Stealing Heaven

by Madeline Hunter

  Court ladies granted men their favors, but he wanted no favors from Nesta. It was not a courtier’s desire that fired in him whenever she was near. His reactions were too raw for that, too vital and too violent. The warrior she battled wanted her, as did the lord whom she thwarted with impunity. So did the starving youth who watched with resentment from the alleys.

  He made himself comfortable on the bench. He waited for her to wake up, so that what had begun in that garden could be finished.

  The pain in her ankle poked into her dream, nudging her toward wakefulness. She shifted her foot and the pain subsided. Sleep lured her again. Enough consciousness intruded, however, for her foggy mind to grope for the reason she should not succumb to the blissful rest. A very good reason, as she vaguely recalled.

  She suddenly remembered where she was.

  She jerked alert and felt her hands beneath her cheek and the furs beneath her stomach and breasts. The sensation of various warmths on the back of her body told her that the fur covered her hips, but little else.

  “I found a cup and mixed some water and wine in it if you are thirsty. It is right beside you, near the fire,” Marcus said.

  His voice came from her left. She turned her head and peered into the shadows obscuring the far end of the lodge. The highlights of his hair and the fires of his eyes were all she could see distinctly. He seemed to be sitting on a bench against the wall.

  She thrust her arm back and pulled the fur so that she was covered a bit more. She contemplated how to sit up in such a way that she could cloak herself completely without first exposing herself more. Some thing in the way Marcus sat there said that if she asked him to turn away while she arranged herself, he would refuse.

  “You should not have let me lie here like this. You should have woken me,” she said while she twisted he head to examine the furs.

  “After your ordeal, you needed the rest. You should not have risked me finding you naked, however Perhaps your soul secretly wanted me to.”

  “It certainly did not.”

  “I wonder. All the same, I covered you some. That was generous of me.”

  Covered her some, but not much. Generous, but no too generous. The implications of what he had don made her heart beat faster.

  He had not only left her like this so that he could look at her. He had also done it so that she would feel vulnerable when she woke. Vulnerable, and alert to their isolation, and sensitive to the sensuality already thickening the air.

  She found the mantle and tugged it around her as she sat up. In the process she revealed more than she< wanted, but there was nothing else to do. He did no move, but he watched. That alone made her skin prickle, and the nap of the fur felt even more luxurious on her enlivened skin.

  She reached for the water with a nonchalance she hardly felt. From her neck to her thighs, her body was in turmoil. “How long have you been back from tending the horses?”

  “A good while.”

  I have been watching you lying there naked a long time.

  She noticed a pile of blankets and saddlebags that he had dumped near the door. “Did you bring in my sack? There are garments in it, and I can wear one while this gown dries.”

  “There was no sack. It must have fallen from your horse before I came upon him, as your cloak did.”

  She was almost sure she had noticed the hump of her sack on her horse when he rode up in the snow.

  She cast him a suspicious glance. What she saw made her heart jump. Her gaze locked on his warily for a moment, but in that instant a mutual acknowledgment of the craving was nakedly there, just as it had been too often since they had met.

  He was going to be trouble. Any man would be in this situation, but this was different, and the ways in which it was different had just been silently spoken. She would be fighting a power that a big part of her did not want to defeat, and he knew that. He counted on it.

  She quickly looked to the fire and fussed with the fur, managing to pull it high behind her neck so that it completely swaddled her. She felt outmaneuvered, and he hadn’t even moved. He calmly sat in the shadows, as distant from her as the lodge permitted, but his masculine aura dominated the space. To her annoyance, her whole body sparkled with anticipation in response.

  “You are unsettling me,” she admitted with irritation.

  “Good. I like you unsettled.”

  “I think perhaps you are the enemy, after all.”

  “Not tonight, my lady. Not yet. If I am, that is for another time and place. What happens here is a thing apart from that.”

  His insinuation sent a thrilling chill up her back. “Nothing will happen here, except a good night’s rest.”

  She spoke as firmly as she could.

  He gave no response.

  “You make me think that I would have been safer with the wolves in the valley.”

  He laughed. That should have reassured her, but ü sounded as if he merely acknowledged that she was right.

  He moved, and she immediately tensed. But. he only stretched out his legs. “There is some food in that sack near you,” he said.

  She grabbed the sack desperately, in order to have something to do. The air between them was too full of the forbidden desire that they shared. The lodge swarmed with enchanting images that must never be made real. The memory of his fingers on her breasts produced a sensation almost as real as true touch would be, and a sly arousal began winding through her.

  “There is a lot of food in this sack,” she said, poking at it while she munched on some cheese. “Enough for a journey of many days. You planned to follow us then and not just catch us to bring Genith back.”

  “I had hoped that you would lead me to your father’s men.”

  “Edward would have been pleased if you had succeeded.”

  “I still intend to. However, since I lost the opportunity to follow Genith there, my only chance of learning the way now is from you.”

  “I do not know the way.”

  “You have never been there? Never met with Carwyn Hir?”

  “I have never seen the man. There is nothing I can tell you that you want to know.”

  “I believe that you can tell me quite a lot that I would want to know. But as I said, all of that is for another time and place.”

  He rose to his feet. She almost jumped out of her skin.

  “Is the fire warm enough?” He strolled toward her. “I can put on more fuel.”

  “Please do not. The chill has left me and now, with this fur and the fire, I am sweltering.”

  “Perhaps you have a fever.”

  He was being very considerate. Very thoughtful. She wasn’t fooled in the least. Danger poured off him, hitting her in eddies that increased in force as he approached.

  As the fire’s light illuminated him, she noticed that he appeared very calm, almost indifferent. Except his eyes. They burned with a seductive warmth. He wore the expression of a man peacefully contemplating what he shouldn’t.

  He bent to tend the fire anyway, then stood in front of it, his boots mere inches from her leg. He loomed too tall and too strong and too beautiful, and much too close.

  “I have no fever. I merely do not feel the cold as much as most. Before today, I had only been chilled once in my life. My first year in Scotland, I could not get warm. I shivered for a whole winter, no matter how many garments I wore.” The words came out in a rush, revealing how flustered she was. Confusion and expectation beat inside her, and her voice sounded frantic to her.

  He stepped away. It didn’t help much. He leaned against the hearthwall and cocked his head, as if she had said something interesting. “Maybe it was not the weather that chilled you, but the marriage that you were forced to make. Genith told me how it was arranged. How did the King convince that Scottish knight to agree to it? The man must have had little allegiance to Edward.”

  She shifted so that she could face him. The pain of moving her sore foot made her grimace, and she extended that leg to ease the discomfort. H
er toes peeked out of her fur cocoon. His gaze fell on them, and suddenly they appeared scandalous.

  Bending, she shifted the fur to cover them, but her movement made the fur slide down her back, so she had to fuss at pulling it up again.

  Marcus just watched, vaguely amused by her predicament.

  Not only amused. What had pulled between them from that first night was so alive and vivid in this lodge that she thought she would touch it if she waved her hand.

  Her good sense, what was left of it, tried to dispel the mood with more talk. “My husband’s brother was the laird and had been taken by an English knight in battle. The people could not afford the ransom, and Edward offered this marriage as a solution.”

  “Marrying you forgave the ransom?”

  “Aye. Unfortunately, those people were not glad to have their old laird back. The brother was a stupid man, and my husband had proven himself a better leader. With that resentment hanging over me, I was never accepted. I was a stranger too, and along with the stories about me and Edward, well, I was considered a bad bargain all around.”

  “I doubt that any man would think that having you in his bed was a bad bargain, Nesta.”

  “We found common ground at night, but day always comes.” She spoke pointedly, so he would know she referred to this night.

  His eyes indicated he had gotten the message. However, she saw something else too. A spark of…what? Rebellion? Resentment? It was enigmatic in its source, but she knew that while he had understood her warning, he would ignore it.

  “Since you said that your husband taught you to use your weapons, I doubt that he cared much about the days, and what people said about you. I think that he died a very contented man.”

  “Perhaps he decided there were a few advantages in Edward tying him to the King’s whore.”

  A smile barely twitched on his mouth. “You feel compelled to remind me of Edward’s interest in you?”

  “It is well that I do. If you get Genith back, things are as they were with her and this plan of the King’s. Even if you do not get her back, nothing has changed with who I am.”

  He pushed away from the wall and took the few steps to her. Her heart jumped. She almost dared not look up at him. When she did, his expression astonished her. The face looking down at her was severe and warm at the same time. Predatory and gentle all at once.

  “With your beauty and your mind as your weapons, and Edward as your shield, you are an impressive adversary, Nesta. But at the moment Edward is in Flanders. The field belongs to me, and you are injured.”

  He lowered to his knees beside her outstretched leg. He was so close that she inhaled his maleness with each breath. His profile, heart-stopping in its beauty, waited within reach. She imagined her fingertips trailing along the square jaw and stroking the hard mouth, and instinctively angled away from him so she would not follow the impulse.

  He reached beneath the fur. “We should tend to your wound, so you are not too much at a disadvantage tonight.”

  He lifted her leg out of the fur and set her foot across his knees. He gently pressed the ankle’s red swell. His frowning concern charmed her, but his touch sent a tremor right to her loins.

  “It will heal in a day or so,” she said, trying to retrieve her pale leg and hide it again.

  “It should be bound.” He looked to where her garments lay drying. Grabbing the shift that was almost dry, he rent it in two and tore off a long swath.

  The binding took too long. She suffered it, fighting the way the intimacy affected her, clutching the fur so that it would not open above her knee. Excitement plucked mercilessly, defeating her with an alluring anticipation of more.

  He pressed against the bandage when he was done. “Does that hurt so much as before?”

  He could tell that it did not, so there was no point in lying. He seemed pleased with the results. In alleviating her pain, he had removed her only advantage.

  She made to pull her leg away. He grasped her shin firmly, not letting her go. The set of his mouth, the brittle lights in his eyes—they all told her that a decision had been made.

  She tried to look away, tried to find something sharp to say that would stop what was going to happen, but words could not end the primitive thrumming soundlessly connecting them.

  Too much of her reveled in what twisted taut between them. Delectable anticipation sent spirals of arousal through her body until her breasts tingled and vulva throbbed. She wanted to throw off the fur and stretch out and have him kiss all of her.

  His hand smoothed slowly up her leg. The caress was warm, firm, and possessive. She closed her eyes and savored the luscious sensations it aroused.

  Impossible, of course. Disastrous.

  “You must not.”

  That hand went higher. Luring. Dangerous. Wonderful. “You know that you want me to.”

  “What I want is a small thing in this. In any of it. I told you so in the garden that night.”

  “Right now what you want is all that matters, to my mind.”

  “Your mind is not working well. Stupid and contemptible, you once called this, when you had your sense about you.”

  “Contemptible because of Genith, but she is gone, and I do not think she will be back.”

  His slow, purposeful fingers trailed to the back of her knee, sending shivers up her thigh to join the knot of excitement in her stomach and the itching pulsation growing between her legs. He stroked higher, brushing aside the fur’s edges, making a gap so more of her showed, and watched his hand and her nakedness and the visible trembles he was causing.

  With her last remnants of sense, she tried again. “If no longer contemptible, it is still stupid.”

  His gaze shifted to her face even as his fingers continued tracing their delicious, seductive paths. “Not stupid and contemptible, Nesta. Necessary and important. More than anything I can think of.”

  “That is because you are not thinking at all. Men never do at such times.”

  “Then you do the thinking for us, lady. Stop me, as you did in the cottage.”

  It was a blunt challenge that he knew she could not meet, just as she had not in the cottage. The part of her that said she should, that recognized too well the complications and betrayals waiting if they did this, had lost its voice. Only the woman in her lived now, woken by the sensual force that had been pulling them to each other every moment since they met.

  “Lie down, Nesta.”

  The command frightened her. That was absurd. She was no innocent. Still, she could not deny this passion raised panic as well as pleasure.

  “Nay.”

  He shifted so that he angled alongside her, propped on one arm, his masculinity dominating her. He eased the fur down her shoulder and pressed a soft kiss to her skin. It might have lasted an hour, so clearly did she feel every instant of that spot of warmth tingling into her blood. He began a gentle assault on her neck with slow, biting kisses that evoked pleasure so intense that her primitive self began a silent chant of exultant encouragement.

  Mindlessly embracing what he offered, she angled her head, exposing her neck. Deliberately, he found pleasure spots that left her gasping.

  Withdrawing his hand from her leg, he gently pressed his fingers down the length of her neck. They journeyed lower, along the edge of the fur where it met her skin. He found where the mantle overlapped, and moved his hand beneath the fur to her breasts.

  He caressed the tips lightly. The pleasure rendered her helpless. Any hope of controlling the course of this, of controlling herself and him, died then. She lost herself in the overwhelming sensations, and in the masculine power taking command of her.

  He stopped kissing her neck. She opened her eyes to find him watching her reaction to his touch. His dark gaze contained layers of lights that seemed to go on forever, deep into his soul and out into hers.

  He teased at her breasts while he watched her face, and she tightened her jaw against the cries that wanted to flow out of her. They filled her head i
nstead, a mad litany of demands and pleas and gratitude.

  “It was wicked of you, Nesta. What you did in that garden. We might have never known this passion could exist between us. We could have been spared its power.”

  He took her mouth in a demanding, probing kiss that sent her reeling. His hand returned to her naked leg, and boldly ventured higher in possessive strokes.

  “Move your other leg, Nesta. Let me touch you.”

  She obeyed, and barely swallowed a moan of impatience as her muddled mind urged him on. Her breath caught when his hand reached the wetness on her inner thigh and then ruthlessly sought its source.

  Incredible pleasure centered where he teased. The hunger that she had imprisoned for weeks surged free, and all she could see was the flickering fire highlighting vague forms in the lodge. Except for him. Marcus remained very clear and precise despite her filming eyes.

  “Lie down.”

  She obeyed this time.

  He swung his leg to kneel above her, his knees straddling hers. Sensuality made his face hard and beautiful. His eyes were those of a man who had been wanting something too long.

  Not unkind, Genith had called that expression, but a little dangerous and frightening. Her sister had not understood the piquant appeal of both the danger and fear if the man was one you desired.

  He gently tugged at the fur. The soft nap slid across her breasts and stomach, teasing her skin as its heat slowly peeled away to expose her to the cool air. His gaze followed the moving edge as if he felt its titillating path as much as she did.

  “You are beautiful, Nesta. The memory of your body has not left me since that day in the cottage. There has not been a moment, day or night, when you were not in my head.”

  His gaze and dominating pose made her tremble. Finally it became too much. She reached to pull him into her arms.

  He ignored the gesture. Instead of coming to her, he unhitched his belt and cast it aside. He pulled off his surcotte and other garments until his naked body loomed above her, hard in the dancing light of the flames.

  Firm fingers closed on her left leg. He bent it up from between his knees and angled it to his side. “Rest your foot here.” He bunched the fur mantle into a mound. “I do not want to hurt your ankle.”