"Yes, of course." He sat down on the edge of the table, one foot on the bench, his ardor simmering for the moment.
She poured a cup of wine and handed it to him. "I suppose I must begin earlier, when I was kidnapped from St. Catherine's in the dead of night by a half dozen men I'd never seen before."
"What?" He set the cup down hard on the table, took hold of her shoulders, and brought her against his thighs. "Say that again, Eleanor. You were kidnapped?"
For all the violence of her tale, she wore a glint of mischief in her eyes and at the corner of her mouth. "Aye, three of my father's guards and three of Bayard's, I learned later."
This was madness. He hadn't ordered her kidnapped. "The bloody bastards didn't tell you that you were being taken to be married?"
She shook her head and toyed with the ties at his cuff, her touch light and inviting. "I knew nothing until I arrived at Glenstow."
Christ, no wonder she reviled him. "You didn't have to agree to the marriage. Why did you?"
Now she was at his other cuff, running her fingers delicately between his. "Spoken like a man who's always been allowed to decide such things for himself. My dear father threatened his dungeon for me. I was too fond of my gardens to survive that kind of punishment."
Outraged, he pulled her close. "Your own father threatened you?"
Her eyes softened as she met his with all her trust, and admiration that he didn't deserve. "It takes more than blood and bone to be a father, Nicholas. You know that as few men do. But I was resigned and hopeful—despite what I knew of the man I was marrying. I hoped to discover some goodness in William Bayard that I could love unconditionally. So I said my vows, Nicholas."
But not to me, my love. His heart filled up with longing for what might have been. She was summer honey coursing through him, pouring into his loins, heating and hardening him.
"And then?"
She slipped out of his arms and drew him toward the parted curtains and their marriage bed. "And then I was escorted to my chamber, where my attendants stripped me and put me under the counterpane in my bed."
"Why? You had no bridegroom to come to you." He almost felt sorry for himself, that he hadn't been there to bed her then—but she was here now, tugging on his belt. She'd somehow relieved him of his leather jerkin sometime back, and his sleeves were hanging loose.
"What are you doing to me, madam?" He shucked off his tunic and tossed it aside, to his wife's approving smile.
"What was done at my proxy wedding. The lack of a bridegroom made the bedding ritual that much more important, so John Sorrel joined me there."
"The bastard got in bed with you?" he roared. "He saw you without your clothes?"
"Oh, my." She looked down at his chest, and lower, at the bulge at the top of his breeches.
Wanting to kill Sorrel with his bare hands, he tilted her chin to him and found her blushing and bright-eyed, her gown drooping off the shoulder again. "Did Sorrel get into bed with you?"
"Partially." She stepped back from him, appraising him from head to foot. "Oh, but Nicholas, he wasn't nearly the man that you are."
"What the hell does 'partially' mean? Did he come to you naked?"
"Only his leg, when he shoved it beneath the counterpane next to mine—as is the custom in these matters." That same lithely naked leg came out of the folds of her gown like a pagan offering, slim and pink-toed and his.
And John bloody Sorrel had been naked with her in his marriage bed? Sorrel was a man who would take a mile when offered an inch. "Did he touch you further?"
"He tried to."
"And?"
Her smile was wicked, worldly, and he wanted her. "He never tried again. But I do wonder, Nicholas, when you mean to begin our wedding night. I have a craving to touch you everywhere, and to be touched by you."
Eleanor recognized that singularly masculine look in her husband's eyes: hunger and longing, lighting her pulse and sending it soaring, making her wonder what she was going to do with him, this steward that she loved too much.
This husband that she would die for.
He was the resonance of her heart, the thunder that slipped through her veins and into her belly when he whispered against her ear. "Oh, my love, may this wedding night forever erase the first."
"This is the first, Nicholas. Never doubt it."
"Christ, Eleanor, you are my heart." He finally came to her, his bay and woodsmoke surrounding her completely. His kiss was deep and lasting, made her crazy and writhing with need for him—a slow, molten exploration of her mouth, then down her throat to the cleaving of her breasts, where he met the limits of the linen and moaned, as though he were starving to taste beneath it.
"The gown, Nicholas. Now?" She reached down to rid herself of the barrier between them, but he caught her wrist and made love to it and then her fingers, before he looked into her eyes.
"Not yet, my love." He kept calling her "love" and "sweet," whispering his heart, making her wish that she wasn't deceiving him in this. Still, she ached for his great, scalding hands to hold her, and pressed herself into his splintering kiss wherever it wandered.
He slid the gown off her shoulder, letting it droop to her elbow. Then, his eyes glittering, he gently lifted her breast from its cradle of linen, holding it in his palm like a gem. Slowly, maddeningly so, he lowered his eyes to look, to admire; then he breathed his magic against her nipple, dashing it with his searing breath. And then he took it into his wondrous mouth.
"Oh, Nicholas. Oh, that's—" She felt a gentle, flickering tug that sent stars into the sky. Then he nibbled, tugged again, and possessed her completely with his startling kiss—an insistent pressure that made her arch into him, made her hips writhe as she rose up on her toes, to be closer to his rioting.
"Now the gown, Eleanor." But he took long delicious minutes raising the hem to her thighs, nuzzling her toes, then the back of her knees. He steamed his kiss through the linen to find the peaks of her breasts, his hands finally tugging the fabric over her head so that she felt free and new.
He stood away from her, looking wolflike and hungry, his body hard flesh and golden shadows.
"You are beautiful, wife."
Wife. Oh, God! She prayed that he hadn't heard himself, that he so often used the word in his thoughts that he wouldn't notice his slip. Because this was all becoming too tangled, too sweet. She didn't want to hurt him. Didn't want to stop.
He smiled, lighting little fires inside her, at the ends of her fingers and across her breasts.
"You're not undressed, Nicholas." She found the ties at the front of his breeches, and he sucked in his breath.
"You're killing me, you know."
"I was hoping so. You feel very good here, Nicholas. Mysterious, and warm." She cupped the marvelous shape of him with her hand.
"Great bleeding saints, woman!" He scooped her into his arms and carried her back against the mountain of pillows on the bed, his eyes wild and glittering.
"I only wanted to touch."
"Not yet, love. I'll not make it through the night."
Through the night, and all the rest of her days with the man she adored, who cared for her people as she did, who held Dickon's esteem and Pippa's heart. Feeling wicked and possessive, she pushed at the center of his chest when he would have gone back to his kissing. "Yes, but you still have your breeches on. And your boots."
She felt tightly coiled and aching, and even more so when he raised a brow and then left to shuck his clothes. Following him to the end of the bed, she clung to the bedpost and watched him undress—something she planned to do every night, every day of her life.
She gasped, nearly lost her balance and fell off the bed when he turned back to her. He was magnificent, his large tarse standing proud and quick, the rest of him rippling muscles.
She knew exactly what all that maleness was for, exactly where it was meant to be, for that opposite part of her was aching for him now, hot and damp. And she wondered how he would taste, and if he would
like to be kissed there.
Nicholas was striving with all of his might not to drive his wife back into the bed and take her swiftly. He could barely think beyond the shapes of her: her breasts set free, and ready for his hands, his mouth; the shadowy triangle, dark red and scented for him.
She was utterly irresistible, waiting for him on her knees, clinging to the bedpost, looking at him in wanton appraisal.
"You're astounding, Nicholas."
"And you are beyond all my dreams." He knelt on the bed in front of her, pulled her against him, and drew her sigh into his kiss.
She arched against him, measuring his arousal with the rhythm of her hips, until she was his pulse and his heartbeat, and he was making new bargains with God. Just one more moment with her, one more day. Then he'd spend all the rest of his life in penance.
"It feels so wonderful, Nicholas. Large and just right and just there."
"And here, my love." He took her sigh deep into his heart as he slid his palm down her stomach, and then watched her astonishment as he spread his fingers and sifted through her damp curls, softly, lightly, until she was pressing herself into his hand, gasping.
"Oh, Nicholas, what you're doing!"
He parted her with his fingers, taking her mouth at the same time, plunging into both fevered slicknesses, reveling in her crooning, in her clutching at him, delving deeply to meet the rising, primitive tilt of her hips. Her eyes were glassy and the color of an October forest.
"Oh, Nicholas—our wedding night is quite wonderful, don't you think?"
It's heaven and hell, my wife. He lifted her against the pillows and knelt between her legs, then trailed his caress down her silky belly, kissing her. He was so hungry for her he had to taste her there just once, even knowing the firestorm that it would unleash inside him. He prayed that he could weather it.
Eleanor could hardly breathe for the pleasure, for her husband's intimacies, and her battered heart. She was open to him, and glad of it, her thighs spread and the great man kneeling between them. So husbandly, so familiar, and so unaware of the way that she was looking at him—as the man she had married. Her blood was on fire, her skin ached for him to hold her, and to be just where he was, trailing his mouth down her belly toward the fever that had gathered between her legs.
"What are you going to do, Nicholas?"
"I plan to kiss you."
"Do you mean there?" He couldn't.
"Oh, yes, my love." He slipped his hands beneath her hips, raised them, and then, mother of all sweet mercies, he kissed her. Right there, lightly but with great attention. "And here." He parted her with gentle fingers and found the center of her with his tongue and then his ravenous mouth against her, and she was sure that the sunlight had come streaming into their midnight chamber, or the brilliant end of the world.
She was soaring upward toward some glorious heaven, leaving the earth, leaving Nicholas behind. And that suddenly felt all wrong. There were too many lies between them.
She'd intended to lead him down a tortuous path of near misses, to torment him for his deceit and to confuse him, to make him twist in the wind while she held the tether. But she couldn't do that now.
"I can't do this, Nicholas." She shoved him away, and flung herself off the bed and through the curtains to the outer room, shaking to her bones, wondering how she'd let it get this far.
Nicholas followed, starved for her, terrified that he'd frightened her, unsure what to do next. "Eleanor, what?"
"I'm sorry." He reached for her, but she scurried to the other side of the table, put her hands up, and turned from him. "I can't go on. I thought I could, but I'm not very good at this."
She was quaking, her skin goose-fleshed, and he draped a blanket over her shoulders. "You've been marvelous, love. I am stunned and aching for you. And though we've come far, you're still a virgin."
"Yes, Nicholas. But we can't do this now." She dragged in a hiccupping sob, harrowing tears welling in her eyes and then falling down her chest, making gleaming trails that he wanted to follow with his mouth and kiss away. "Because I can't deceive you any longer. I thought I could trick you into this."
He sighed, knowing that he wouldn't have missed this for anything—his wedding night with his remarkable wife. "My eyes are wide-open, Eleanor."
"No, they're not, Nicholas. They can't be." She pointed toward the bailey. "Do you know what Sir Richard told me today, just when he was leaving?"
A chill swept across his shoulders: the end of the world, the beginning of his forever without her. "More about your husband?"
Her eyes glittered wetly. "Oh, Nicholas, that he had a son."
Nicholas swallowed and battled his own tears, that everlasting grief. "Did he?"
"Yes. Don't you see what that means? We had a son. His and mine."
He felt her accusation bubbling inside his chest, sending his thoughts into circles, the past, the present all tangled and tied together. "I'm sorry for your loss, Eleanor." For ours.
"I would have loved him, Nicholas—I love him now. I would have held him in his pain. I would have been a comfort beside his father who adored him, who would have laid down his life for him. But don't you see? I was never given the chance to mother him, never given a chance to love my husband as I should, as I want to."
He turned from her, feeling the light slip away, the familiar darkness at the edge of his vision. His chest filled up with sorrow, that fierce aching that never went away. "He wasn't that kind of man."
"Oh, but he was that kind of man, Nicholas. He was good and honorable and devoted."
"You have the wrong man."
"And the most remarkable thing about him was that he hadn't always been that way. He changed, Nicholas. He wasn't the man I married—not the William Bayard who came to live at Faulkhurst, who selflessly cared for his tenants, who found his bastard son and cherished him, who carved little bears for him out of scraps of pine. And who came to love a wife who overran his sanctuary."
"Eleanor, stop."
"No." The room grew quiet, just his heartbeat and hers. "You are my husband. William Nicholas Bayard."
His throat closed up, and he went to the window to find more air. "I can't be that man to you."
He could feel her heat at his back. "Why can't you?"
"You don't know me." He closed off his heart. All those battlefields, all those bloody churchyards.
"You don't know yourself at all, Nicholas."
"Don't you see that it's too late?"
"For what?"
"Madam my soul is black and unchangeable—God's least favorite."
"No." She came around him with her clean scent, her goodness, put her warm hand in the middle of his chest. "You're His best kind of work, Nicholas, His proudest. Look at what you've done with your life in such a short time."
"You're wrong—I learned that the hard way. I know what it's like to feel God's coolness on your cheek, the breath of His laughter when you think that He's forgiven you all your sins. But you see, they pile up and begin to spill over into other parts of your life, into the whole countryside."
Eleanor's heart was breaking into tiny pieces for this wonderful man, whose broad shoulders carried the weight of the world. "The plague wasn't God's judgment on you."
"No. But it was His means to condemn me. I did everything He asked of me, gladly and with an honest heart, because I believed that I'd found redemption. After all, the world was falling apart, yet I had Liam. We had each other, the best of friends, father to son, my little boy and I. And then he was gone. Just gone."
He was looking out at the dark sea, his eyes full of tears that he was too stubborn to blink away.
"I'm sorry, Nicholas," she said through a sob.
"I've done my best here. I'll finish the chapel roof, and see that your grain barrels are full before I leave." He grabbed his breeches off the floor and looked as though he would just walk out.
"You'll do nothing of the sort, Nicholas." She caught his arm and stood in his path. "Yo
u're needed here, where you've always been."
"So that I can watch the crops fail and the tenants die and my wife taken from me because I love her with all of my heart? I won't have it."
"Liam wasn't taken from you out of retribution."
"You don't understand. We had six months together—six months to fill my heart to bursting with a love that I'd never known existed. I was terrified, Eleanor, and I was astonished, and I was—" His voice broke, and he raked his fingers through his hair, his hands shaking.
"Nicholas, you were a father."
"Oh, God, Eleanor, I couldn't save him." A keening sound tore from his chest. He dropped onto the chair and put his head in his hands. "I can't stop it from hurting."
Eleanor didn't know what to say, only knelt at his feet and feathered her fingers through his hair, sitting there for long minutes while he sobbed quietly.
"I don't want you to leave, Nicholas. I need you. Pippa needs you. Little Toddy thinks the world of you."
"You don't know what you're risking." He stood abruptly, still startlingly naked, her caged lion, so vital, so very much alive.
"Only my love for you—and you have it all."
"Christ, Eleanor!" He came at her, as fierce as she'd ever seen him, and cradled the back of her head roughly so that all she could see was the terrible sorrow in his eyes. "Do you know how much I love you? And how helpless that makes me feel? I knew the ways of this God. I understood the proposition the first moment you and I met. You couldn't be plain, or timid, or dull. No, you were fashioned for me to love until the end of my days. And I'm terrified." He held her to him, brushed his lips across her ear and her lashes, as though he couldn't get enough of her.
"You've got it all wrong, Nicholas. I'm not plain or timid or dull, because I was sent here to save you—and you're an awfully stubborn man when it comes to opportunities. We have so much to do. A chapel to build, a life to celebrate, a whole village, rolling fields of barley and pease to tend." Eleanor thought she heard his heart shift as she took his face in her hands. "How many chances does one man get, my love?"
The Maiden Bride Page 22