His saint, his virginal wife. From head to toe—and every sultry place between.
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Chapter 12
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Supper seemed more like the opening day of a market faire than the simple feast in her new home that Eleanor had imagined.
Chests and barrels and furniture were piled around, and Pippa and Lisabet were drawn to them like friendly little bees to a forest of hives. Dickon took his meal in the gatehouse; Fergus and Mullock at the trestle, eating as though they had never eaten before. Hannah managed her bites between the hall and the kitchen, and Eleanor not at all.
Nicholas had snagged a loaf of rye and some cheese and then apparently disappeared to work on the armory, because she soon heard his hammer against stone.
Even through all the chaos—his chaos. Deep inside her chest, flittering around like a bird wanting the sky.
He kissed me.
But he hadn't really kissed her; it only seemed that way. Just tit for tat, that sort of thing.
Then why had his mouth been the most delicious, the most stirring thing she'd ever felt against her cheek or any part of her? Why had time stopped; why had the armory floor started spinning? And why had he lingered two heartbeats longer than she had the night before?
All of it nonsense—not to be repeated.
Addled and distracted, she finally—as he had predicted—whacked her shin with the sledgehammer.
"Oh, blast it!" The pain shot everywhere at once, splintered into her shoulder and out her toes. She stifled the pitiful howl that would bring Nicholas running and chiding, but she hobbled and hopped around the great hall, now the center of attention.
"Oh, Nellamore! Owwwww for you!"
"I'm all right, dear."
But Pippa kissed her hand and Mullock dragged over a bench for her to sit on, and Hannah brought cold rags, and Fergus a sturdy walking stick.
Eleanor burst out in an unseemly bout of laughing, hugging them all. Because though her leg burned like fire, she loved her new home and family dearly, so much that her heart seemed too big for her chest.
It all overflowed in streaming tears and more laughter—almost the hysterical kind. Especially when Mullock regaled them with his amazing skill at a hurdy-gurdy he'd found in the undercroft. When the dancing began, she forced herself to dismiss her injury.
An hour after sundown everyone was asleep, the hall peaceful and quiet save for Fergus and Mullock, who snored in antiphonal chorus.
Thoroughly exhausted and suddenly reluctant about meeting with Nicholas to study her plans for the next week, Eleanor hobbled up the stairs toward the solar, grateful for the walking stick.
Just as she hoped that she could hide her accident from Nicholas by sitting down before their meeting, she heard him on the stairs below—that solid footfall and a resonant accusation that rippled up her legs and melted the knot in her stomach.
"Are you limping?"
"Well, of course, I'm limping." And it's your fault, she wanted to say. For being so distracting.
Blast the man, she resented having to turn and face his scowling, but he was already burning holes in the back of her skirts with his glaring, and pointing at her leg when she finally hobbled around to confront him.
"It's nothing."
"It's everything to me, madam." A breathless sentiment to throw to a woman he'd just kissed. He charged up the few steps between them two at a time, then pointed to her legs. "Show me."
Ha! As though she'd just lift her skirts for him and obey. "That isn't necessary—"
"You'll sit." A single sweeping gesture from that great paw of his had her sitting on the step. He knelt in front of her and shoved her skirts up past her knee, like an insistent bridegroom.
A bridegroom.
Oh, yes—the man was perfect. Strong and raven-haired and tossing off his orders as though he had a husbandly right to her. But that sort of daydreaming was too much for this very long day, too close to her thoughts to be borne.
"What the devil are you doing, Nicholas?" She tried to shove her chemise back down, and to shove away the fluttering butterfly in her chest that told her it was just fine that he was so interested in her legs—more than fine, that his hands were hot and imperious.
He grabbed her ankle and stretched out her stockinged leg. "Good Christ, madam." She'd never seen him so angry, and she tried to get away, but yanking her foot proved fruitless; it might as well have been anchored into mortar and stone. "How did you do this? And when? Why didn't you tell me?"
Her shin had become an angry lump, bulging her stocking, looking far more dramatic than it had an hour past when she'd been dancing with Pippa and Fergus, and far worse than it actually felt.
"Really, Nicholas. A bit of foolishness is all. I was only—"
"Sledging away at another of those damnable locks? I'm right, aren't I?" She would have lied, but everyone in the hall knew the truth and would tell him when he asked.
"Yes."
"Bloody hell. I told you to come find me."
"It wasn't a very big lock."
A moment later he and his expert fingers were all the way up her dress, had her garter points free, and her stocking slumped round her ankle as though he were planning to bed her there on the steps to the solar.
And that suddenly didn't seem like such a disagreeable idea. Her troublesome maidenhead gone in an instant, taken by this very strapping man. And the idea would have come from Nicholas himself, not from her—not a request by his lady or a demand for his labors, which might impinge upon his morals.
"Bloody hell, woman, I warned you to take care." He was rumbling curses under his breath, wincing as he examined the bruise as though he had been wounded himself. "You might have broken a bone."
"I didn't break anything—except the lock."
He cradled her calf in his hands—his very large, very capable hands—raised her leg, and slowly, delicately inspected the profile of her shin against the lamplight. "Look at this."
She was looking, but not at her leg. At his face and his fury and all his fineness. Another wholly inappropriate thought lodged itself like a wicked whisper inside her belly and warmed her there: that he might be planning to nibble where he was looking so intently, right there behind her knee where he glided his finger; and then trailing those marvelous lips all the way down to her ankle and back again, higher, perhaps, to that warm and quickening place which seemed to be shamelessly calling to his fingers as they moved along her calf.
Dear God. And here she was, lounging like a strumpet across the steps and his leg, with her kirtle and chemise nicked up to her bare thighs.
"You were damned lucky this time, madam."
I am still, sir.
"It's only a bruise." But still he turned her leg this way and that, as clinically distant as a battlefield surgeon. Hopefully—please, God—he was unaware that her heart was thrumming, that he'd completely unstrung her.
For she was trembling on the verge of asking him to take care of her little virginity problem.
"Let me see your hands." He took them before she could object and raised her ragged palms for her to see. "Just as I expected: blisters. Why aren't you wearing your gloves?"
"One's missing. I've never been able to keep a pair together." Now he had her boot off, and then her stocking. "Nicholas!" Not in the stairwell, she nearly said.
"Blisters here, too." He was frowning at her toes, tugging at each of them until she was squirming against a giggle. "And here and here, inviting poisons and fever."
"You're quite free with my limbs, steward." She tried to sit up, but that only exposed more of her thigh and heaven knew what else.
"All this because your boots don't fit you. How long have you had these?" Off came the other boot, to thunk its way down the stairs to the landing.
"Dickon found them on a deserted cobbler's bench. It's the best I can do at the moment."
"Your stockings are riddled with holes." Now her legs and feet were entirely bare, and his ha
nds were so warm, so thorough.
"I have only that pair."
"And a great hall filled to bursting with chests of clothing and shoes."
"You're so sure of that?"
"You'll have boots and stocking in the morning, if I have to tear through the goods myself. Have you suffered any other injuries in my castle that you haven't told me about?"
His castle, still. His arrogant claim rolled off his tongue as though it had belonged there. So, apparently these were not her feet, or her blisters.
"I'm perfectly capable of taking care of myself, finding my own linens and boots."
He made one of his heated, head-to-foot studies of her, then stood abruptly. "You're coming with me, madam."
"Where?" But she was already in his arms, caught up against his chest, and he was starting down the steps with her. "I'll go peaceably, Nicholas. I can walk."
"Not without your shoes."
"Must I point out that you just stole them off me?" And her stockings—with those large, fine hands of his. "Where are we going?"
"Did you ever wonder where the hot water that pours into the kitchen comes from?"
"You're taking me to the kitchen?" But he was heading the wrong way for that, toward the cellar and then into the darkness at the bottom of the stairs, into that odd, sulfurous smell that she'd often noticed along this corridor.
"Not to the kitchen, madam," he said with a rumble of dark amusement that thrilled her.
He shouldered open a door that she hadn't known existed, then bolted it again—more of his secrets. Like a quick summer fog off the river, the cold, damp air of the passage was chased away by the heated air of boiled minerals.
The very same smell as the kitchen, only stronger.
"Sister Hypathia."
"Who?"
"The herbalist at St. Catherine's. It smells like her cauldron did at summer's end: herbs and minerals. Sulfur and dragon mint."
This scent was similar, though not as greenly floral, and grew stronger, damper as Nicholas carried her deeper and downward into the undulating passage, until the walls were no longer made of castle stone, but of twisting fissures in the bedrock.
The last fissure opened onto a wide staircase and an even wider chamber, lit by three oil lamps that must burn and flicker all the time.
The devil's grotto.
"My dear sir, what have you found here?" Soaring stone-carved ribs, vaulting high up to a center point, and beneath that at the grotto's center was a large, steaming pool of water, a dozen feet across and twice that wide. It was bounded on the near side by ancient, square-hewn stones, on the far side by a low, rocky outcropping, and was fed from a fall of water that came tumbling out of the wall and then exited over a ledge at the foot of the pool into a sieve of fissures in the damp floor.
"For your well-being, madam." He stood her on her feet and shucked her of her woolen kirtle, down to her chemise, then lifted her over the side to dangle her legs. "Sit here."
But the moment she felt the heat against her flesh, felt it hiss deeply into her calves, she slid off the edge of the pool into the wondrously warm water that reached all the way to her waist.
"Oh, my, Nicholas." She cooed as her knees melted with the pleasure, then she let herself float free on her back in all that caressing water. "You found me a bit of heaven."
Aye, wife—but it makes me ache like the devil for you.
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Chapter 13
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Nicholas knew he was in dire trouble the moment his wife's hem hit the steam. He'd meant her only to sit on the ledge and dangle her legs and hands, but now she looked like a lounging selkie, waiting for a wave to come slip her back into the sea.
His exquisitely beautiful wife.
"So you fancy yourself a doctor, Nicholas, as well as a soldier and a mason and a diplomat." She smiled blissfully as she floated, her eyes closed, her hair playing loosely in the constant current, dancing with his senses.
"I am merely your steward, milady."
"Much more than that; Nicholas. What other secrets are you holding back from me? That you are an alchemist? Or a wizard—for there is no other explanation for a place like this."
He stood at the edge of the pool, hardly able to breathe, to think beyond her chemise floating in the lapping waves, the bobbing of her breasts and her dark nipples visible in the lamplight. He wanted to join her there. To join with her.
He turned away instead and tormented himself with the sound of her splashing and torrid thoughts of her toes and his tongue.
Christ.
"I give you but a few moments longer, my lady, then I want to see your blisters and that bruise of yours." And every other part of you.
"You're right; we really should be in the office, planning the harvest campaign. But, ah, Nicholas, this is marvelous. And to think that I might have come to Faulkhurst as Bayard's bought-and-paid-for bride."
A safe enough conversation, if one that ate at his pride. "You find that so unthinkable?"
"Now, more than ever." Splash. Sloosh. A long, wispy sigh that he felt against his ear. "As entirely unimaginable as the marriage was itself. I was perfectly happy cloistered with the Sisters of Mercy."
What? He shook his head of the buzzing. "You were what, madam? Cloistered?"
"Yes."
He spun around against his better judgment, certain that he heard thunder all the way down here, a bolt of holy scorn. "Cloistered, as in a nunnery?"
"At St. Catherine's. This is far too nice, Nicholas."
Bloody hell, he'd stolen a nun. This ravishing nun, from a very jealous God.
He stomped into the pool to his thighs—his boots be damned—and straddled her legs to tip her to her knees, then bent over all that sultry, steaming bliss.
"Tell me that again, madam. You were a nun when Bayard married you? A holy sister?"
She knelt like a coy mermaid peering up at him, one pink shoulder completely bare and tantalizing, the front of her gown drooping dangerously, just covering the maddeningly dark point of her breast.
"I wasn't anywhere near holy, Nicholas." She raked her fingers through the curtain of hair that was streaming out around her. "And I certainly wasn't a nun."
His heart climbing into his throat, he knelt too and made her look at him directly with those eyes of dark amber. "You weren't even … what is it called—betrothed? Promised to God, or whatever the devil they—"
"A novitiate?" The water defined her rising brows more clearly against her fairness and starred her lashes. "Good heavens, no. Why would you think so?"
He couldn't answer. She'd taken his breath away again, left him sputtering again. And relieved—because he hadn't been certain what he could have done, if he'd actually stolen her from a nunnery.
"I'm just curious about the lady I serve." Sopping wet to his breastbone, Nicholas leaned back against the edge of the low wall, crossed his arms against his chest, and stuck his heels into the stone paving of the pool.
"I wasn't well suited to the life. Not at all."
She smiled brightly at some secret facet of her past, then pushed backward in a swirl of skirts and a pale bare foot, only to come swimming back toward him, smiling, beguiling him again. "I loved my beds of hollyhocks and my daffodils too much for that. I dearly wanted to stay there forever, but I wasn't interested in vows."
"None beyond your marriage vows then."
"Not even them." She shook her head fiercely, as though he'd suggested she take up witchcraft. "Especially not marriage vows."
But we are married, wife, well and truly, until I take care of the matter. He'd never actually considered her desires; she had merely been his bride. She needed only to show up and be married to him. He might have been a beastly scourge to her at the time, but he'd been a damned eligible one.
"Isn't that every woman's hope, my lady: marriage to a prosperous and powerful baron?"
Her laughter echoed off the vaulting. "How very like a man to think that a woman wishes to be hand
ed from father to husband like a sack of turnips, forced to keep his household, to wait contentedly for him to come home from his warring and whoring, then to suffer his embrace—at his pleasure, and only long enough to beget him sons and sons and more sons—before he scurries off to his mistress's bed."
Here he was again, unjustly accused of deeds he'd never had the chance to commit against her. Not that he would have strayed a heartbeat from this woman—not if he'd known her as he did now.
"Sorry to have offended your sensibilities, madam. Now, let me see your hand." He stuck out his own and she paddled toward him.
"Oh, but you don't offend me, Nicholas. You're pigheaded and arrogant, and you try to negate my authority at every turn—"
"I've been more than patient with you—"
Her laughter ended in a delicate snort of disbelief. "But in all that, you've never offended me."
"That's good to know."
"I speak of my father's treatment of my poor mother, and as I'm sure my life would have gone with my husband." She stood up in her sopping, translucent chemise and gave her hand to him, already prunish around the blisters. He studied her palm with a pinpoint focus because to look up would be to see too much through her gown. A glance, and he would surely be blinded for his sins.
"He wouldn't have beaten you, my lady. He wasn't that kind of man."
She looked up from where their fingers entwined, dragging his gaze along with her, because he was nearly beyond resisting her. "How can you know for certain that William Bayard didn't beat his women?"
Hell's teeth; he set his own traps, then stepped right into them. "I would have heard of it, if he had. That sort of reputation precedes a man."
She pursed her lips, thwarted in her beliefs. "Well, whether he would have beat me or not, my wedding night to William Bayard was as abrupt and as quickly done as my wedding to him was."
He snorted. "Your wedding night? Madam, you haven't had a wedding night with your husband."
"I— But, I…" She paled to chalk and took in a small breath of terror. "What the devil do you mean by that, Nicholas?"
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