by Karen Ranney
He took one step toward her. Then another. She closed her eyes as a rumble of thunder overhead shook the tower. Her fingers trembled against his wrist. Fear of storms? Or of him? He let loose her hand, stepped back.
She stood, faced him. The wind pressed her skirts against the long line of her legs, blew her hair behind her so that there was no subterfuge, no shadow to his study of her. Only the line of cheek and chin, the sweep of a throat and a pulsing beat there.
She came too close, her hand once again breaching the distance between them. A look of compassion flickered over her face even as her fingers brushed tenderly against his folded arm.
The thunder sounded like cannon fire. Her eyes closed; her fingers curved against his shirt. It was not him she feared, then, but the storm. The wrath of nature itself.
She took one step closer. Propriety did not halt her. It was as if her greater fear silenced any thought of it. Or perhaps they had already vaulted over those gates the moment she’d whispered in his ear and kept him silent in his pain.
“How did you know about this place?” One of a hundred questions he had for her. He was not as much enraged as he was confused. He told himself she would say something that would easily explain. Except that she said nothing. Instead, she trembled and her face paled.
An arc of lightning flashed above them, a vein of light that surged across the black sky. The storm was above them, so loud that he would not have been able to hear her answer had she given him one.
The clouds, tired of their show of bravado, opened up, showering them with heavy drops. In only seconds they were drenched. Her eyes were closed, her face as pale as death. But she made no move to escape the rain. It was as if she were frozen in that moment, held stiff and taut. A streak of silver lightning plunged into the ground, followed almost instantly by a hollow clap of thunder. It felt as if the air had been split in two.
Her eyes opened wide, the look in them stark and wild. She pulled away, escaping into the darkness of the stairway.
He followed her down the spiral steps. Halfway down another burst of thunder halted her. Her back flattened against the curving wall, her eyes clenched shut. Just before he reached her, she moved again, descending the remaining steps slowly, as if she finally realized her danger in taking the slippery steps too fast.
As she reached the stone floor, the lightning struck again. The glare of it illuminated the interior of the tower. His foot touched the last step as the world seemed to shatter around them. She ran to ward him, her figure made white by the unremitting glare. Her face was ashen, her hands clenched into the fabric of her skirt. Her arms pressed around him, her cheek lay flat against his chest. Her trembling vied with the shuddering earth.
He held her with his uninjured arm, the two of them encapulsated in darkness. Another flash. He looked up. The sky sizzled. Then the world became white fire, his hearing deadened by the eruption of sound. He was pressed against the curving wall of the tower, his arms holding tight to Anne, as the ground shuddered, helpless, beneath them. The wind blew the dust around the inside of the tower in a whirlwind; the rain entered from the stairwell opening and dampened the air. It was an otherworldly scene, one that he could have easily imagined in one of his fevered dreams.
When it was over, he pulled away from her, pressed his fingers against her cheek. She tilted her head just so, as if she leaned into his touch, fitted herself to it. His fingers trailed to the base of her throat, his thumb extended upward beneath her chin.
She glanced up at him then. A look not unlike the one she’d given him in the meadow. His fingers halted their exploration. He dropped his hand. The storm raged around them, and his thoughts were as chaotic.
The storm, instead of abating, seemed to hover overhead. The sound of it increased, the tower magnifying the deep rumble of the thunder until it sounded as if God himself snarled.
Perhaps it was because their clothing was sodden or because he’d spent the last week dreaming of her, but he was suddenly acutely aware of each curve of her. His hand trailed around her waist, feeling the suppleness of it, the gentle taper of her hips beneath the material of her skirt.
In that instant, he envisioned her naked against him, standing on tiptoe in order to fit her body more perfectly to his. He would hold her there, bend his head in order to rain kisses on her shoulders, press his face against her breasts, touch her softly and sweetly and with the greatest care. He could almost feel her bare skin beneath his fingertips. Could taste the texture of her lips, feel the warmth of her breath on his flesh. He wanted, suddenly, to press his lips against her throat. Just that. A kiss to measure the pounding of her blood, the heat of her skin.
She placed her hand on his chest, and he felt the texture and heat of her palm against his skin, as if his wet shirt were not there at all. He did not wish to touch her, because he knew, with an odd sense, that if he did, he would draw her closer until there was nothing between them at all. He would remove her wet clothes from her and offer her veneration for the beauty of her rain-drenched body. There would be nothing to guide him but this confusion that had ruled his life from the moment he’d seen her.
She looked almost fragile with her head bent before him, her hand upon his chest. A bridge of flesh. A woman of stubbornness, talent, mystery.
The boyish Stephen peered out behind responsibility and authority and wanted to demand of her why he felt as if he knew her. Pugnacious and stubborn, his childish self would remain until granted the answer. Then, after she’d told him, maybe he would know why he thought too much about her, not enough about those things listed on a scroll in his mind. All the various tasks that remained for him to perform were somehow made unimportant beside the enigma she offered.
She startled him then by standing on tiptoe and placing a sweet and simple kiss upon the corner of his mouth. Here, it seemed to say, I have marked the spot, and this will be where my lips rest. Then she fingered the line of his jaw with her thumb, as if she tested the angle of it.
He had never been a man of touch. He had about him, he believed, an almost iced reserve that warned others against coming too close or venturing too near. Even as men clapped each other on the shoulder or clasped a hand, they rarely did so with him. Yet he remained silent and still beneath her explorations.
He disliked feeling helpless, wound together by the knots of all his wants and desires. But he was, unbelievably. There were men who were frightened of him, who saw his raised sword and blanched. Others knew of his reputation for good fortune and battle prowess and fled before they met.
She simply stood and kissed him.
She pulled back her hand and stepped away. He wanted to ask her to keep it there. Perhaps to kiss him again. But he was a man of sense and a fearsome strength of will. Duty. Honor. Loyalty. The doctrines of his life. He stepped back, away, a safe distance from her touch. But he was not protected from her smile, so sweet that it seemed to take the place of the absent sun.
The wind had risen, and she was soaked clear to the skin, her trembling not strictly from the storm but from the cold. It kept her safe, that small shiver. Rendered her helpless and therefore someone to be sheltered, cared for, and defended. At that instant, he had fewer thoughts of seduction than of protection. He would see her back to her chamber, give Betty orders to cosset her if need be. Keep her safe and away from him until he left. For her sake, if not for his.
His better impulses had him walking to the door at the base of the tower. Once there, he turned and looked at her. The storm had not abated, but it was as dangerous here. This place offered shelter, but with temptation.
But because she was a woman under his protection and because she trembled from the storm and because a part of him still wished to remain with her, he turned to her and extended his hand.
Silently, she walked to him, placed her hand against his. Palm to palm, the link they shared seemed an acceptance of another bond between them. One he could not decipher and did not truly wish to.
He’d killed his
share of men, because it was war and someone had decreed that they were his enemies. He was prepared to face death for his country, to give his life if that were necessary. A courage that came from necessity and in a sense from honor. But he suddenly found himself afraid in a way that labeled him coward and knave and fool. This woman with her small smile and her flushed cheeks was a greater danger to his peace than the chaos of war itself.
Chapter 7
Anne held tight to his hand, wished that she were not so cowardly. A Sinclair is brave. Fearless. An incantation that had been repeated to her and by her since she was a child. A recitation to balance the terror that storms induced.
They were nearly to the bridge when the lightning struck again, a sword of light that brought with it a stench of fiery air. As if God himself lived in the clouds and was annoyed by their show of defiance. The earth rumbled, lifted up beneath the pummeling. She fell to her hands and knees just as the thunder roared.
It was as if the earth had ended. The world stilled horribly for a second and then exploded. The ground shuddered. Boulders fell around them. Dust rose, was dampened, enshrouded them in a cloud, as if Langlinais was disintegrating around them.
Stephen pressed his hand to the back of her head. She needed no further urging to press her face against his chest, grip his shirt, and murmur a silent prayer. She closed her eyes, more than frightened. All of her childhood terrors were being realized in this moment. And all of its wishes.
Just the day before, Anne had worried for him. Had lain in her borrowed bed and stared at the ceiling, fervent prayers easing her to sleep. Now he knelt with her and held her to him. A dream? Another vision? No. There was too much will in this man, too much power.
His injured arm was protected by being bound to his body. Her lips rested against his fingers, breathed against his skin.
An eternity later the sound gradually faded, the storm appeased. Her grip on his shirt eased. She pulled back. Not far, but enough to glance up at him.
He was looking down at her.
Anne reached out her hand and brushed her fingers over his cheek, feeling the warmth of his skin and the softness of it newly shaven. His unsmiling lips were full and almost hot beneath her fingers.
She’d expected to see him pale. Wan, perhaps, from the sick room. But this man bore no signs of illness.
Beneath his restraint, just beneath the somberness of his look, was another man, one who looked out at her from flashing eyes. One she might have feared had she not been so fascinated. There was a look in his eyes she’d never seen, not in all her visions. As if he saw her as a woman and had his own thoughts about what he’d like to do with her. It was a look the men of Dunniwerth were always careful to mask. She was Anne Sinclair and, as such, almost inviolate.
But this man dared. A discovery, then. He could silence her with a look and make her cheeks heat. Not from embarrassment, which might have been wiser. Instead, anticipation. Her blood rushed, hot, through her body. Her breath grew tight.
Stephen lowered his head slowly. She might have pulled back, but she didn’t. Simply waited and sighed when she felt the texture of his lips, the heat of his mouth. She arched closer to him, her lips falling open beneath his. He coaxed her to him, the emotion hinted at in his gaze there in full measure in a kiss. He murmured something, a word, an enjoiner, an endearment, or a command, she wasn’t sure. His hand came up and flattened gently against her cheek, tilted her head. She moaned, a simple sound that echoed her body’s enchantment with such a thing.
She wanted to be inhaled by him.
Her helpless murmur connected them, a breath passed from one to the other. The kiss grew deeper until there was only darkness in her mind. The sweeping majesty of a sky without stars.
A breath escaped her, one and then another. There were no thoughts in her mind, only an ache that brought no pain. It spread through her body, heated her breasts, raced to her toes. She was a secret becoming unveiled, a rumor being shouted, a girl changing to woman.
Her fingers dug into the linen of his shirt, pressing against the texture in frustration. His skin was shielded and covered and barred from her, and she could not touch him, absorb the heat of him.
Long moments later, he lifted his head, ended the kiss. She blinked open her eyes, a sound of protest on her lips.
His face was burnished in the soft shadows of the morning storm, his breath as rapid as hers. Realization of where they were seeped into her passion-drugged mind. They knelt together on the sodden ground beneath a gentle rain. In the north the sky was clearing, and a patch of blue indicated that nature was done with its tantrum.
She should have stood and walked away. Or protested the kiss. Said a word that lightened the moment. Any one of several dozen things. Instead, she stared at him, her breath still caught in her chest, her blood racing hot through her body.
His fingers reached out and pressed against her bottom lip. The very tip of her tongue touched it.
“Who are you?” he asked, his voice hoarse with desire.
A dreamer. Words she didn’t speak.
But he did not seem to expect her to answer. He stood and held out his hand. Anne rose reluctantly, placed her own atop it. Kiss me again. Not a maidenly thought. Yet she wanted another kiss or a hundred of them. She wanted him to lead her to that place his kiss had lured her, where all she could feel was the touch of his lips and her own response.
She arranged her sodden skirts around her, sluiced her hands over her face, drying it as well as she was able. Stephen did the same, the moment freed from its awkwardness by their similar gestures.
The sun began to shine as if in apology for what the storm had caused. Not brightly, but with a watery gleam that illuminated the scene of destruction. She looked around them. The lightning had come dangerously close. The tower that had stood there a moment ago was only a mounded pile of stone and brick now.
She was stunned at how close they had come to being killed.
“Too close,” Stephen said from behind her. An echo of her thought.
She nodded.
A glint among the bricks caught her attention. Something glittered in the gray morning. She picked her way through the debris, reached down, and retrieved it from beneath a crumbled bit of stone. It was a coffer, its rounded wooden lid elaborately carved. A gold adornment in the center of it was what she’d seen shining.
“What is it?” she asked, holding it up for him to see. It was surprisingly heavy. She handed it to him when he joined her.
There was no lock, just a simple latch, which he pried up with his finger. Age had made it difficult to move, not intention. The leather hinges gave way and crumbled as Stephen raised the lid. Inside was a wooden block darkened with water and age. He lifted it up and out of the coffer. Not a wooden block at all, but two flat pieces of wood holding at least a hundred pages of parchment tightly pressed together.
The first page was brown and crumbled. The latter half of the book had suffered water damage a long time ago. It was no longer legible. The ink looked to have remained stable, but the parchment had hardened into a black sludge. The first page, however, was as white as the day it had been prepared.
“Do you read Latin?” he asked.
Anne shook her head.
He scanned to the bottom of the first page, then glanced at her, a half smile curving his lips. “It’s a codex written by my ancestress. She was rumored to have been a scribe.”
She watched as his hands closed the rounded top of the coffer. His fingers traced the intricate carvings of the wood, the detail of the gold medallion. Even the hinges, little more than crumbling leather, were touched gently.
“It must be more than four hundred years old.”
She stretched out her fingers and touched the coffer in awe.
He frowned, studied the rubble, then bent and removed a few more stones. “It shouldn’t have been here,” he said. “Only armament was stored in the tower, but even so it hadn’t been used for years.”
“
Unless it was placed there on purpose,” she said.
He glanced at her, surprised.
“Perhaps it was meant to be kept hidden.”
They retraced their steps, Anne’s attention on her footing over the crumbled stone. When she was clear of the mounds of brick, she looked up. Stephen’s gaze was on her, his look shuttered.
“Forgive me,” he said. “I should not have kissed you.”
Silence stretched between them. An apology. How strange that she’d never thought him to offer one. As if he was shamed by their kiss and wished to eradicate the memory of it. The idea robbed her of speech. She looked beyond him to where the bridge spanned the Terne.
“Circumstance has made you a guest of Harrington Court. As such, you are under my protection.”
Anne nodded. It was a true enough statement. Did he wish her to also agree that it had been wrong to kiss him? She would not, nor could she believe it to be. Rash, perhaps. She might grant him that. Destined? That, too, if he only knew it. But she felt no remorse about it.
“Do you truly regret it?” There, words that were even more improvident than the kiss.
“My honor would suffer for it if I were not.”
“If I did not feel the same? Would that excuse your honor?” Was there a spark in his eyes? A twinkling star in the heavens of them? Or only something she wished to see?
“Do you always say what you wish, Anne Sinclair?”
“I rarely do,” she said, giving him the truth. Her visions had been kept a secret all her life. Her journey here had been cloaked in silence. Even this last week had been one of omission rather than speech. “But I cannot regret kissing you,” she said, a declaration and a bit of honesty that made him frown.
She left him then before she could say more. But she felt his gaze on her all the way back to the great house on the hill.
Hannah sat up with difficulty, surprised at the sign of weakness. Every muscle in her body ached, and it felt as if all her bones creaked in protest of her inactivity.