Border Bride

by Hale Deborah

  She turned to Idwal, who was going about a few small chores in the stable. “Gaynor will get wind of all this soon enough. If she’s looking for me, tell her I’ll be back when I come. I have a matter that needs attending.”

  Since her bidding scarcely needed a reply, Enid didn’t expect more than a nod from Idwal.

  But reply he did, with a single word that spoke volumes. “Con?”

  How much did his crippled thoughts grasp what swifter ones missed? To anyone else in Glyneira, Enid would have ignored the question, or told them to tend their own business.

  Idwal deserved an answer.

  “Con.” She nodded. “I need to know where I stand with him. Before the rest of our guests arrive.”

  Idwal all but pushed her toward the gate. “I…mind where you stand. Go on!”

  Something about his eager assurance kindled an answering spark of hope in Enid. A trill of nervous laughter bubbled out of her as she slipped through the gate and headed for the orchard.

  Some mysterious urge possessed her hands, making them fumble with the cord that secured her braided hair. Once it came untied, she shook her long dark tresses loose to dance in the breeze. The more to look like the girl Con ap Ifan had left behind in Gwynedd so long ago.

  Something inside her fluttered, too. The way it had on that summer night when she’d stolen into Con’s sleeping place in the hay mow and lain with him. At least today the sun shone bright and the man was not befuddled with drink.

  Somehow both those things alarmed her even more.

  Rounding the maenol, she walked toward the orchard. With one step her feet wanted to break into a blithe skip, if not a dead run. With the next she felt as if someone had lined the soles of her shoes with lead.

  As she drew closer to the fruit trees, she did not see Con right away, and a gaping void formed in the pit of her belly. Then suddenly he stepped into view from behind one of the cherry trees aflower with breathtaking clusters of soft pink blossoms.

  His eyes widened, as if better to drink in the sight of her. His wide handsome mouth curved in a smile of pure, delicious admiration. When he spoke, lavishing each word on her like a caress, she could not believe that he had ever addressed another woman so.

  “By heaven, lass, they say fond longing gilds the memory, but I swear you’re more fair even than I remembered you during all our years apart.”

  How could she deny it when he made her feel so beautiful?

  She might have thrown herself into his arms then, if he had not held them behind him. His sun-bronzed warrior’s face suddenly looked years younger and his eyes glowed with the bashful eagerness of a boy.

  “I made something for you.”

  From behind his back he brought forth a cunningly fashioned circlet of apple and cherry blossoms. With a touch no heavier than the spring breeze, he nestled the floral crown in her hair.

  For an instant, Enid wished she had a mirror of polished silver or even a still pool of dark water in which to admire her reflection. Then she caught a passing glimpse of herself in Con’s eyes.

  That was all she needed.

  Con shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “I wish it could have been diamonds and rubies.”

  “Nonsense,” she whispered. “Gems are cold and hard.”

  “They last forever.”

  “I’d sooner something rare and precious for an hour.” What peculiar talk! If Enid hadn’t known better, she’d have sworn Con’s words were coming out of her mouth and hers from him.

  “I did see the Empress of Constantinople once, fairly dripping in jewels.” Con reached out to adjust Enid’s chaplet of Welsh spring blossoms. Then his hand strayed down over her hair to graze her cheek. “She was not a hundredth part as fair as my Enid, the Queen of Springtime.”

  “Thank you for this.” Gathering all her courage Enid added, “It makes me feel like a bride.”

  Con reeled back as though each of those softly uttered words had been a swift arrow aimed at his heart.

  Why hadn’t he thought of that before? It was the custom for brides to wear a wreath of flowers in their unbound hair. Sometimes the bridegroom wore one, too. Was this how Enid would look when she stood before Father Thomas to take her marriage vows with Macsen ap Gryffith?

  Would Con have to stand with the rest of the company at the door of the little country chapel and hold his peace when the priest asked if there were any objections to the union? Would he have to pluck his harp and sing love songs at the bridal feast? And would he have to witness the disrobing of the bride and groom on their wedding night?

  The prospect haunted him.

  Enid caught his hand in hers and gave it a heartening little squeeze. “I’m glad we’ve had this time together, Con.”

  He found himself unable to frame an eloquent answer. “And I.”

  “You did love me, back in Gwynedd when we were young, didn’t you?” Her dusky purple eyes held him, divining the truth with her intuition.

  “You knew that, surely.”

  She shook her head. With subtle brush strokes, wistfulness gilded her beauty. “How could I have known when you never spoke? And then when you went away?”

  “How could I speak?” The old desperation mounted inside him like steam in a covered pot. “A fatherless plowboy to the lord’s daughter, and her promised to a princeling? I had nothing to offer you, Enid.”

  He stabbed his finger toward the timbered wall that enclosed Glyneira. “Not even a modest maenol on the borders. Besides, your father would have slain me on the spot for suggesting such a thing, just like the poor fool in ‘The Ash Grove.’”

  Her eyes told him she knew it was true. “It nearly killed me to think of your going away.”

  “Oh, cariad, you must see I could no more stay than I could speak. Even if I’d been content to hie oxen in the fields of some Welsh backwater, how could I have abided watching you wed to another man?”

  How could he abide it now? The question slashed at Con’s entrails.

  An answering flicker of his own distress crossed Enid’s delicate features. “That morning after you first arrived at Glyneira, you claimed it amused me to befriend you back then. Accused me of using you to practice flirting.”

  The recollection shamed him. “I should have held my tongue.”

  “Not if you believed it. But you mustn’t believe it any more.” Enid’s dark eyes had never shone with such ardor, her voice had never rung with such conviction.

  “You were the sun and the moon to me, then, Con ap Ifan. I never once thought of you being fatherless. Often as not I envied you for it. I didn’t disdain you calling the oxen, either. It’s as important a job as there is if folks are to eat. And there’s almost a magic to it, the way those great beasts pull for you. Not because you poke them with a goad from behind, but because you call them and coax them to follow you.”

  All his life, and especially since he’d left Gwynedd, Con had struggled to rise in the eyes of the world. Now the person whose good opinion mattered more to him than any other was saying she’d always held him in the highest esteem.

  It knocked his balance awry…but in a good way.

  “You have a magic in you, Con. It lights you up from inside and makes your manner blithe and easy. Who knows? Maybe your father was a prince of the Fair Folk.” Enid took a step toward him, the fruit blossoms fresh and fragrant in her raven hair.

  For reasons he could not fathom, Con backed away from her. “You give me too much credit, lass. The highest I can hope is that I was bred by a wandering bard with a glib tongue and itchy feet.”

  “That’s all long in the past, anyhow.”

  Again she approached him and again some wary instinct made Con retreat until he felt the rough bark of an apple tree pressing into his back.

  Her voice dropped to a beseeching whisper that rolled like thunder in Con’s ears. “You said yourself, the feeling doesn’t go away. You said I fill the empty places inside you.”

  Enid swayed toward him, her li
ps held in an unmistakable invitation to kiss.

  His own feeble voice of caution warned Con to resist. The moon-baying of roused passion drowned it out with ease.

  Subsiding against the trunk of the apple tree, he planted his legs wide and gathered his comely wood nymph close until the soft folds of her clothes and the flesh of her belly pressed against his rigid desire. Then he kissed her in the way the amorous bees kissed the cherry blossoms—rubbing his body against hers and drinking in the sun-sweetened honey of her lips.

  His hands roved over her, tugging her skirts higher and higher, mad with impatience at the wool and linen barriers to greater intimacy.

  Enid responded with all the passion she must have worked so hard to curb during their youth. Had she, too, lain awake on sultry summer nights, aching to hold him in her arms?

  Without words, her lips swore it had been so.

  The delicate perfume of the fruit blossoms wrapped around them, mated with the golden warmth of the spring sun and the languid, sensual drone of the bees. Con ap Ifan had sported with many women in many different places, but none like this.

  It felt akin to heaven on earth. His earth. Plowed by his hand, protected with his blood.

  Enid drew back from their kiss, but such a little way that her breath whispered against Con’s chin and the sensitive flesh of his neck. “Your feelings for me haven’t gone away, have they, my cariad?”

  “Gone? Nay.” He chuckled at the notion, and at the blissful tickle of her tongue on his throat. “Swelled tenfold more like.”

  “And do I still fill the empty place inside you?”

  “To overflowing.” Just as he wanted to fill her, now, the way he’d so often dreamed of.

  He hitched her skirts higher still, until his impatient hands could ply the provocative rounding of her bare rump. Given a few more moments, he might peel the kirtle and smock off her altogether until she wriggled in his arms perfectly naked, as befitted a wood nymph.

  “Do you want me to marry Lord Macsen?”

  “No!” She was his. Every caress of his hands on her bare skin claimed more of her. At that moment, his hot blood demanded he battle any other man who might wrest possession of Enid from him. “No, you mustn’t.”

  She subsided against him with a sigh so rich in contentment it almost quieted the blaze of rage his passion had ignited.

  “Then you’ll wed me, instead, and stay at Glyneira always?”

  The whispered words expressed less a question than a sweet certainty.

  They went through Con like a blade of cold iron with a jagged edge.

  Chapter Nine

  Con had loved her, and still did more than ever. He would stay, and they would all be a family.

  Enid dismissed a passing qualm about how they’d break the news to Lord Macsen, and how he would respond.

  True, she had sensed a potent undercurrent of interest radiating from her late husband’s lord every time he’d come to Glyneira. When their hands had chanced to brush while helping themselves to the evening meal, he had not flinched away, but stared into her eyes with a look that questioned and challenged. When she’d offered an opinion, he had listened to her with such intense attention it had made her stammer and set her heart pounding.

  Nothing had ever been spoken of this disturbing awareness, nor had anything unseemly passed between them while Howell had lived. Now Enid fervently hoped she had misread Lord Macsen’s intent. Otherwise relations between Glyneira and Hen Coed could become badly strained.

  It didn’t matter, though. Enid twined her arms about Con’s neck and threaded her fingers through his hair. Even if it meant incurring the wrath of the powerful border chief, she’d be willing to risk it for Con. Just as she had once braved her father’s fury.

  Only this time Con would be with her, standing by her. Nothing else mattered.

  For a few precious fleeting moments, Enid tasted heaven. When she felt Con’s grip on her slacken and his body cease to strain against hers, she did her best to ignore it. When she sensed an unsettling air of aversion from him, she tried to dismiss it, as well.

  Even her stubborn will could not hold the truth at bay forever.

  “Now, Enid…” As Con reached back to disengage her arms from his neck, his voice took on a calming, almost wheedling tone—the way someone might speak when imparting bad news to a person prone to hysterics. “S-stay at Glyneira…forever? Us wed? You can’t mean it.”

  Only twice before in her life had she peered into an uncertain future with such dread. First, on the morning after she’d surrendered her virginity to Con, when she’d searched the estate in vain for some sign of him. And again when her father had given her in marriage to Howell ap Rhodri, sending her into exile.

  Back then, she’d clung to the foolish certainty that everything would have worked out if only Con had chosen to stay and stand beside her. With all her heart, she’d believed he could help her face whatever a threatening tomorrow might bring.

  Now Con was the threat.

  “Of course I mean it.” Hurt and fear boiled within her, brewing up an overflowing cauldron of bitter wrath. “Why else would I say such a thing? And why do you make it sound as if I’ve proposed something impossible…or indecent? You’ve spent this whole fortnight pursuing me in some fashion or another—singing me love ballads by night, by day taking on all the duties of a husband and father around Glyneira.”

  “Yes, but you must see—”

  “No, Con ap Ifan, you must see! You’ve kissed me and handled me in ways only a husband has a right to. Can you deny that if I hadn’t spoken of marriage you’d have me on my back in the grass with your man-part buried inside me?”

  When Con hesitated, his mouth opening and closing in a palsy, she demanded. “Well, can you?”

  “I’d be a fool and a liar to deny how much I want you, cariad—”

  “How dare you call me that?”

  Con kneaded his temples. “I dare because that’s how I feel about you. It’s how I think of you—how I’ve thought of you for as long as I can recall.”

  Enid resisted the soft surge of pleasure that engulfed her heart at his words. If he didn’t stop talking by contraries soon, she’d box his ears! “Then why in heaven’s name can you not take me to wive? Is it my children? Can you not accept them to raise as your own?”

  “You know that has nothing to do with it.” His tone sharpened. “Myfanwy and Davy are a fine pair, but I don’t have it in me to be a good father. Not even to a child of my own flesh.”

  She whirled away from him, fearful her face or her eyes might betray something about the child of his own flesh. When she felt Con’s hand light on her shoulder, she shook it off.

  “This has naught to do with my feelings for you, Enid—the love and the desire. It has naught to do with the children, either. Only with me. I can’t throw my future away for any woman…not even you.”

  “What future awaits you that is so much better than a warm home and the love of a family?” Perhaps if it was brilliant enough she could grasp and grant his reasoning—not feel herself so lightly cast aside.

  “Nothing less than a knighthood.” There could be no mistaking the fervor of ambition in his voice. “I could return to the Holy Land at the head of a force of my own men. Not as a hired sword to the Frankish princes, but as a nobleman in my own right.”

  Knighthood? Nobleman? Those were Norman notions!

  While Enid tried to make sense of it, Con kept talking, his bluster running away with him. “If you but knew how long and how hard I’ve labored for this chance to prove myself, you would not ask me to toss it away as if it counted for nothing. This is a chance to make my dream of a lifetime come true, Enid.”

  His grand dreams! Just because they soared higher than hers, with magnificent plumage, did they signify so much more than her modest nestlings?

  “By our Lord’s death, you’re a filthy spy for the English, aren’t you?” Rounding on him, Enid plucked the blossom crown from her hair and hurled it
at him.

  It didn’t hurl at all well.

  With scarcely more substance than the fragile bonds that connected her to Con ap Ifan, the delicate floral circlet wafted toward him. The violence of Enid’s heave broke it apart into single orphaned blossoms that drifted to the ground. How she wished it had been made of heavy gold and hard gems that might strike him a blow half as painful as the one he’d dealt her.

  “That’s what all this has been about!” she cried. “A mercenary pretending to be a bard, travelling along the border, poking around our defenses. Using your wiles and the feeling I once had for you to worm your way in among us.”

  Her words appeared to accomplish what the blossom crown had failed to do. “That’s not the way of it, Enid. I swear.”

  Con’s handsome features darkened with that look of injured honor that Enid would once have done anything to avert. Now she hadn’t a jot of sympathy for the treacherous bounder. She’d been a fool to fancy him anything like the openhearted, impish boy she’d once loved. Con ap Ifan had lived too long among the Normans and they had stolen his soul.

  “I am on a mission for the Empress Maud,” he confessed. “One that will help the folk of Powys and Deheubarth.”

  Though she couldn’t listen to any more of his bold-faced lies, some weak, traitorous bent in Enid wondered how she would bear it if he stopped speaking and went away…and she never heard his voice again.

  “And you wanted to use my maenol to advance this scheme with Macsen ap Gryffith?” Thank heaven she had kept the truth of Bryn’s parentage from both the boy and his father. She would never want her son tainted with Con ap Ifan’s betrayal of their people. “How could I have let you play me for such a besotted fool?”

  “Stop being so bullheaded for once, and listen to reason,” Con snapped. “Just because I can’t wed you is no reason to wreck a fine opportunity for your lord and for the folk of Powys.”

  “For you and that empress creature, you mean.” Her palm itched to strike him a blow he’d remember her by instead of her melting, vulnerable kisses. “I know better than to heed any more of your sly riddling talk.”