Turning to Nicholas, she said, “You did well, boy. The fact that she’s still alive attests to that.” Brushing past him, Anna went to the bed and picked through her supplies.
“What about the fever?” Nicholas asked. He placed the branch of candles on a table near Catrin’s chair. The woman seemed to know what she was doing. Perhaps she had a tonic for the sickness in her assortment of cures. “It comes and goes.”
Picking up a packet, Anna crumbled the contents into a goblet and poured wine from the ewer beside the bed. “There’s infection inside the wound. Likely that’s the cause of the fever. I’ll have to drain it. I’ll heal your lady in no time, milord.”
“I’m not his lady,” Catrin said. “I’m only—” She looked over her shoulder at him, confusion shadowing her eyes. “I don’t know.”
Anna snorted. “You seemed well acquainted when I came in here.”
“We know each other only because I’m kin to Lord Nicholas’s ward, Gillian,” Catrin said, raising her chin. He recognized her stubborn, combative expression—and waited for the next volley. “In truth, we loathe each other.”
Anna hooted at that, pounding her fist on the mattress. Catrin undoubtedly possessed a gift for understatement. He wouldn’t call what they’d been doing before Anna interrupted them loathing, he thought, suppressing the remembered pleasure before his body could react.
Far from it.
A few moments more and Catrin would have been stretched out naked beside him on the bed, if he’d had his way.
“It’s true,” Catrin said. “Ask him how he got that bruise on his face.” Her gaze darted toward Nicholas, then away when a chuckle, swiftly suppressed, escaped his lips.
Catrin glanced at him again and scowled when he shrugged and remained silent. “I punched him in the face.”
Anna looked at him. He nodded, touching the faint bruise beneath his eye. “Aye, she did.” His voice shook with laughter. “But she didn’t stay angry long,” he added.
Anna squinted at Catrin, then seemed to come to a decision. “Whether ye be enemies or lovers, it matters not to me. ’Tis something you must sort out yourselves. But you can trust me to heal your hurts.” She handed Catrin the goblet. “Drink this, milady. ’Tis a mixture to cure your fever and ease your pain.” She searched through her belongings until she found a tiny pot. “Shall I lance the wound now, or come back later?”
Catrin swallowed and closed her eyes briefly before she answered. “You might as well do it now. Waiting will only make it worse. I’d rather get it over with than worry about it.”
Anna nodded. “’Tis a wise decision, milady. Better to face the pain now than let it fester and grow.”
She slipped a tiny, needle-sharp knife from her belt and thrust it into the coals. “Care to help, milord?” she asked, her gaze resting on his face.
He would swear she knew how much the idea disturbed him. “Why not?” he replied, taking up the candles again and moving closer to Catrin.
“I’ll not lie to you, milady. ’Twill hurt like the very devil. But mind you sit very still. I don’t wish to cause you more harm, nor to mar your pretty skin. Lord Nicholas could hold your arms, if you wish.”
Catrin’s head snapped up, her eyes wary, reminding him of a cornered animal. He banged the candles down so hard that several blew out. “She doesn’t need me to hold her.”
He didn’t want to remind her of how he’d bound her the last time.
Or remind her of when she was raped. There was still much about the incident that he didn’t know. Once this ordeal was over, he intended to talk to her again.
He had no desire to distress her by doing anything that might bring back memories of the assault.
“As you wish,” Anna said.
Willing his hands to steadiness, he lit the candles he’d extinguished. Anna brushed by him and retrieved her dagger from the fireplace.
Squinting at the glowing tip, she nodded her satisfaction. “You’d best put your knife in the coals, too, milord. I might need it to seal the wound once I’m done.”
Nicholas did as she asked, hoping as he buried the blade in the embers that they wouldn’t have to use it. He’d borne worse himself without a qualm, but the thought of pressing the heated metal against Catrin’s soft ivory flesh sickened him.
Catrin shifted in the chair, turning to give Anna better access to her back. Anna busied herself setting out her supplies on the table, humming a sprightly air as she worked.
“Stop that infernal noise,” he snarled. How could the old woman go so blithely about her business, knowing she would cause pain?
Anna stopped humming and turned toward him. “Hold the candles steady, milord.” Taking up her knife, she asked, “Are you ready?”
Nodding once, Catrin tightened both hands about the arm of the chair and Anna began her task.
Nicholas forced himself to watch as Anna lanced the abscesses and allowed them to drain. If Catrin could endure it, he could do no less. Though she couldn’t hide her pain, she made no sound, simply closed her eyes and tightened her grip on the chair until her nails bit into the wood.
Although it seemed to take forever before Anna finished, the candles had scarcely burned down. “I won’t need your knife,” she told him as she smeared salve from the clay pot over the wounds.
He set the candles down more gently this time. Snatching up a cloth, he knelt beside Catrin and dabbed at the sweat beaded upon her face. She sat slumped over the arm of the chair, resting her forehead on her arms for a moment, then straightened as Anna wound fresh bandages around the cuts.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
“I’ll be fine.” Her voice shook slightly, but already the color had begun to return to her cheeks. He handed her the goblet, watching as she drained it.
Anna bustled about, gathering her belongings together. “You’ll do fine now, milady.” She paused to pat Catrin’s arm. “I’ll return in the morning to have a look at you. Mind you let her rest, milord,” she added as she limped out of the room.
“What an odd woman,” Catrin said after he closed the door behind Anna. “She’s blunt, but very kind.”
“Are you certain you’re well?”
“Yes. The salve is very soothing. It’s dulled the pain so I scarcely feel it. Or perhaps ’tis the herbs she put in the wine. I feel surprisingly well.”
Nicholas tended the fire, pulling his dagger from the coals with a brief prayer of thanks that they hadn’t needed it. Leaning his forearm on the mantel, he stared down into the flames.
What did he find there, she wondered. The past? It wasn’t something pleasant, for she could see the hurt etched on his face, the shadows emphasized by the flickering firelight. “Are you sorry we came here?”
So much time passed, she wondered whether he’d heard her. Finally he raised his head and pushed away from the mantel. “No, I’m not sorry.” He dragged a stool beside her chair and sat down.
“It’s a shame Ashby fell into such disrepair.” She tugged the linen higher about her throat when she felt Nicholas’s gaze settle there. “But you’ll make it right again. I’m sure of it.”
He stared down at his hands, clasped loosely about one upraised knee, then looked up suddenly. “Do you know what troubles me the most?” he asked. She shook her head. “’Tis the fact that I permitted Ashby to get this way. It’s just a place, a building, a thing—and I feared it. It has no life, no power. It cannot harm me unless I allow it. Yet for all these years Ashby has personified my deepest fears.”
“I don’t understand.” She leaned forward and placed a hand on his arm.
He laid his hand atop hers, his fingers tightening almost to the point of pain. She grimaced, and he eased his grip, threading his fingers with hers. “My father was the second-born, and to his father and his older brother, Gerald, he was nothing. So one day he ran off with the castle whore.”
Although Catrin tried to hide her shock, he must have noticed it. “Aye, what Anna said was true. My moth
er was a Welshwoman who came to Ashby looking for work when most of her village was lost to sickness. Because she was Welsh, she was distrusted by most. The only work she found was on her back.” He closed his eyes briefly, and when he opened them they were filled with pain. “But my father loved her until the day she died. They ran off to France and he joined a band of mercenaries.”
“Then how did you come to inherit Ashby?” Catrin asked, confused. That wasn’t precisely what she wanted to know, but she couldn’t think of a delicate way to phrase the question.
She needn’t have worried; Nicholas understood. “Oh, I’m the legitimate issue of a proper marriage, I assure you,” he said with a mirthless laugh. “My parents wed as soon as they were beyond my grandfather’s reach. And my father made certain his father knew it. But Uncle Gerald never managed to produce a child that lived past its first year. Though God knows, he tried. It became an obsession with him.” His grip on her fingers relaxed. “How he must have hated knowing everything he had would go to me.”
“Were you a mercenary, too?” She couldn’t imagine the Norman king permitting a mercenary to inherit a powerful estate, although she’d heard that King John had no qualms about rewarding his hirelings with land and property.
“For a time. My father had some standards. I became the squire of one of his more proper friends.” His gaze held hers. “And later, I did hire out my sword. Honor is a strange concept to me, at least the way most noblemen understand it. I swear I found more honorable men among the mercenaries I lived and fought with than among the nobles I’ve met since I became lord of Ashby. But a hired sword is considered beyond the pale, no matter his reasons for what he does.”
Releasing her hand, he stood. “I should leave so you may rest.”
She held out her hand. “Stay—please. You listened to my dismal grumbling, and it eased my mind. Please allow me to return the favor.” She smiled. “Besides, you cannot pique my curiosity and then leave me unsatisfied.”
At that, he returned her smile, but whereas hers had been meant to soothe, his was teasing, devilish. “Never let it be said that Nicholas Talbot left you unsatisfied, milady.” He dropped down beside her chair and, lifting her hand to his lips, placed a lingering kiss on her palm.
But as he rested his head against Catrin’s knee, he continued his tale in a flat, impersonal voice, his flirtatious manner dropping away as swiftly as it had arisen. “When I was ten my mother became very ill. We had little money, and it became too difficult for her to follow the troop from skirmish to skirmish. So Father collected me from my foster family and came home to throw himself on my grandfather’s mercy.”
Catrin stroked Nicholas’s hair away from his brow with a soothing touch, waiting.
“Mercy was beyond my grandfather’s ken. At first he wouldn’t even permit us to enter Ashby, but my uncle convinced him to allow us in. Despite how he lived, my father was very proud. That he swallowed his pride long enough to listen to his family’s abuse is a measure of how dear my mother was to him.”
His father wasn’t the only one with pride, Catrin thought, running her fingers through his disordered curls.
“But they refused to let him stay.” He raised his head. She met his eyes steadily, her own filled with tears. “That selfish, unyielding old man wouldn’t even give her a place to die in peace.”
He sat back on his heels. “Since then, every time I think of Ashby I remember how my mother comforted my father as we rode away. She didn’t last a week. She died in a broken-down hovel we found in the woods. I’m not even certain where it is.”
Catrin reached out to him, but he shrugged away from her comforting hands. “I hated them. They took away everything I had—my mother, my father’s pride, my innocence. And now that I’ve finally come here I see that I’ve feared a phantom all these years. It wasn’t Ashby I hated—it was them.”
Catrin shivered, as much from his words as from the lack of warmth without him pressed close beside her. She held out her hands to him again. “Let it go, Nicholas. ’Tis in the past. It cannot harm you further unless you permit it.”
He stood and bent to lift her out of the chair. Enveloping her in his arms, he carried her to the bed.
Catrin knew a momentary alarm when she noticed their destination, but she soon realized she’d misjudged him yet again. Nicholas desired comfort from her now, not lust. He sat on the mattress and held her cradled in his arms, his face buried against her throat.
At last his muscles relaxed beneath her and they slumped over on the bed, still clasped together.
Peaceful at last, he slept.
Chapter Nineteen
I was the most wonderful dream, Nicholas thought as he nuzzled his lips along Catrin’s collarbone and up over her shoulder. He stopped in the hollow of her throat, savoring the scent of roses blended with Catrin’s own sweet essence rising from her warm, supple skin.
When she moved against him, drawing her hand down his chest and stopping just above his throbbing manhood, his eyes snapped open.
This was no dream.
Catrin lay curled about him, her towel twisted until it revealed more than it covered.
The past night’s surgery appeared to have done her no harm. The skin beneath his lips felt pleasantly warm from sleep. No dew of fever-induced sweat dampened her smooth flesh. And she’d slept peacefully in his arms the entire night, apparently undisturbed by nightmares or troubling memories.
At times during the night he had hovered on the edge of sleep, aware of Catrin nestled in his arms. He had no intention of seeking his own bed, when he could savor the pleasure of holding her.
Too soon, the night had ended. But while Catrin slept on, he had no plans to leave.
Instead, he intended to enjoy his good fortune. The woman curled up beside him was warm, soft, beautiful. He’d be a fool to let her go.
His movements leisurely, Nicholas caught the edge of the towel between his fingers and eased the fabric away.
The faint light of dawn creeping through the shuttered windows lent a rosy glow to her ivory flesh. Nicholas caught his breath at his first complete glimpse of Catrin’s beauty. Her breasts were full and well formed, and her tiny waist flared into gently rounded hips perfect to cradle a man—or a child. Closing his eyes, Nicholas permitted himself to consider the idea instead of shoving it aside as he had in the past.
He’d never wanted a child, never wanted any woman enough to share that intimacy. If he intended to have Catrin—to make love with Catrin, he corrected himself—the possibility that they might create a child was something he should consider. He no longer believed this passion between them could be ignored…nor satisfied with a hurried coupling.
A lifetime with Catrin might not be enough.
The image of Catrin, belly rounded with his child, was frightening—and arousing. A renewed surge of desire swept through his manhood.
It was all well and good for him to make plans, but ’twas unlikely he’d find Catrin as eager as he. Although she hadn’t seemed disgusted or scandalized by his past, it didn’t necessarily follow that she’d be willing to consider a future with him.
He didn’t even know if she truly wanted him as her lover. Granted, each time they touched was more explosive than the last. But given the things he suspected had happened to her, she might not want a physical relationship with him.
Or any other man.
In the days when he was with the mercenaries, and even when he was part of the king’s army, he’d seen too many women who’d been assaulted.
Rape happened all the time, when men traveled far from home, when the blood lust was upon them, at times simply because some men were no better than rutting beasts when they encountered a defenseless woman. He’d witnessed the blank stares, the trembling, cringing victims flinching from everyone, the bloodied, broken bodies sprawled on the ground, dignity denied them even in death.
Nicholas had never permitted his men to rape. The idea of forcing himself on a woman revolted him, althou
gh he’d met plenty of men, of high degree and low, who saw it as their right.
It was a tribute to Catrin’s strength, her will, that she hadn’t become a cringing victim. Although he didn’t know what she’d been like before, Nicholas had no doubt the ordeal had made her tougher, tempered her as a steel blade thrust into fire was made stronger.
Her strength was part of her appeal. He feasted his eyes on her beauty once more, his gaze lingering on all the places his hands ached to touch, before reluctantly tucking the towel around her. When had he become so noble?
Or was he simply being foolish not to grab what he wanted?
His hands lingering on her shoulders, he gently kissed her lips. He had intended to leave her then, but her eyelids fluttered open.
Her sleepy gray eyes focused on his and the corners of her mouth curved up in a smile. “Nicholas?” she murmured, snuggling closer to him.
“You’d better hope so,” he said, chuckling. “I trust you realize who you’ve cuddled up to.” Brushing aside a cluster of ebony curls, he grazed his lips along her cheek. “Good morrow, milady.”
He drew her closer still and nibbled at her lips, taking advantage of her acquiescence to ease his tongue into her mouth. Her movements languid, Catrin took up his challenge, her tongue mating with his in a seductive thrust and parry.
Groaning deep in his throat, Nicholas gradually shifted more of his weight atop her while continuing to kiss her. He didn’t want to do anything to shock her. Uncertain whether she would accept the intimacy he wanted, he proceeded slowly, allowing her to grow accustomed to him.
Though his body nearly rebelled at the thought, his mind found the notion intriguing.
Surely he could survive such sweet torment!
Catrin burrowed her fingers into his hair, her fingertips kneading his scalp in a surprisingly sensuous caress. He felt the sensation all the way to the soles of his feet.
In the meantime, her other hand had been busy untying the neckline of his shirt. Reaching down to the hem, she began tugging and pushing at the material, trying to shove the shirt up over his head.
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