by Karen Ranney
“You haven’t asked anything of me,” she said softly, the truth of that statement muting his smile. There had been no declarations between them, no vows of love, no sweetness that comes before a parting or instead of it. Even now they faced each other as adversaries instead of lovers. Angry with each other for the grief they’d each experienced. Afraid, perhaps, because of what might come between them now.
He was a man of isolation, and she had been a woman of cowardice. It would take courage for each of them to step out of their respective roles. Yet he had done so by coming to the island. It was her turn now.
“Stay right there,” she said, pointing at the ground at his feet. “Do not move.”
One eyebrow arched upwards. “You have a deplorable habit of doing that, Anne Sinclair,” he said dryly. “I feel it only fair to warn you that I don’t feel particularly well disposed to obeying orders at this moment.”
She ignored his scowl, left the clearing, went to her hiding tree. She stood on tiptoe and reached inside the hollow. She retrieved her drawings, wrapped in oilskin. The first of these drawings was a childish rendition. An image of a vision she’d had. He’d been sitting in the bailey, concentrating upon his drawing. His fingers were black with the charcoal he used, but they flew over the page, adding detail to doorways and embrasures, creating the proper angle of a merlon. She’d drawn him sitting there, his gaze on the east tower.
Another drawing had Stephen as the boy she’d first seen, sitting on the bed, Betty kneeling before him. There was a look of such loss on his face that it made her heart ache even now.
She rolled them into a cylinder again, held them close to her chest. Her heart pounded, a clarion bell of anxiety.
In this one thing, she would be as brave as Juliana. And in one other, too. She would tell him how she felt, so that if he chose to ride away from Dunniwerth, he would do so with the knowledge that she loved him. A memory or a regret for him to keep all the days of his life.
Chapter 31
In only moments she returned to the clearing.
Across the grass their gaze met. Her arms were wrapped around a package. Something she considered valuable or precious from the way she carried it.
She was an amalgam of beauty, grace, strength, and anger. Or perhaps it was not anger in her eyes. Another emotion, perhaps, one that made her look away.
Only hours ago his life had been somewhat his own. His body had been loaned to the king for the duration of the war; his arm strengthened to wield a sword and his aim sharpened to fire a pistol. He’d endured what he’d must because it had been there to tolerate. But dominion over his thoughts had always been his. When had that ceased to be?
When he’d realized he did not want to leave her.
“I want to show you something,” she said and placed the parcel on the tree stump then stepped back. He unwrapped it, since it was clear this was what she wished.
One by one he spread the drawings out. They were not witty portraits or clever caricatures, but sketches of him in various poses. One showed him standing at Langlinais’s east tower. Another bending and placing the brick that gave access to his hiding place back into its groove. Still another standing in front of his father, a look on his face of studied indifference. And one of him as a boy the night his mother had died. Dozens of sketches of him.
He felt his blood heat and then cool.
Questions came to his lips and were dismissed before being given voice.
“I did the first of them when I was ten,” she softly said. Her words settled into his mind like stones, each of them separate and distinct, as if she built a fortress with them.
He turned and looked at her.
Her eyes were wide. Was it fear he saw there?
“I’ve seen you all my life,” she said. “In my visions. No other person, Stephen, only you. The first of them happened when I was eight,” she said, and began her tale.
One so improbable that it could not happen. But he listened even as his hands shuffled the sketches and saw scenes she could not have otherwise known. A moment atop the east tower, when he’d felt a loneliness so acute that the pain of that moment speared him even now. A picture of him leaning over the Langlinais bridge. How many times had he done that as a boy? As many times as he’d ridden Faeren over the hills and meadows of his home.
It should have angered him, this odd knowledge she had of him. She had, with these visions, in vaded his privacy at the deepest level. But he realized that they were not something over which she had any power or control.
And he did not accept the idea of sorcery. Or witchcraft. But he believed in her.
She’d known his name. The hiding place he’d had as a boy. And looked on Langlinais as if she knew the castle as well as he. And he’d heard her call to him in a moment of great danger. Not fever then, but fate.
Silence stretched between them. Not the awkward pause between strangers. They had been too intimate for that. It was an utter stillness, like the one before a storm. He glanced up at the sky, certain that it was to rain again. Another thing he would have to grow accustomed to, the eternal rain of Scotland.
He sucked in his breath, felt the cool air bathe his throat, swirl inside his chest.
“I’ve seen you all my life,” she said again, and the words made him recall another moment. A night when she’d wept on his chest and told him that he’d always been there. She’d spoken the truth, and he’d disregarded it, pushed it behind his own pressing concerns.
It seemed to him that those things he had once cherished, such as loyalty and virtue, honor, nobility, trust, all of them were becoming suspect in this new world riddled by war. It was as if what had been important about his life had disintegrated, crumbled into dust like ancient silk. Harrington Court was no more, his plans for restoring Langlinais nothing but the dreams of youth. His country was at war, his king no doubt incensed with him. He doubted if he would ever return to London, or that he would ever see the court he’d known restored to its previous power.
But into that emptiness had come another life. One prepared for him even as he was unaware. A woman sent to him to ease his pain. To give him hope again. To frown at him and make him smile. She had a variety of smiles, all suited to her, warm brown eyes, and an endearing laugh. She was stubborn and brave, compassionate and sensual. She had the ability to make him think and the capacity to render him senseless. She had discovered him from beneath the man he’d thought he was.
His earldom was more than land. It was more than Harrington Court. More than even the castle, Langlinais. It was a heritage of men who had persevered despite obstacles and circumstances that might have felled other men. It had pushed him onward even beyond what he’d thought himself capable. Such courage would have to stand him in good stead now.
Only one thing concerned him. She stood silent, her hands clenched in front of her. He wanted to place his hands on her cheeks and purse her mouth, free the words that were entrapped there. Stay with me. Not once had she said it. He wanted the words.
But she had given up part of herself and waited for him to ridicule her. He saw the proof of it in her eyes. Fear. Not anger. That and a tear. One from a woman who did not cry easily.
Was love come so easily as that? Yes. But it had happened earlier than this moment, hadn’t it? When they’d stood in a dark tower, and she’d shivered against him as lightning split the sky.
She bent forward to gather up the drawings. He reached out and encircled her wrist with his hand. She turned her head and looked up at him.
“I don’t understand,” he said, offering her the truth.
She pulled away.
“But perhaps there are some things that I don’t have to understand. The miracle of Langlinais, for one. These drawings, for another.”
She seemed to be made of ice, so still she stood. He wanted, in that instant, to warm her, to hold her tight in his arms. Instead, there were words that must be said first.
“I’ve no home,” he said. “And I do
not doubt that the king will offer a reward for my head, to be matched only by the Parliamentarians. Or your father,” he said wryly. “But I’ve dreams enough to occupy me and wealth I’ve managed to hide away. I come from a long line of men who have always believed in the future.”
She straightened.
One step toward him, then another, and her hand was on his chest. A surprisingly capable-looking hand, with long fingers and an imperious thumb. Not unlike the rest of her.
“Anne,” he said, and the sound of her name on his lips was like a gentle rain. As he heard her indrawn breath, his lips curved into a smile. She had the power to effortlessly distract him from any task, even that of studying her hand.
She was his to protect and defend and keep safe. To love and need and worship with body and mind and soul. His through all time, as Sebastian had loved Juliana. If the world crumbled about them, he would hold sacrosanct a few sparse clods of earth for her to stand upon. There he would hold her in his arms and find an answering comfort in her embrace.
“Amantes sun amentes,” he said with a smile. “Lovers are lunatics,” he said, in answer to her frown.
As a declaration of love, it lacked something.
“An té is mó fhosglas a bhéul,” she countered. “You talk entirely too much.” Her cheeks grew pink. “Loosely translated, that is.”
“I think I need to learn Gaelic.”
“Not an insurmountable feat for someone with such skill at Latin.”
“I could barely understand that old man we met on the road,” he said. “Was that Gaelic he was speaking or some sort of gibberish?”
“I think it owed more to a lack of teeth than to an abundance of nationality, Stephen,” she said calmly.
“What would your father say if you married an Englishman?”
“I’ll tell him you’re my Latin tutor.” Her cheeks deepened in color as he watched. So she recalled that night as well as he.
“I’m not the sort of genial husband you had in mind,” he said, smiling. “But I doubt a man of pleasant disposition would fare well among you Scots.”
“You’ll stay, then?”
He reached out and touched her cheek. It felt warm beneath his fingertips.
How could he ever part from her?
She turned her head and kissed the tips of his fingers, then grabbed his hand. Their fingers entwined even as their smiles grew.
It began to rain. Again. But he decided that it didn’t matter. He was, after all, already wet.
“We should go back to Dunniwerth,” he said.
“Yes,” she said, smiling. “But it’s dangerous to be on the loch when it storms.”
“The cottage, then?”
She stepped closer to him, placed a chaste kiss on his cheek. But her palms rested on his chest, and her smile had an edge of daring to it.
“Here?”
He smiled at her, amused. “You’re afraid of storms.”
“You’ll have to protect me,” she said, running her fingers to the laces of his shirt. “Lie with me,” she said softly, standing on her tiptoes to whisper the invitation in his ear. As if the squirrels and the birds might hear and pass the news to the rest of the forest court. “The only time we’ve loved has been in parting, Stephen. I would have this time be in welcome.”
“In the rain?” he asked. In snow, in sleet, in dead of winter. In a flood, he thought, or with lightning crackling about him.
She nodded.
Her fingertips on his skin had an odd effect of stilling his mind. There were other objections he should think of, surely. Instead, all he could remember was the vow he’d made to himself to love her once not in parting but in joy.
Above them a canopy of new leaves protected them from the worst of the rain.
He stared at her and she stared back, her eyes wide. The patter of the raindrops on the canopy of branches above their heads indicated how hard the rain was falling. Droplets clung to the leaves above them, falling heavily to the ground from time to time. A fine mist penetrated this odd bower.
He started at least a hundred sentences in his mind. A hundred approaches, a single one. The words stuttered to a halt, sliced to death by her silence.
He bent and kissed her instead.
His lips coaxed hers open. A gasp and her tongue met his. There, in this matter he was at least adept.
In the shadow of her throat, her blood beat hot and quick. He placed his lips there, heard her sigh. Would he have known her if she had not been sent to him? A thought that pulled him back from the edge of passion.
“Why did you come to England?” He knew the answer before she spoke, but required the confirmation of it.
She smiled then, the warmth in her eyes so deep and full that he felt himself surrounded by it. “To find you.”
He should not have been at Langlinais. He should have been at war. Instead, he had been suffused with a disgust so pervasive that he had acted in a way not himself. He had left the battlefield and returned home. In time to meet this woman and rescue her. A chain of coincidences. Except of course, they were not. The drawings proved that.
He kissed her then, welcomed her into his heart with a feeling not unlike humility. And gratitude.
As it was with them, the kiss turned heated.
He should have stayed her hand when she un laced her dress, carried her into the cottage and protected her from the rain. Garment by garment she removed her clothes even as he argued with himself. She should be veiled from the rain. She should be laced up, draped and tucked and protected from the elements.
Instead, he laid her down in the clearing. He unlaced his shirt, his fingers fevered.
She watched him, her eyes warm and welcoming. The fascination of her gaze made his breath tight and heated his blood. There was no semblance of smile on her face now, only a solemn study as each part of his body was bared as if she were to be judged on her recall.
She glanced up at his face. Her cheeks were pink, her lips open just the slightest bit. There was more to her than curves shadowed by a dismal day. More than arms and legs and secret places. His hand stretched out, and he noted with amusement that it trembled. As well it might, given this moment and this woman.
He was as hard as he had ever been, but as she watched him, he felt himself swell even further. He had the sudden mental image of a pikeman in harness.
He laughed at himself even as he lowered himself over her.
He kissed her, spiraling into the sensation of it. His breath was caught. He needed to breathe, but instead of air there was Anne.
He’d suspected that there was another dimension to love. Another depth. His instinct proved correct, after all. And so did hers. There was a strange rightness to their loving in the rain. It was elemen tal and almost pagan. Life at its core and its simplest.
He sluiced the rain off her breast, mouthed a droplet trembling upon her nipple, felt himself speared by a sense of tenderness so sharp it was almost pain. Was that love? If it was, he would bandage up his wounds daily and count himself a fortunate man.
The rain found an opening in the bower of leaves and anointed both of them with shuddering drops.
She gripped his shoulders with her nails. Even in this she demanded. Their kiss was transformed by his smile, by her soft laughter as she opened her eyes.
Joy filled him, an odd complement to passion. But he discovered in those moments that it was a better emotion than lust, as gold is more valuable than silver.
She stroked his chest, her fingers threading through the light furring of hair there. Measured his shoulders with hands that made his skin shiver. She raised herself up and kissed his shoulder with soft, warm lips, tasted his flesh with the tip of her tongue.
Her fingers slid gently over the bandage on his arm. “Does it still pain you, Stephen?”
He wanted to tell her that his only discomfort was some distance removed from his arm, but he did not. Instead, he shook his head, then contented himself with his explorations of her. The curve of
her underarm led to the plump swell of her breast. Her ankles were fine-boned and sensitive to his touch. The hair between her legs was as fine as down and damp.
One hand lifted her breast to his mouth. He suckled her nipple with a gentle then a more insistent tug.
“I like that,” she murmured.
He spoke against the curve of her breast. “So do I.”
The rain filtered through the leaves, bathed them in a warm shower. He felt it on his back as he leaned over her, smiled at the thought that they both might drown of love as he entered her, each slow and slipping moment accompanied by her slight gasp.
He entered her slowly, the feeling exquisite in its execution. There was a sense of fullness, but it was aided by the melting warmth inside of her.
One hand held her hips still, the other played with the tendrils of hair at her temple. His mouth settled over hers, his kiss soft and coaxing.
She was him and he was her and she could not tell where one began. Or ended. “More,” he murmured, his lips on her throat. Soft, biting kisses traced from her neck to her shoulder.
He eased forward again, moved her legs aside with one hand, rose over her.
“Look at me, Anne.” It was a gentle command issued in a harsh voice. “Look at me,” he said again when her eyes fluttered shut. “Please.”
She blinked them open. His face was shadowed, his smile tender.
The words were accompanied by a slow easing into her. Further than he’d ever been. Harder and yet more gentle. He pushed her knees back, rocked over her. Teasing movements that made her grip his shoulders hard, tear at his flesh. She bit her own lips in the need that tore through her.
He bent and sucked her nipple, his teeth grazing the delicate flesh.
Her ears rang with odd sounds, a rushing noise, or one of deep-throated bells. The sun was inside of her, heat and melting warmth. She felt light and heavy at the same time. Her limbs floated, her hands oddly flailing, her toes curled and flexed.
He kissed her, then rested his open mouth on hers, exchanging breaths. The heat in her body burned higher. She was nothing but sensation. A pulsing, throbbing feeling, an ache that was linked to his movements, to the words he spoke. A cadence of love spoken in a gentle voice.