed to believe he hung the moon in the night sky.
Chapter Seven
Elena did a lot of sighing as she sat on the damp ground watching the swift current of the spring stream hurrying by. She wondered what its hurry was. Would its crisp, clear water not end up at the same destination regardless of whether it raced towards its journey’s end or traveled at a more sedate pace? Did the same hold true for human beings? Had her life’s course already been laid out in front of her and she had only to place her feet on the path and follow along? Was Prince Michel her destiny or only a young girl’s daydream? And how was someone of her limited life experience to know the difference?
It was at times like these when she most missed her mother. Though her memories of her mother were but a hazy recollection of soft arms, a gentle manner and a lovely countenance, encased in those memories was the certainty that she had been loved. Uncle Barnabas did his best to replace both of her parents in her young life, but there was no denying he’d been woefully inadequate as a substitute for a mother’s love. Elena felt certain if her mother was still alive, or even if her Uncle Barnabas had married and she had grown up with a woman’s influence in her life, she would not now be so ignorant about the chaotic feelings Prince Michel roused i
n her.
At the reminder of her uncle, she tried to offer a sincere prayer for his eternal soul, but her thoughts were swirling inside her head and she couldn’t concentrate on her petitions. Feeling guilty at her lack of focus, she promised herself and her uncle’s gentle spirit, she would pray for him again when she was feeling more settled. She did not chastise herself too harshly, however, as even one of the lord’s most devoted followers could not be expected to keep her thoughts straight in light of her first experience with a man’s passion.
Those same feelings even now intruded on her thoughts and made her catch her breath as she relived those priceless moments of being held against Michel’s strong chest and the feel of his lips pressed against hers. She’d been shocked when his head dipped to claim her lips and she realized he was going to kiss her. Somehow she’d known even as she tried to conceal her astonishment at his intention, that he was not going to kiss her the way a brother kissed a younger sister or perhaps a young, and somewhat irritating cousin, but as a man kissed a woman he desired.
Here, she remembered thinking, was her opportunity to prove to Michel she was not the child he thought of her as. The problem with her proposed plan was that she’d never before been kissed by a man so she had no notion as to how to go about disputing his infuriating opinion. Still she wasn’t about to pass up the opportunity fate had granted her.
She remembered the challenge in his expression when she didn’t pull away from the circle of his embrace as it slowly tightened around her. She guessed he expected her to flee in terror at the sight of the masculine desire she could read in his intent gaze. Or to be so shocked by his boldness she would scurry away back to the safety of camp.
Men could be surprisingly stupid at times, Elena concluded. Despite her youth and lack of feminine role models she played mistress for her uncle’s household long enough to reach her just conclusion. Hadn’t she spent the past weeks since their initial, unorthodox introduction attempting to gain Michel’s attention? Hadn’t she been bound and determined that he look at her as a woman and not the child he persisted in referring to her as whenever her presence among his followers came up in conversation?
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