by Sue Wilson
"Patently untrue!"
"That you have half the silver of the realm, stolen and secured in your vaults-"
"Would that it were so."
"That you sliced out the tongue of your last minstrel because he substituted your name in one of his tales-"
"Now you see, that is a perfect example. That rapscallion's off-key tremolo is still offending your ears."
"That you have a running rivalry with Price John over the age of your youngest bedmate-"
"Why, that is lunacy! All the world knows I prefer a seasoned woman."
"A rivalry which is to be renewed when Lackland comes a'wassailing come Christmastide-"
"Thea, half of what you hear-all of it perhaps-it's no more than lies."
"That you are hung like your stallion."
The Sheriff stopped midway across the bridge, tilted his head in consideration. "Well," he conceded, "that much is true."
A burst of laughter escaped her lips, and Thea set her hand squarely on Nottingham's chest. His eyes turned from gray to black as he recognized her intent, his lips forming some useless admonition-
And then, with utter delight, she pushed.
He did not fall gracefully. Arms and legs sawed futilely in mid-air, and a surprised squawk of indignation flew up just before he broke the water with his backside. Thea ran the length of the fallen log and put herself on solid ground before he surfaced. Sputtering water and curses and scraping wet hair from his eyes, he gained his feet in the chest-high pool.
"Thank God it's not too deep," Thea said. "I can't remember if I heard you could swim."
"Damn you, woman! No wench would dare!" He hauled himself out of the stream, dripping clothes and water-filled boots sloshing with each step. He grabbed for her, but she danced out of his reach up the grassy embankment.
"Damn you, Sheriff, I am no wench!" She stood atop the embankment, hands planted on hips. "And I would dare!"
She never knew how he reached her so quickly. He bolted after her, flinging out a sopping arms as she turned to run, and ended the chase before it began. She felt herself being yanked back by the laces of her kirtle, his drenched linen sleeve crossing her breast, the cold wetness of his leather-wrapped thighs seeping through her woolen skirts. Was this the victory she bargained for-to be snuggled against a dripping leviathan?
"Christ, woman, what have you done?"
She laughed again, tilting her head back to rest on his shoulder for one glorious moment as she basked in delight at their game. His fingers slid from her back to her waist, releasing his hold on her laces.
"Bested you. At last." She smiled, a languid taunt of triumph, then broke away with a start and bounded through the grasses, leaving a trail of laughter for him to follow.
"Bested me...again," he muttered, then called out, voice rising after her. "What are you, woman? Woodland nymph? Fairy? Some ensorcelled creature of the forest trapped in a woman's body? Whatever you are, I will not chase after you. I am the Lord High Sheriff-"
"-Of Nottingham. Yes, I know. But a trifle slow for a sheriff...and a trifle wet, if truth be told."
"And who have I to blame for that? Tell me, wood witch. Would you have me return to Nottingham like a drowned rat?"
She stopped amid the last fringe of grasses, breathless from sprinting and laughter, and turned to watch the Sheriff's lumbering progress. He approached her glowering, although whether true or merely pretended menace she could not tell. His tunic and jerkin were plastered against the contours of his chest, and water streamed down lean, sinewy arms and long fingers held slightly away from his sides.
"A drowned rat with a boar's temper, I fear." A faint smile of fondness curved her lips. "There's an abandoned swineherd's hut nearby. You could build a fire, I suppose. Dry out. Restore your dignity."
He swore softly between pants, chest heaving beneath the weight of water-laden clothes. "I've tracked boar with less trouble, wench."
Thea crossed her arms over her chest. "Wench?" she challenged.
Something flickered in his eyes, a change like quicksilver that told her she had engaged him in the chase, that what he held back out of civilized good humor, he did not hold back now.
"Wench," he repeated, stormy gaze pinning her, daring her to flee or rebut him.
"Scoundrel."
He chuckled, conceding her the point. Without taking his eyes from her, he fumbled with his sword belt.
Thea dragged her gaze from the mysterious smile lighting his lips to the finely etched hilt of his sword, and swallowed her laughter. "You do not think to murder me, my lord? Not for a jest?"
He said nothing, but let the weapon clang to the ground, answering for him, then undid the leather belt that cinched his waist and held it to the side at arm's length, where it twisted and coiled like a black adder.
And then she knew his purpose, the certainty of it illumined in his eyes.
"You can't-if you must-there's the hut, but a short distance from here. If you insist upon disrobing-"
He dropped the belt.
"My lord, think what you do-"
Jerkin and tunic hung from broad shoulders. He shrugged out of the russet wool and let it drop behind him.
"My lord-Sheriff-"
The tunic he pulled overhead. "Wench."
She should have run, then, in the instant he peeled the white linen over his dark hair and she gained the last advantage he was sure to give her, but while her heart pounded with the need for flight, she stood fixed and immobile. She couldn't run if Satan himself stalked her, not if Satan and this man were one and the same as she-as everyone-believed.
He closed the distance between them, striding through the grass, stealth disguised as grace. In the moment she stood there, unable to move, she knew she had traded her soul for the sight of him.
"Woman," he murmured. A slight concession.
Water glistened on his shoulders; jewel-like drops beaded across the expanse of his chest. He walked toward her, each deliberate stride sending the beads rushing together, scouring his chest and abdomen with a web of tiny rivers.
"Thea."
It was her name she most wanted to hear, something that made her human in his sight and not another nameless thing to be ordered to meet his whim. She thought she had won until he grabbed the laces of his leather breeches in his fist and jerked, freeing the ties. The breeches sagged on his hips, open to an arrow's trail of dark hair that darted from his navel to disappear in loosened laces.
She tried to avert her eyes, and could not. He was full, heavy with arousal that strained against the sodden leather, beautiful, disturbing in the desire he did nothing to hide.
She held out her arm, whether to ward him off or to draw him closer she did not know. It did not matter. His hand closed over hers and drew it to his lips. His beard brushed her palm, then his breath, ragged bursts of heat that belied the calculated steps of his seduction. The tenderness tore at her. He spoke her name again into the well of her hand, then drew his lips from her palm to the inside of her wrist.
Her fingertips hovered above his cheek as if she could not bring herself to touch him, to surrender sanity that easily. She reached out, stroked the blue-black sweep of beard, then drew her fingers back as if scorched. Trembling, she touched him again. His cheek felt cold. She laid her fingers, then the whole of her hand, against it, warming him.
There seemed a thousand things she should say to him. Every protest, every shred of reason and resistance still lay within her grasp. She should recant each bold, careless gesture of the day, each wish and accidental temptation she had laid at his feet in the past weeks, beg his forgiveness for taunting him so. But none of that would finish what had started between them the night he had come to her chamber.
And finishing seemed so necessary. So right. If they hurried, they could not do it quickly enough.
Thea did not ask what madness overcame her, nor did he. With a soft cry, she wrapped herself around him, the soft wool of her kirtle soaking the wetness from him. He reached for her, te
ntatively at first, as if he dared not believe her, or allow himself to want her again. She could sense his hesitation in the instant his arms went too slowly around her, when his hands settled too gently on her hips. Then he was grabbing the wool of her skirts in frantic fistfuls, crushing her body to his, burying a low moan of need against the curve of her neck.
Droplets from the ends of his tangled hair plopped to her shoulder, trickled between her breasts, tormenting her with their gradual, icy descent. Her fingers tore the thong from his hair, wound wet, silk ropes of it in her hands.
At her touch, he lifted his head from her shoulder, lips gathering the wetness he had left there. Softly, his warm tongue caught a drop at the hollow of her throat, then swept down to drink from the swell of her breast.
The feeling called back a host of memories, sensations her body remembered when her mind would not. She shivered in his arms, her breasts and nipples taut, aching everywhere he did not touch. He drew his lips up the crook of her neck, as if he thirsted for the taste of her skin.
Jagged rasps of breath became a murmur in her ear, her name over and over again, as if he could find release in the desperate sound of it, a prayer repeated faster and faster until she caught his face between her hands, directed his lips to hers, and let him drink deeply.
He tasted not of wine, as she remembered, but of spring water, of the air and the earth, and she craved the flavor of him as she craved the essence of the meadow, of Sherwood. His chilled lips grew warm beneath hers. Their tongues met as if by instinct, caressed, twined in sensuous communion, answering one need, creating a myriad more.
Desire flared, spilling through Thea's body like wildfire. Weeks of craving him made her weak; denying it made her mad. Now the madness crumbled away, stripping denial with it. What was left was pure, a white-hot flame that seared her skin from the inside out, turning to ash every reservation, every constraint, every doubt that lingered.
He was cool to her heat, strong and hard and unyielding to everything soft and melting within her, the promised whisper of relief.
Her hands slid from his hair to his shoulders, planting heat there, sowing with splayed fingers the planes of his chest. He hissed in a hoarse breath as her fingertips grazed his nipples, grown cold-hard in the autumn air, and let his head fall back with a sigh of surrender as she bent low and covered him with the heated swirl of her tongue.
With a groan, he pulled her close, strong fingers kneading the flesh of her buttocks, and lifted her blatantly against him. Her body swayed into his, mirroring the slow, suggestive thrusts of his hips, wanting already the end of what he'd started.
Shamelessly, she reached for her skirts and pulled the barrier of fabric away, moaning as the wet skin of his breeches fit against her bare flesh and rivulets from his water-logged leathers dripped down the inside of her thighs. She trembled against him, so close to peaking, wanting him closer, closer, every soft cry defining her need.
Impatiently, she reached for him, fingers brushing against his erection, swollen and rigid beneath sodden leather. At her touch, he sagged to his knees, pulling her with him. Their lips touched, not so much a kiss as a shared, quickened breath. The same tension along his thighs dwelt in hers; the same rhythmic pulse in his shaft throbbed between her legs. He was completion, the answer to every riddle of her body's need.
Thea combed through the tangle of untied laces at his waist, but met his hand, searching for her. Ignoring her cry of protest, he clamped his fingers around her wrist and pulled her arm behind her back.
She wanted to curse him-how dare he make her helpless, take away the chance to touch him, to sate herself with the knowledge that he was hard with hunger for her? All she managed was a whimper, a thwarted plea.
He murmured to her, damnable Norman words she did not know, could not comprehend, save their intent was unmistakably lustful, a list of all the lascivious, pagan things he meant to do to her when all she wanted was to be filled with the solid length of him.
With a small, smothered cry, she put her free hand on his shoulder, fingers digging into the muscled flesh, and French bled into something she understood: a soft shush quieting her and a single, deep command.
"Thea, sweet, open your legs."
She yielded without thinking, her thighs fever-weakened, quivered apart. His hand slid beneath her skirts, stroking from knee to thigh until his fingers touched her damp curls. She moved against him, pressing herself into the sensation he created, urging him to enter her. He kissed her-and did as she wanted, so suddenly that she gasped at the invasion. A sharp shudder overtook her as his finger withdrew and entered, hard, again.
Light and shadow eddied about her until her senses blurred and feeling coalesced around a mounting sting of sublime pleasure. Her hand clutched at the slipperiness of his shoulders, his arms, finally gaining purchase on the leather waist of his breeches. She hooked her fingers into the kidskin, squeezing the leather into her palm as she felt herself tightening around him, being filled, emptied, filled again, until she was sobbing against him, wracked with the powerful tremors of release. Sherwood became a whirlpool of blackness.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
He held her close, letting her desire well up, spill over, and ebb into the liquid aftermath of sensual satiety, and then he lay with her on the ground. The euphoria that weighted her body spread through their entwined limbs, and for a moment he felt as bliss-drugged as she.
Above them, tall grasses swished in a lazy whirl, opening to a twilight sky. Somehow, quite beyond Nottingham's recollection, the day had slipped away, and his every care faded with it. They should leave, he knew, or risk capture in the gloom that stole so quickly through the forest in the shortened days of autumn.
His eyes drifted shut. Leave. Or stay. Forever. Safely cocooned in this green hideaway, listening to the gentle murmur of wind, feeling the earth solid beneath his back-
Listening to her shallow breathing, feeling the solid trust of her body, pressed into his side.
Trust.
The very word stabbed him with regret.
Mother of God. What had he done?
He was not to touch her. Not until she was free. Not until she wanted him. Him! He had sworn to it, not knowing even then whether he had made the promise to protect her, or himself.
No matter now. The vow splintered like a faulty lance against his desire for her. Fragments of it lay everywhere, from the trail of his clothes left by the stream to this place where he had dropped to his knees in surrender. How quickly he had laid aside the sturdy threads of reason for some air-spun fantasy. And for what?
He laid his arm gently across Thea's back, gathering her closer. For this, he thought. For her head nestled into the hollow between his chest and shoulder, fitted there as neatly as if they had always been meant to lie like this, as if they could lie this way for eternity. For the pink flush on her cheek. For every soft cry she gave him.
Sweet Christ! It was different this time. Harder. Not because of meaningless oaths he could not keep anyway, but because the first time he had all but forced response from her, wanting to exact some confession of her feelings, and this time...
This time she had met him, giving him what he dared not even hope for-willing passion, desire as blatant as his own, desire he could rouse again with but a touch. She would yield to him, open to him, ready and eager, if he wanted. And, oh, God, how he wanted!
If he could forget his oath and the reason for it. Forget she belonged to his enemy, who undoubtedly swore oaths of his own. Forget that she had given him only her body, but nothing of her heart.
A plague on the woman! He did not want her flesh without her soul, did not want the lack of satisfaction he felt now to be magnified tenfold when he took her, made love to her, and knew she had no love to return.
He felt her lips press against his collarbone, the delicious warmth of her tongue tracing circles against his skin, and he clamped his teeth together, strangling a cry in his throat.
She dragged heavy-lidde
d eyes open, and her full, kiss-swollen lips bowed into a smile worthy of a practiced courtesan. "Now you are mine, Sheriff."
She silenced him with a kiss, long and lingering, then playful and brazen, and he clung to her, wondering what twisted irony made his wildest dreams come true now when he could not have her.
Then he did not wonder at all, but took in the heat of her lips, savoring the dream, unable to let go. Erratic breaths hammered at his lungs, battering his restraint.
"Insatiable witch..."
Her lips curved around his, breaking the kiss into quick, breathless touches to his beard, his cheeks and temple and brow, and against his lips again. Their tongues touched, danced apart, slid together, and then she moved over him, her small hands seizing his wrists, wresting his arms overhead.
"This time, I will take you, Nottingham."
And well she could have, straddling him, tossing her hair in the wind, her fingers lightly furrowing his chest.
"You make sport of me, woman," he said, trying for some semblance of his previous command, for the control she was determined to strip from him.
Her laughter coursed through him like lightning. He wanted to laugh with her, give himself over to this play of hers. His fingers clawed in the grass at his head, digging into the earth as if he could anchor his sanity there. He was losing himself in her, giving her his strength, his power, his advantage.
"Thea-"
She bent low, touched her mouth to his belly, and his breath fled. No! He could not permit this! Another woman he could resist. Some castle whore who thought she knew such devices. Aelwynn, yes, even Aelwynn, God, but not this one. Not Thea, whom he could not have. Not Locksley's woman.
Gently she placed her hands over the straining leather of his breeches, then her touch closed around him, sculpting the shape of his swollen shaft. Breath hung painfully in his lungs as he felt her fingers pluck at the loosened laces, heard the sound of cord whispering through eyelets. She opened her mouth against his flattened abdomen and sucked at the taut flesh with a soft whimper, savoring him.
An ache of pleasure shot up from his belly. He lifted his hips, directing her mouth lower.