He heard a slow, firm step behind him and raised a hand to greet his father without shifting off the milking stool. “Will you look out for Edie and Jack today? Take good care of them?”
“I will.” Thorkill kissed his forehead, something he had not attempted since Valens was a boy. “Try kisses,” he remarked mildly, before strolling back into the warm gray dawn.
Easy for you to say, old man. Valens rested his forehead against the cow’s bony flank and wished he were taller.
Today is the last chance I have to court her.
* * * *
“Will you come with me to gather mushrooms?” Crouched beside the tiny summer fire and helping her to brush out the ashes, Valens sounded low and solemn, though his eyes gleamed.
“Is that a new way of saying ‘Come see my arrow heads?’” Katherine teased, gratified when he flushed. He was looking very handsome altogether, in a dark green tunic and black leggings, with shoes on his feet, not boots. I shall have to find some mud to trail him through, with those, she thought unkindly, and surprised herself by almost giggling.
I know what he is trying to do, so why am I not more resentful?
“Not at all,” her companion countered smoothly, but his eyelashes fluttered so she knew he lied.
Strangely, she did not care. It was, she decided, rather flattering to be fussed over, but she must not lose her wits in all this courtly prettiness. “I need to feed Edie and Jack first.”
A hot breath, almost a sigh, fluttered like a butterfly against her cheek before Valens bounced to his feet and offered her a hand to raise her. “My father will keep them with him and feed them honeycomb.”
“And make sure there are no bees or stings in it,” called down Thorkill from the attic platform he had lately taken over to bed down in. To give Valens and me more space.
Katherine nodded approval. Thorkill had discovered the wild hive yesterday in the woodland and brought some back, a sweet treat for everyone.
“Thank you,” she said aloud, her gaze on the son rather than the father, her fingers warm and snug in his.
“Good,” said Valens, giving her hand a squeeze before dipping outside to empty the slop bucket. Another task he need not do, like clearing out the ashes, and what Eric and especially Basil would have called women’s work.
There was an advantage, she realized, in entering a household where men had been forced to shift a little for themselves. And where there is no sour mother-in-law. Smiling at this last thought, Katherine turned to the sleepy children.
* * * *
The sun was high when they finally set out. Carrying sacks for the mushrooms and elderberries, they strolled on woodland paths out into meadows.
“It is so peaceful,” she remarked, admiring a red-winged burnet moth as it sped among the grasses and flowers. The town where she had lived had been beset with dangers, of fire, or rampaging apprentices, or furious escaped pigs. To her, this simple, limpid quiet was a gift.
“My lord keeps this area safe,” Valens answered, a different reply but one that was also welcome. He squinted at a mushroom she was about to tell him to leave when he kicked it apart and moved on. He flapped the sack he carried and laughed to see her watching. “I am impatient, I know. If I could gather with a magic wish, I would.”
“Perhaps a waste of a wish,” Katherine replied, feeling less sure than she sounded. Spotting his easy grin, she reconsidered. She could do this. Eric had disliked being teased, he had always stood on his dignity, but Valens was different. “How do you keep the place safe? By spying? By interrogating?”
Her breath stopped as Valens raised his head.
* * * *
She taunted him, the naughty wench, her narrow little face alight with mischief. It gave him such hope for her answer tomorrow that Valens was stunned with happy relief, too glad almost not to reply, but then—
Are you a spy or not? Seize the moment!
“By force of arms for my enemies and kisses for my friends,” he answered boldly.
She took a step closer. “Am I a foe?”
The offer was there. Heart hammering, he took her lightly into his embrace. “I am not certain.”
Impudent and fearless, she leaned in. “Perhaps you should check?”
He lowered his head and kissed her smiling face, learning her forehead, nose, cheeks, and lips with his. Desire poured though him in a wave of glittering heat and pounding blood, spiking higher as her round full breasts jiggled against his chest and their groins collided. Katherine, his Kate, wound her wiry frame around his as he roared into her pliant mouth and dragged her ever more tightly against him.
He had intended a playful seduction, a mock interrogation of her as a pretty stranger, blistered with butterfly nips to her pink ears and fingertips, against the sweet curve of her neck. He had pictured sweeping his hands across her flanks, cupping her bottom, dipping in the soft crease between her breasts. He had imagined shuffling off her clothes, sleek as a grass snake shedding its skin. Now all plans and thought were blasted away by raw need, to taste, to have—
“Tunic, off, off!” Kate’s nimble, reaching fingers tore at his clothes and then they were rolling on the grass, her breath hissing as his hands caressed her smooth bare legs. Valens ripped the drawstring of his tunic, half-shredding it.
“Yes!” Exactly as if he was the wet nurse, Kate suckled his exposed nipple, tonguing it to a reddened peak. “So good,” she was murmuring, as they rolled again and she slid between his thighs. He held her there, wrapping himself around her, and she sighed.
Guessing she was coming back to herself, Valens gentled his caresses. “Easy,” he whispered, kissing the small mole beneath her right ear. “We have time.”
She stared at him with dazed eyes that had begun to darken with shame. He did not want that, he never wanted that, and he said quickly, “It has been long for you?”
She wrinkled her forehead and he added, “Since you made love.”
A slow, devastating blush crept up her face. Abruptly she shifted, curling away in his embrace, her toes slammed against his calves as she strove to push herself off him. “Easy,” he murmured again, and stroked her ears, noting how she trembled. Insight broke in him, brutal enough to tear at his breath.
“You have been starved of touch, have you not?” he said, when he could speak without rage.
Kate gave a low moan and shook her head. “He was older. He said I must not importune. Once Jack was born it became…easier for me.” She huddled in his arms. “I am sorry.”
A couch of ashes for a marriage bed. No wonder she caught flame so quickly. “He was a lazy, selfish brute, Kate, and a liar.” Unable to bear her look of bewildered hurt, he caught her head between his hands and kissed her deeply.
* * * *
There. Her last secret was out and she could blame no one but herself. Not even my spy. Her jaw hurt where she was clenching it after their kiss had ended and she fought back the familiar shame. She knew the jokes about widows and their desperation for sex, about women and lust. Had not Eric’s priest warned her against the sin of concupiscence? Now her guilt was made manifest.
Revealed before a spy, whispered Basil spitefully in her mind. I always knew you were a whore.
“You have done nothing wrong.” Valens’s surprisingly deep voice wrapped about her like a fur cloak, comforting and warm. It stopped the shivering in her bones and she could lift her head from where she had burrowed it on his chest. His hard, hot muscular chest…
Feeling herself slipping again, into sin, she started when Valens brushed her fringe away from her forehead and laid his cool palm above her eyebrows. “Truly, Katherine,” he went on, using her full name, she knew, as a way to point up what he would say next, “If you are as mired in lust as you think, would you have beaten your step-son off you with a stool?”
Bewildered, she rested her elbows on his chest, ignoring his flinch. “What?”
Valens kissed the tip of her nose. He looked the way he did when he watched E
die playing, amused and indulgent. “This is clearly the bait of muddle-headed thinking for years,” he said under his breath, and, more clearly, “Had I been spying on you and Basil when you were still at the coin-makers, I would have expected you to seduce him. That way you and Jack would have kept your places in the household.”
“Urgh!” The instinctive cry spewed from her and she writhed, trying to escape, but Valens clamped her more securely against himself and kept talking, bringing his lips softly against her ear.
“Is not your honest reaction, your natural reaction, proof that you do not chase after any man? You could not force yourself to do what may have been prudent because your feelings are too honest, too true. And that is right, Katherine. You did what was right, for you and Jack.”
Warmth and something more stole through her. The hidden murky guilt of years dropped off her like an unwanted collar and she smiled.
“So. Do you want to wait until tomorrow?” she asked softly.
Chapter 8
Valens drew back slightly. He thought he knew what she was offering, but he needed to be sure. “Kate?”
She nodded, her eyes narrowing. Not with fear, he realized, but excitement. Her trust in him made him humble for an instant, and then he had to pray that his face would not show his preening triumph. I won! Victory over a coin-maker and his poxy son.
“Let me look at you.” Disguising his feeling through action, he rolled and arranged her so she was lying on top of him. Bright green eyes gleamed as Kate smiled, her thin mouth quivering at the corners. “We shall have pretty youngsters, you and I,” he said, the comment slipping from him before he had sense to stop it. Where are all my spying habits? Blown away by a merry, impudent widow.
Not so merry now, he amended, as her narrow little face grew wary. He sensed her desire and her nervousness and reminded himself to take care. “Do not be so troubled, Mistress Weaver. We shall do well together.”
A soft glow lit her face and smoothed the frown lines on her forehead. “You remembered my craft.”
He did not think it wise to tell her that a spy needed an excellent memory. “You will have a weaving frame. I know carpenters, I know woodcraft. It will not take me long.”
“Where would you put one?”
He grinned at her. He liked Kate’s practical nature, even as it pinned him. “The barn with the cow and calf, and hurdles between you,” he added quickly.
“Eric—” she began, and stroked his hair as if to gain warmth from it. “Eric never wanted me to work, no more than housework.”
“The more fool him.” Valens shrugged and caught her before she could fall away from him. The shift and ripple between them as their limbs and parts brushed together made him long to rut against her, grind and grab, but he kept himself in check. He wanted to return to kisses but sensed she needed this tender space between them first. “Do as you wish, weave or housework only. Either suits me.”
“Why?” She echoed Edie’s impudent question, but her eyes were solemn, her thin mouth held very straight. She seeks reassurance from me without even being aware of her need or desire. It made him feel tender toward her. She really needs a man to look after her.
“Marry me.” The wish forced the words from his tightened throat before Valens could stop them. He could feel the redness exploding in his face and knew he should have addressed her in a formal garden, on his knees, with Katherine sitting on a flowery seat, not draped on top of him like a luscious cloak. “Say you will marry me. I know my lord is returning for your answer tomorrow, but I would know now.”
She blushed. “I did not mean that when I spoke of not waiting.”
“Yes,” he agreed softly. “I agree and say yes to you. But I would know more, Katherine. Please, will you answer? Will you marry me?”
His intended gave him a soul-seeking glance that changed her from Katherine to Kate. Please, by Adam, let her be my Kate. “Why?” She did not sound offended, thank Christ.
Because I will be lost without you was the kind of admission only a poet would make, not a fletcher. “To make me an honest man.” And he wanted her to stay with him.
Her smile deepened. She dipped her fair, blonde-to-brown hair across his face, tickling his nose in a way he thought was accidental until he spotted a dither of mischief hovering in the creases of her smile. “What will suit me,” she said slowly, returning to their earlier conversation in a drawl he thought even Julian the sheriff would not match, “is for you to kiss me.”
“I can do that.” Thank all the saints. Valens raised his head.
Their lips met and he sank eagerly into the kiss, overwhelmed and distracted even as the spy within him recognized that she had still not answered. I can hope, he decided, and let the matter drift away in a sunlit bubble of pleasure.
* * * *
Valens had asked her to marry him. Katherine finished their latest, limb-trembling kiss and nestled her head into his neck, basking in his warmth. His eyelids had not fluttered as he had spoken. He wants this. He wants me.
Even the way he had asked—in a rush, with them hooked together like goose grass—had delighted her. Eric had negotiated with her widowed mother who, after Katherine was married, had promptly re-married herself and moved away. Katherine had not seen nor heard from her mother in three years.
My first marriage proposal. She kissed Valens’s throat and felt his arousal beneath her. Both that and the stumbling, flustered way he had asked her were pleasing. I can do this. I can agree.
She was not sure yet if it was love on Valens’s part, but it was something. And he had met her desire with his own. He had not been like Eric, making her feel ashamed of her passion.
So why can I not say, “Yes, I will marry you?”
It was because Valens had not declared his love for her, or for Jack, she decided an instant later. After her less than ardent marriage to Eric, where the early flicker of desire and even liking had collapsed into dull ashes, she longed for passion, clear and open. I need love from Valens. Spy or not, I need him to declare it. I need more from this marriage than usefulness to each other. Or am I being foolish, expecting too much? What does he truly feel for me?
Ducking away from her tangled emotions, Katherine brushed her hand across his chest to concentrate on more earthy feelings. I have already agreed that we need not wait. Our marriage may be tomorrow but the wedding, our wedding, is now.
Perhaps that was it, Katherine thought, as Valens tumbled her over in the fragrant grass so she was beneath him. I want the old ways, the way my grandparents joined, with need and passion first and then a wedding with a priest. The private, intimate marriage before the public one.
I trust him. Perhaps. And perhaps he loves me.
Choosing to believe it, she smiled and kissed him again. He stroked her nose and chin before dropping a gentle palm to cup her left breast. “How are you now?”
He was asking because he must have known that her bosom had been sore. Warmed by his concern, she nibbled his ear and heard him gasp, a gratifying response. Even as she leaned closer to nip again, Valens slithered down her and began to tongue her breasts.
The moist heat through her clothes ripped into her and she wailed. His bobbing red-gold head, brilliant as a jewel, kept moving, weaving over her like a shuttle as his tongue flicked and sucked and probed. She could feel her nipples seeping and did not care as the tepid milk ran along her curves. It was messy and glorious and Valens shimmered his lips over her, tickling her fetid skin until she thought she would burst with pleasure.
She tugged at his hair as he licked the aching crease of skin beneath her breasts, unsure of what she wanted. “Do not stop!” she breathed, and jerked her body up into his cradling arms.
“I have just started,” he promised, laughing into her belly, and tongued lower.
He clasped her thighs and dragged her closer, holding her tight as she thrashed and writhed. She wanted and did not want his juicy kisses on her intimate parts, his mouth embracing the spot between her l
egs as his head rocked forward and back. And now there were fingers as well as lips, easing into her, opening her, and she could not top the rush, the flood of delight that rocked through her.
“Good girl,” Valens murmured, patting her drooping thighs as she lay panting, utterly undone. “The first of many.”
There is more? She forced open her drowsy eyelids and saw Valens smiling at her, looking as if he had shared in her joy. He stroked her over and eased his hands under her bottom. “We shall have much pleasure, little love.”
Little love. Katherine melted at the name and basked in the “Good girl”, her ears pricking afresh when Valens—her husband-to-be—tugged off the rest of his clothes and tossed them aside. She had an instant to admire his tough, compact frame, and then he was drawing off her borrowed russet tunic, drizzling it away in caresses like warm rain, and she was naked and lovely beneath him.
“Gorgeous. You gorgeous, gorgeous thing.” His lips captured hers and, being a gorgeous thing, Katherine kissed back, chuckling as Valens cursed when a stone raked along his naked flank, sighing when his eyes fixed on hers.
He reached for her and she reached for him. Her legs opened of their own accord and he sank between them. For a moment there was an odd numbness as his thick sex pressed against hers, followed by a slow wave of pleasure as he rocked into her.
They were one, married in the old way. Katherine blinked, taking in the wonder, smiling at the slackened gasp of pleasure on her husband’s flushed face, and coiled her limbs more snugly about him. She cantered her hips and wrapped her legs about his middle, drumming her heels on his rump to make him snap to it.
Valens the Fletcher and his Captive [Medieval Captives 2] (BookStrand Publishing Romance) Page 6