Gratitude flowered again in Alyson. “Yes, please,” she answered, still partly astonished that she was alone with him and that she moved him-as clearly she did.
Kneeling beside her on their springy, seductive, sweetsmelling bed of hay, Guillelm hoped that she did not realize what effect she was having on him. Although it was a rainy midsummer, he was still very hot, and not from his earlier brisk walk to the spring. He was pleased that his clothes hid the most obvious signs of his arousal. Smoothing a salve made from crushed garlic onto the very top of her shoulderworking with her gown merely unlaced and not even peeled away from her back-should not have been in any way erotic, if only because of the salve’s pungent smell, but touching Alyson made his senses explode.
“We can eat soon,” he said. Food was not what he wanted but Alyson might be hungry. The edges of her healing wound were as pink as a peony. Delicately, so as not to hurt her, he trailed his thumb down the delicate line of her spine. Sensing her shiver, he steeled himself to his task again.
“We can use the bread Eva gave us for trenchers,” he remarked, as the savory smells of the pottage and pie filtered through the barn. He had already burned his fingers on the earthenware crocks when he placed them in the ashes of the fire, but he was not about to admit that to his nervous little healer-wife.
“There are the dried apples, too,” Alyson said in her low, warm voice. “We can roast them”
“I can roast them. You need to pamper that shoulder.”
Conscious of his own rigid discomfort, Guillelm sat back on his heels. He wondered when he would be able to walk to the fire without hobbling in an undignified crouch. “It is good English food, but scarcely the exotic dishes I hoped to serve you,” he growled.
Alyson smiled and shook her head. “To me, it is a feast”
Under the bright stars, with the air about them perfumed with hay and woodsmoke and the savor of venison and roasting apples, they shared their simple meal. To Alyson, water had never tasted sweeter. To Guillelm, day-old maslin bread had never been so delicious. The crab apples burst in their mouths like a draught of hot spiced wine.
Relaxed and replete, they ate the soft cheese and then the hazelnuts, rolling the shells between each other, making a game of it.
“There are the owls again,” Alyson said, tilting her head to listen.
Guillelm watched the firelight play over the fragile bones of her face. He wanted her. He had wanted her for a long time.
“Dragon?”
Something of his tension must have shown in his face. He attempted a hasty smile that felt more like another of what Tom called his “gravestone grins.”
“Guillelm, what is it?” Alyson reached toward him.
“No,” he warned darkly. “Not unless you take it further. Much further.”
She could do this, Alyson marveled. Moving from their hearthspace, she glided lower on their rough bed. She placed a hand on his foot, her palm covering the ankle bone, and looked up at the man she loved.
Guillelm’s dark eyes bored into hers. “I have always wanted you,” he said.
She had not touched him with such leisure and intimacy since their bath together. Alyson took off his shoes and ran her hand along the length of his lower leg; one hand and then the other, learning him over again. He quivered under her hands, the sinews and muscles tensing, feeling harder than bone but warmer. Through his thin leggings, the hairs on his legs were surprisingly soft, his flesh solid and at the same time yielding, both rough and polished. His eyes never left hers.
“I know I have sometimes been curt with you” His speech came in stops and spurts as she curved the fingers of her hand across his knee. “People are always around. It has driven me mad. Not being able to touch you when I want to, to hold you-“
His large hands bunched into fists by his side, then unclenched. He was sitting on their mattress with his back against the greater mound of hay, his legs thrust straight out in front of him. He was breathing slowly, deliberately, and a strong, dark tide of color had risen in his tanned, handsome face. The firelight threw the intent brightness of his gaze into stark relief.
“Alyson,” he said urgently, using her name almost as a plea.
He was waiting for a word from her, she realized, holding himself until then under an iron restraint.
“I am sorry,” she whispered. “I do not mean to tease you”
Now that she finally had Guillelm where she had dreamed of having him for so long alone, finding her desirable-she was suddenly besieged by a thousand doubts of inexperience. What if he expected a miraculous seduction? “I do not want to do anything wrong”
She was blushing, no doubt scarlet in the face, but she knew she must not look away from him. She wanted no shadows, no Lord Robert or Heloise between them. Surely I can do this, she thought. I love him.
Alyson withdrew her hands and knelt up on the prickly mattress, undoing her belt and then the plait of her hair with cold, fumbling fingers. It was harder for her to hold his eyes than it had been for her to keep her ground against the knight at the joust who had tried to attack her.
“I want you to hold me,” she heard herself say. “Please, Guillelm. Hold me. Love me”
He was already moving. In the space of a breath, Guillelm enveloped her in a rib-crushing embrace, his face flooded with energy. “Mother of God, I was afraid you would never ask! Alyson, my wife, my sweet little healer.”
He kissed her lips, forehead, nose and throat, saying again, “I was afraid I had lost you, that you perhaps had changed in your feelings toward me”
“I changed to you?” Alyson wondered. “I thought the same. The very same”
Each began to laugh in sheer relief, laughing afresh when a fox yapped from somewhere on the downs outside, as if in protest at their levity.
“Come here” Guillelm swung her up into his arms, rolling off the bed and carrying her closer to the fire. “Let me look at you”
For Alyson, the gentle collision of his chest and flanks against her body robbed her of words and even thought. She could only feel, skin against skin. Her arm, pressing against Guillelm’s belly.
He kissed her throat, sending a lazy wave of pleasure sweeping through Alyson’s body that made her toes curl.
“I love you,” she said, the words easy to say because they were true.
Brighter than the tumbling flames, his eyes and face glowed with feeling. “You are so lovely. Let me see you-all of you”
He began to tease her blue gown off her legs and higher, gently trailing the soft linen past her thighs, her hips, her slender waist.
“Put me down, please,” Alyson begged, longing to be free of the clinging cloth.
He did so instantly, his face showing an uncertain shyness that she was almost ashamed of evoking. “It is all right,” she said.
Swiftly, before she lost courage, Alyson unfastened the lacing of her gown and stepped out of the loosened garment and her white undershift, hanging both over a nearby standing rake. The silver coronet followed, and the rest of her jewels dropped into a small, glittering heap onto the dirt floor of the barn. Standing stiffly, naked and never so glad of her unbound flowing hair, she spoke with her head down, staring at Guillelm’s well-shaped feet.
“Dragon, I am-“
She was not certain what she would have said next, only that she was here, but Guillelm said gently, “Sssh” Stepping across the dry earth, he embraced her again, enfolding her in his arms with such a look of wonder and desire that she blushed and closed her eyes.
“You are beautiful,” she heard him say. “Beautiful and honorable and appealing. A man would have to be dead not to be bewitched by you”
He lifted and carried her back to their bedspace, laying her down on her cloak. Stripping off so swiftly that he was almost a blur of movement, he came beside her and drew her closer still, so that she was lying full length on top of him.
“A little less hard for you, I think, than the ground, even with our bedding.” He blew soft
ly on her eyelids. “Are you ever going to open your eyes?”
Stubbornness urged Alyson to respond to such a direct, amused challenge, but she was distracted by strange, new sensations. With her breasts pressed against Guillelm’s chest and her nipples brushing against his chest hairs, her breath seemed to have dissolved into her throat. Her slender legs, long for her height, rested on his, her toes pressed against his calves. He shifted under her, moving slowly so she could accustom herself to the touch of a man in this way, his thighs supporting her easily, their muscled potency as hard and flawless as new iron. His entire body seemed as enveloping and comforting as a hot bath. But it was not a passive reassurance. She could feel his obvious arousal. His entire skin seemed to crackle with energy. The firm embrace and gentle clashes of their bodies made her mouth dry and Alyson shyly conscious again of that place between her legs.
“Alyson?”
He moved again as she ducked her head and burrowed her face against his shoulder, wishing she was more strutting, more like the deadly Heloise. She found everything about him intriguing yet familiar; this embrace was new to her and yet it felt right.
“This is not something you learn from potions or books,” she admitted, kissing an old scar close to the beguiling crease of his right elbow.
“No, little healer. I know it is entirely fresh to you”
The solemn tenderness of his voice made her feel welcome in his arms and more confident, so that when his hands began to caress her, she allowed her fingers to wander, too.
“God!” His breath came in rapid gasps as Alyson’s hand flowed down his right flank and across his lower back, exploring that powerfully seductive hollow close to the base of his spine. “Your hands. Your fingers!”
“My shoulder is healing and my fingers are fine,” Alyson said, a little smugly, part of her reveling in his clear response, the way his legs jerked and his hips rose from the mattress, inviting her to go further, touch more. Then she too was lost in sensation as Guillelm turned them both slightly so that she was still supported in his arms but more side-on, and the fingers of his left hand were cupping her breast and the fingers of his right hand stroking her back, lower, then lower.
“So lovely,” he said. He kissed her, his mouth and tongue flicking and teasing against hers, his thumb softly circling her perked nipples.
Murmuring reassurance as his stretching hand glided over her jutting hip bone, he touched as if she were as delicate as rare glass. “Look at me, sweet”
How do I open my eyes? Alyson wondered, her body sunk in an intoxicating wonder. Then she gasped, her eyes flying open as Guillelm fondled her bare bottom. He smiled at her, a certain tension in his eyes.
“There is more,” he said, rolling her closer to him, kissing her again, stroking her naked form from the top of her spine down to her calves.
“Your skin is finer than silk,” he muttered, trailing little kisses down her breastbone and across each breast. His hand never left her bottom, his palm rubbing over the soft mounds, his fingers circling each cheek until she felt dizzy with a building excitement that seemed to begin in her loins and extend in a whirling, stomach-buzzing sweep to her breasts and throat and lips.
“Guillelm!” Her legs stiffened and her bottom raised in response as he touched her in a way no other man had ever done. Almost stunned with these new feelings, she reached out for him, her groping fingers freezing in a moment of delicious shock as she encountered his hard maleness.
“Do not touch me now,” he groaned as if in pain, moving back from her slightly, out of her reach but still within his. “You are entirely too sweet and this is a journey that’s better if we go together.”
His other hand relinquished her breast and dipped lower, fingers stealing softly between her legs to the tight black curls where Alyson had never before been caressed.
“Please-” she gasped. His big hands, one covering and smoothing over her bottom, the other spiraling still more deeply into her most intimate place, were dissolving all sense of place or time or even shame. She clung to him, lifting her mouth to be kissed.
“I do not think I can bear this,” she whimpered, surfacing after a long, passionate embrace. She felt herself hovering on the edge of something explosive and at the same time sweet-as if she might die but be glad of the dying.
“Trust me, Alyson,” Guillelm whispered. “Please trust me “
His voice and his kiss calmed her, though the sweet tension remained and grew tauter. He was above her now, smoothing back her raveled hair, kissing her breasts, always touching her as he moved his body over hers, never crushing her with his weight but giving her time to familiarize herself to this change.
“I do trust you,” she said, her answer ending in a strangled intake of breath as his fingers pleasured her again.
He moved closer, encouraging her now to wrap her arms around his middle, breathing teasingly into her ear as their thighs collided. Alyson felt as if she was in a golden haze, with the firelight and Guillelm’s tantalizing kisses and his hard, blazingly warm body covering hers. Her sense of expectancy increased as she felt him lower himself into her, her body pliant and trusting, her eyes open, gazing into his.
He growled something in Arabic she did not properly hear and then began to move within her, kissing her deeply.
Alyson felt a sharp, brief pain and then only a luscious, melting joy, wave after building wave. Sensual and overwhelming, it caught her up, sending her on a dizzy, speeding journey of devastating bliss. She heard Guillelm shout her name and saw his face tense and then flame into an exultant, almost savage release.
Clasped in each other’s arms, they tumbled together over the brink of delight into ecstasy.
Snug in Guillelm’s embrace, Alyson stirred early the next day. In the pinky-gray predawn light and the dull orange glow of the sunken fire, she watched him sleeping, wondering at everything that had happened.
Their union of last night had it finally laid Guillelm’s demons to rest? Were they now truly husband and wife? The holy church stressed that the sin of lust should be fought. So had they come together in love or lust?
Surely we came together in love, she thought. She had told Guillelm she loved him. He had spoken of his love for her and although he had not said the words, “I love you,” his every action showed it.
Then why does he not tell you? A new voice started up in her head, sounding like the sneering whine of Petronilla. Dismissing the voice, Alyson concentrated on Guillelm.
In this predawn light he looked younger, almost a youth, although there was a strong shadow of golden stubble along his jaw. His lashes curled against his tanned, lean cheeks like wisps of the finest silk. His bright hair was longer than when she had first met him, spiking in little tufts over his ears and beyond where he wore the collar of his mantle … when he was wearing it. At the moment he was wonderfully naked, bundled together with her under his cloak, which certainly did not cover much of him, sprawled out as he was in sleep. She nuzzled his bare shoulder, wondering what it would be like to kiss his slumbering mouth.
Almost as if he had sensed her thought, Guillelm tightened his grip around her middle, then relaxed with a sigh of wakefulness and opened his eyes.
“Good morning.” Rolling her on top of him again, he kissed her forehead, then her mouth, recovering her carefully with his cloak. “You slept well, I trust?”
“Extremely, thank you,” Alyson stammered, conscious again of her own nudity and blushing under her husband’s intense, knowing stare. Lying on top of him, she could hardly fail to notice his rapidly increasing arousal, nor her own response to his long, sinewy body. But it wasn’t even morning!
“We should go,” she began, willing herself to move but failing miserably when Guillelm smiled at her.
“Everyone at Hardspen, if they have any sense, will still be in bed. As we are, I believe.” He raised an eyebrow. “Rather an eccentric couch, I know, but comfortable, I trust?
“Alyson?” Guillelm touched her cheek w
ith his fingers. “Have I shocked you with this? Do you truly wish to rise? Because if you do, then we will.”
He would do this for her. He would forgo his own need. He trusted her choice. Was that not caring? And love?
Then why does he not say the words, I love you “?
Chapter 24
Alyson and Guillelm returned to Hardspen in the midafternoon, wandering back to the castle by way of a high, winding droving road that avoided the flooded river plain and water meadows. They did not hurry and Alyson was glad that Guillelm seemed in no more haste than she was to go back to their everyday lives.
As they approached the main gate, it opened and a lone rider with two other horses on long leading reins cantered out to meet them. Alyson felt a prickle of cold temper, mingled with unease, run down her back as she recognized the riderless horse as Caliph, and the glossy black mare as her own Jezebel.
Fulk jumped down from his irritable bay stallion and began talking at once, his nasal voice raised to a half-shout, as if he intended that others should hear him, as well as Guillelm.
“My lord Guillelm, you are needed. I know that you left word where you were yesterday, you and your lady, but my messenger did not find you at Setton Minor and you have been sorely missed. Thomas of Beresford left for his manor this morning. The nuns of St. Foy’s have also left. Their sister house at Warren Applewick, some three and thirty miles from here, have offered them a permanent sanctuary at their convent. Some of the knights of the Temple are their escorts on the journey.”
“That is noble and kind,” Alyson put in, determined not to be ignored. Fulk wore no helm today, or armor; he had mudspattered leggings and a badly dyed scarlet mantle. His gray hair was greasy and uncombed and he had not shaved, but he looked altogether too pleased with himself. The red pimples across his nose and cheeks seemed bigger and more noticeable than ever and his thin lips seemed locked into a steadfast half-smile.
Holding Caliph’s reins out to Guillelm, Fulk deigned to glance at her but addressed Guillelm.
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