At Your Pleasure

by Meredith Duran

  Every time he charmed her, her smile belatedly signified to her a betrayal of her family.

  Every time her smile faltered, he returned to the question of killing David Colville—who, like his father before him, now appeared to have abandoned a woman who would not permit herself to abandon him.

  There was no news of the man. Yesterday, before receiving word of the rebels’ defeat at Preston, Adrian had written to the king, speculating that Colville might have gone into battle there, or perhaps ridden north to Scottish soil. I begin to think he never intended to return to his property here, though his sister fully expected him. He had closed the letter with a proposal to return to London, where he might be of use in formulating a policy to handle the aftermath of the upheavals.

  He had not spoken of this yet to Nora.

  A boy spotted them as they neared the fortified wall. Recognizing Adrian, he ran ahead, bare feet flying, yelling for the gates to be opened.

  “He is eager,” Nora said with a smile.

  “He’s a scamp, off on a pretext in search of a hiding place, for I promised to wallop him if ever I caught him again without shoes.”

  Her laughter sounded surprised. “But who are his parents?”

  “Distant relations,” he said. “Deceased.”

  “Do you take in many orphans?”

  Her voice was teasing. But the answer was simple. “Any who are Ferrers, or related thereof.”

  She kept smiling at him for a moment, and then a blush rose in her face, and she ducked her head and looked away, absorbing herself in a survey of the walls they now approached. New freckles showed on her cheeks and the slim bridge of her nose. Here in the country she never wore powder.

  To take her to London would be a mistake. He knew what the city meant to her, and how easily old habits were recovered. Hope might suggest that her dislike of court would draw her nearer to him, her only counsel . . . but wisdom suggested otherwise. In so many regards she remained out of his reach, and in the city, reminded of the mask she had once worn, she would find it easier to remain aloof from him.

  If he could not win her in Hodderby, the place where she felt safest to be herself, then in London he would lose her—for at court, nobody was ever himself.

  Perhaps he was never himself but with her. Or rather, with her, he was more than himself. He did not recognize this excess of emotion within him. Six years out of practice, he had yet to fathom a way to govern it.

  To have her at court would pose a dangerous distraction to his composure.

  Yet, he had no choice but to take her, for he could not leave her alone so long as her brother remained on the loose.

  Side by side they rode across the short wooden bridge that spanned the moat. Late-blooming water violets stippled the green water. On the bank, half hidden by a profusion of wild roses, two swans loitered, their chins tucked modestly to their chests. Thence into the large, well-combed yard, where they drew up in the shade of an elder tree sprouting with scarlet berries. The passing of the wet weather had given rise to a riot of color. Stands of yellow poppy and purple foxglove hugged the walls, and the ivy was verdant where it spilled down Beddleston’s weathered face.

  “But how beautiful,” Nora said as he helped her dismount. On the ground, she hesitated, encircled by his arms, to consider the crenellated tower that topped the great hall. “That facing is new.”

  She had a sharp eye. In Adrian’s childhood, the tower had collapsed, killing a man. His father had ordered the stones removed, the hall repaired and roofed. For almost two decades Beddleston had lacked a tower. But without one, its vantage, nestled in the valley, lacked a clear view to the surrounding hills.

  “It was repaired this winter,” Adrian said.

  She gave him an opaque look. “And the moat? Was that repaired as well?”

  He smiled and offered her his arm. When she looked like to press him, he tilted his head toward the front doors. “Your curiosity does honor to your house, my lady. Come meet your people.”

  Her startled look betrayed that she had not taken note, before, of the servants forming a line by the front doors to greet her.

  The brief dance of her fingers on his arm revealed her disquiet. But she drew herself upright and moved forward with him, making poised courtesies to the twenty men and women there assembled before allowing Adrian to draw her into the entry hall.

  The stained glass in the entresol above shed rainbow light across the tiled hall. In a puddle of scarlet they paused to be divested of their outerwear. “No luggage,” Adrian said to the porter, “only the saddlebags without.” They had ridden hard today and planned to return to Hodderby at dawn. “Have my sisters and brother readied to greet us before supper.”

  Again he caught her curious, speaking look, but she made no comment as he led her onward.

  Up the broad wooden stairs they went, she running a curious hand over the carved balustrade. The niches in the walls, once used to house torches, now supported brass urns overflowing with flowers. These, too, she touched gently as she passed, fingering the petals of roses and lilies, her gaze wandering. The stained window, which showed the martyrdom of St. Theresa, briefly caught her attention, but it was the oil portraits of his ancestors that most plainly intrigued her. Near the top of the staircase, she came to a halt.

  “This is you,” she said.

  The painting had been made in his university days in France. As he watched her study his younger self, a bittersweet feeling took him by surprise. When she glanced back to him, he bit down an impulse to ask her if she could still find that boy in him—if she could tell him where to look.

  Instead he put his thoughts to what miracles time had wrought on her. Taking her by the shoulders, letting the softness of her breasts against his chest serve as answer to any questions his rotted brain might manufacture, he kissed her in full view of those who cared to look.

  Another surprise: her mouth yielded to him when he had expected her to complain for privacy. A gentle hand fluttered over his back, then gripped his waist with a strength that belied its size. She stepped closer yet, fully against him, and the kiss she gave back to him grew puzzling, flavored by something that felt closer to desperation than desire.

  He set his forehead to hers. “What is it?”

  She shook her head, but her hands traveled down his hip to skate, provocatively, the top of his buttocks.

  He almost spoke bluntly: there was a library directly behind them and its floor or furniture could be made fit for their purpose.

  But the odd quality to her silence commanded his own. For a long moment they stood together, breathing, as she leaned into him.

  At last, haltingly, she said, “This place . . . I did not expect it to be so lovely.”

  “No?” He kept his voice soft. “Does it please you, then?”

  “It feels like”—she gave an abashed tug of her lips—“an enchantment to me.” She ducked her head as though embarrassed by her admission.

  He gently took her chin to lift her eyes to his. “I am glad,” he said. This was the place that gave all his efforts meaning. To have her here . . . no sweeter triumph had ever been his than to be able to say, “And now it is your home as well.”

  “Yes,” she said, but some anxiety still trembled in her voice. “Yet I cannot but think, looking around . . . that this was where you thought of me.” She glanced back to his portrait. “Where you slept six years ago,” she whispered. “Where you rode from to meet me. As though it were . . . haunted by us.”

  “I rode from here a month ago, too,” he said. “And how fortunate for me that I did.”

  He felt, heard, the hitch of her breath. She kissed him again, then, a short and violent kiss from which she broke suddenly, slipping past him to climb the rest of the stairs.

  He showed her onward to his chambers, where he watched her walk the corners of his dressing room. Haunted by us: her words began to make sense as he saw this room through her eyes. Here were the most prized ornaments of his history�
�the astrolabe on his writing desk, collected from a Turk in Italy; the mappa mundi that he had found at a market in Antwerp, painted on goatskins stitched to the width of a man’s outstretched arms. Volumes of philosophy and rhetoric sat on the oak bookshelves. He was a man of few personal possessions, and until this moment, he had never considered what they might say of him. But to see her close examination of them . . . suddenly he realized that each held a story that he might wish to share with her; and that in sharing these stories with her, these objects would finally realize their value.

  The odd, poetic thought unnerved him. Too late he remembered the one item in this room that he did not entirely wish her to see.

  Her steps faltered as she spotted it. Slowly, with a hand that looked to tremble, she opened the door of the small glass-fronted cabinet that sat beside his dressing table.

  The silver pomander, worked in delicate filigree, no longer smelled of her. Or perhaps she no longer smelled of the herbs that she had stored in it, once upon a time, when she had worn it daily, next to her heart.

  She turned to him, the pomander clasped in her fist, her mouth thin and white, her eyes shining. “You . . . kept this?”

  He could not endure her tears. “Not for sentiment,” he said with deliberate honesty. “I spake curses to it more often than not.” He had told himself, these many years, that he kept it as a reminder of the cost of weakness.

  He wondered now if it had not taught him, instead, how to lie to himself with conviction.

  She shook her head, looking as though she did not believe him, or had not heard him right. Very carefully, she replaced the pomander in the cabinet, then gazed upon it a moment longer before she whispered, “Adrian . . . why did you bring me here?”

  He took a breath. There were plain answers to give: it was meet that a new wife should see her holdings; that she should know her husband’s family, though those in residence be yet in the schoolroom.

  But the truth was not so plain.

  In order to know her, one must know Hodderby. So, too, with him and this place.

  He wanted her to know him here.

  To speak such words was impossible. The very prospect stopped his throat. He was not a boy to beg her to know him, or to forgive him for forcing her hand. He had bullied her into marriage to protect her life, and he would not bargain with her now in the hopes of gaining a greater reward than her health. He was no self-deluding fool: never had he imagined that stripping her of choices would win him her love.

  He was at peace with this, was he not? He had practice in surrendering love: he had let go of any number of people in his life. The losses had scarred him, but they had never rearranged his innards.

  Only now, here, in this moment, did he understand that it would not be the same, should she be lost again.

  So what, then? Would he play the jailer for the rest of his natural life? Would he lock the bird in its cage until it forgot how to sing? What use, then, for the cage, once the song had gone?

  She watched him very closely. “I am glad to see this place,” she said. “Do not mistake my meaning. It . . . to be amongst everything that is you . . .” She lifted her fist to her chest. “Here, it almost . . . hurts me.” She tried for a smile. “I see all I lost. Or rather . . . the full nature of what I never could have had, long ago.”

  “But it was not to taunt you that I brought you here,” he answered slowly. “Only that it seems to me—” He cleared his throat. Explanation went against his grain, but for her, he would try. “It seems that you look upon my intentions toward your brother as willful persecution. But each of us has people of our own, Nora, and places worth protection.”

  She looked at him uncertainly for a moment, and then comprehension whitened her face. “But who have you to fear?” She took a quick step toward him. “You are Rivenham! Surely no one could touch you!”

  Her hand was reaching for his. He took it, squeezing hard. “None of us is without enemies. You of all people know this. Your father was no small figure, but he was careless, and rested too comfortably on his laurels. What keeps a man powerful is his dissuasion of his enemies’ aims. This task which was set me with regard to your brother—my failure is one of their aims. How would it look if I failed? I, a former recusant?”

  “But—” She looked dazed, as though it truly had never occurred to her that to set a former Catholic on the trail of a Jacobite might be a task as politically perilous to the former as the latter. “There must be another way to rout them!”

  “There are many ways to defend oneself.” That was only the truth. “Do not mistake me: I do not speak to you from a place of fear. I merely ask you to understand that I did not conceive your brother’s downfall as a piece of private malice. It was ever part of a larger contest, which I have little choice but to wage.”

  To his surprise, she put her arms around him, digging her head into his chest as she said in a muffled voice, “I had never thought . . .” In the pause that opened, her swallow was audible. “I was selfish. All my care was . . . for what I must give up. I never thought you had aught to lose.”

  But his ears had latched onto one notion in particular, and it fixated his predatory instincts. “What you must give up,” he repeated softly. “Would that be me?”

  Her head lifted. She reached up to cup his face, and the touch of her cool, soft hands was sweeter perhaps than any words she might have spoken. “Oh, Adrian.” Her voice seemed clogged with unshed tears. But then she pulled his head down to hers, pressing her lips to his fiercely, and her kiss spoke nothing of grief. The hot hunger in it instantly kindled him.

  He caught her by the waist, holding her steady as he returned like force with like. She pressed her body into his, sliding her hand into his hair with stinging violence. “Take me to bed,” she said into his mouth.

  This forwardness was new. He meant to encourage it. He swung her into his arms and kissed her again, using his shoulder to knock open the door to the next chamber, carrying her to the bed and setting her upon it.

  He meant to follow her down, but the vision she made arrested him: hair tousled, slipping from its pins; sober dark skirts knocked over her knees to reveal embroidered stockings and slim legs. As he gazed upon them, they opened in a wanton invitation that made his entire body tighten to steel.

  He exhaled. Here on this bed he had lain through so many open-eyed nights, forbidding himself thoughts of her. And here she now lay, like a sultry vision designed to lure saints from their pedestals.

  “You are beautiful,” he said slowly. What an insufficient word.

  The smile that curved her mouth raised the hairs on his nape. When she lifted a hand to him, she might have been beckoning an army, gesturing for the destruction of cities and the embarkation of war ships, or the lowering of the moon: such was the uncanny, hot power she radiated.

  “Come,” she said, her gray eyes slumberous.

  Hesitantly, almost fearing himself—for this was no gentle desire that roared in him—he sat on the bed. But she was not content for patience: seizing his elbow, she pulled him down atop her. Reclaiming his mouth, she wrapped her leg around his and anchored him to her.

  Her confidence silenced his hesitation. He drove his hands through her hair, plundering what she offered—nay, what she insisted that he take. Beneath him she was sinuous, wild and hot as a flame as she arched against him, her hips goading him on. In her boldness now she took him back to the time when neither of them had known caution—for he had not seduced her, six years ago, but they had seduced each other. Together, equally, they had burned.

  Nora opened her mouth on Adrian’s throat, tasting the salt of his skin, digging her nails into his flesh. Some wild hunger drove her, wanting a brutal satisfaction. The pomander—it had been that pomander which shattered her . . . Oh, to see it again, which she had given so long ago, and guessed destroyed. To see this place, and him within it, finally, when those many years ago, all she’d had of him were stolen hours in the wood . . .

  Until
she had seen him here, now, it had not struck home to her what he risked by marrying her. And yet, he had risked this enchanted place once before, too—had risked his right to it, and his welcome in it, when he had defied his family to come for her.

  The risk had profited him nothing. Yet he had taken it once again when he’d wed her.

  She kissed him fiercely, willing her tongue and lips to communicate what words could not. This desperation felt almost panicked. How had she not seen him more clearly? What god would not punish a woman for failing to see this man’s worth? She felt seized by the strange conviction that somewhere, in some sibyl’s cave on a distant shore, an hourglass with their names was trickling its last grains of sand.

  She was grateful when he growled and drove his hands through her hair, grateful for the slight pain of his grip and the aggression of his mouth; it bespoke a mood to match her own. The unyielding press of his body, the unhesitant strength with which he directed her head to a more opportune angle, took her away from herself, breaking the reign of mind over flesh. Her bodily need ruled her now; her troubled thoughts fell away.

  She clasped him to her, nipping his throat, the flavor of his warm skin inspiring an animal strategy. Pushing his hand away, she gripped him by the shoulders and forced him ungently beneath her. Then, shifting herself atop his body, she placed her feet on his and flexed her toes to lift herself higher. Shamelessly she rubbed against him, against the thick, hot length of his cock, but it was not enough. Twining her calf around his thigh, hooking her arms around his neck, she laid herself along him and clung like a vine. Vines were soft and easily cut, but when they set deep roots and wrapped tightly enough, they could topple even the tallest stone walls.

  I am not letting you go.

  He placed his leg between hers and lifted her with his thigh, but the bulk of her skirts concealed the feel of his shifting muscle. These clothes seemed suddenly to be unbearable impediments, requiring patience where none remained. Even his hand gripping her clothed waist seemed an insult to the skin beneath, which wanted only his nakedness against hers.