By Royal Command

by Laura Navarre

  His mother snorted through her long nose. “He pondered it long enough. I thought he was waiting for the girl to die in childbed, so he could forego the settlement and keep the dowry.” Rafael smiled darkly, but didn’t look up. “But he wished not to kill her with another failed pregnancy.”

  Katrin kept her eyes on her book, absent fingers stroking the cover. She’d never forget Borovic’s despair during that doomed childbed, how frantic and guilt-ridden he’d been. Perhaps he hadn’t loved the girl—some twenty years his junior—as a man should love his wife, but he’d harbored affection for her all the same. Putting her aside was the decent thing to do, and had doubtless saved her life. Meanwhile, rumor had it, he’d found a new playmate in the wanton Cate, who’d stayed behind at Caerwyne.

  Rafael swirled his wine. “Then my brother will again be seeking a mother for his heir.”

  “He has an heir already in you,” his mother said pointedly. “But aye, he’ll seek a bride when he rides for the witan. He’s already sent word to the king, so Ethelred can propose another match. Borovic wants proof of the girl’s fertility this time, as well as a suitable dowry.”

  “Perhaps,” Katrin murmured, “he should seek a wife for love, and so stand a chance of being contented. Wasn’t his first lady such a match?”

  The dowager laughed. “His first lady was a simpering fool with little more than beauty and a sweet disposition to recommend her. He married for the most frivolous reasons, but he’d hear nothing against it from me.”

  He’d fallen in love and married a girl who resembled Katrin. No doubt he’d expected her to share his first lady’s biddable nature.

  “Perhaps this match will be a happier one,” she said.

  The dowager shrugged. “Wealth and privilege are what a man seeks to marry—along with healthy sons, which are a wife’s first duty. Are you still not breeding, girl?”

  Katrin started, heat climbing into her cheeks. She’d been unwilling to admit anything so early, afraid even to hope, though she knew the perceptive Rafael had begun to suspect. Her courses hadn’t come since moon-dark. God willing, she’d conceived—which she’d certainly expected, given their frequent indulgence in the marriage bed. These days, no more than a languid smile could ignite him. Rafael would dismiss their attendants abruptly, voice thickening with passion, and they’d fall embracing in broad daylight.

  Burning to her fingertips, she strove to subdue her blushes. “We’ll do our utmost to oblige you, good-mother.”

  “Now that I’m allowed to remain home with my wife for more than three days at a time,” Rafael said dryly, “we might just manage it. If we fail, I assure you it won’t be for lack of trying.”

  His tone was infused with warmth, eyes simmering as he watched Katrin beneath lowered lids. He was impossibly beguiling: disheveled from working his horses, breeze riffling his dark curls, tunic gaping open at his throat. The molten heat of hellfire pooled at her center.

  When she leaves, he’ll take me to bed…

  “A son would come timely.” The dowager fanned herself. “If Belmaine has an heir, he’ll do for Argent in a pinch.”

  Rafael chuckled under his breath and leaned back, stretching his legs to study his booted toes. “God will bless us with a child when He wills. Meanwhile, I’m in no hurry.”

  Idly he drew Katrin’s hand into his lap and rubbed lazy circles against her palm, turning her bones to liquid.

  * * *

  Katrin shuddered and arched back, grasping fistfuls of rose-colored silk, gritting her teeth against the throbbing pleasure as Rafael slid into her an inch at a time, taut as a coiled spring. If their earlier coupling hadn’t blunted the keen edge of passion, she couldn’t have played this wicked game.

  Now she wrapped her legs around his lean body to draw him deeper, driving them both to madness. When she tightened tiny muscles around his length, his sharp-drawn breath scraped the night.

  “Gently, for the love of God,” he breathed. “You’ll unman me.”

  Mischievous, she clenched around him, perspiration springing out against her skin. Leisurely he undulated against her, sinuous as a serpent.

  “Do you dream of this?” she whispered, smelling the sweetness of cloves mingled with the musk of arousal.

  “You require—no words of mine—to assure you of that, witch.”

  Sometimes she was still abashed by the shameless hunger that drove them, though she no longer believed it sinful. But shame couldn’t stop her aching body from arching against his, shattering his hard-won control. Ignited, Rafael thrust fiercely. She sank sharp teeth into his shoulder as colors exploded against her closed lids. Grappling with savage urgency in a riot of tumbled cushions, she plunged headlong into rapture in the arms of her wrathful angel.

  Later she stretched, sluggish and sated with pleasure. At her feet the stone nymph raised her urn, spilling water into the fountain. Moonlight poured through the open doors, mingled with the heavy sweetness of jasmine.

  Idly Rafael stroked her belly. His serpent ring flashed. “When we married, I thought it would lessen in time…this frenzy of desire between us. I thought I’d retreat to my studies and my baronial duties, that you’d occupy yourself tamely with womanly pursuits. Instead, I’m consumed by you…this indecent craving for my own wife, and I do everything within my power to ensure you’re likewise beguiled. I fear we’ll never return now to a state of grace.”

  She turned her head to seek his hooded gaze. “Why do you say we’re damned beyond hope of salvation? Wasn’t it you who told me we all deserve forgiveness—all of us, no matter what our sins?”

  “So we’re taught.” He brooded, his beauty uncanny by moonlight. “But to obtain divine forgiveness, we must first experience true remorse. Can you find it in your soul to regret us, Katrin?”

  “Nay.” Smiling, she twined her fingers with his. “I’ve confessed our misdeeds to the priest, and gone straight from penance to your embrace. If we must have an heir, ’tis no sin to take pleasure in the begetting.”

  “I suppose we can steel ourselves to accept one.”

  “Marry, don’t you want your heir?” she demanded, annoyed.

  “I thought siring a child would erect one more barrier between the life I have and the one I would have chosen. I prayed for the strength to accept my fate.” He rolled over to face her and said fiercely, “You alone made it bearable to take my brother’s place, and I don’t care whether you’re sent from God or the Devil! If you birth a dozen children, I’ll embrace them all.”

  An ache swelled in her breast, constricting her throat and burning her eyes. She turned into his tensile heat and wrapped her arms around him, pressing her face into his shoulder.

  Upon my soul, I love you, she yearned to say, but she was afraid to spoil the moment. Never had he welcomed those words. When he released her, she rolled away with a sigh.

  “Do you think it’s possible,” he said casually, “with all our bedsport these many weeks, that you could be breeding now?”

  “Perhaps.” She allowed herself a secret smile. “I don’t want to say until I’m certain.”

  “Well, as you wish.” Rafael rolled over to nuzzle her shoulder. “Keep your secrets then, but don’t let it trouble you. Nineteen is young yet to become a mother. My own didn’t bear me until she was two-and-twenty.”

  “I—I was with child…once.” She startled herself with her own confession. She hadn’t meant to tell him the last of her secrets. Yet to earn his trust, she must be willing to trust him in return. “I miscarried.”

  He lay quiet, hand resting on her belly. “This would be when you were wedded to Courtenay?”

  “Well, nay.”

  “Nay?” He sounded puzzled. “Then who—?”

  He choked off the question as realization struck. “It was the sword-theyn.”

  “Aye,” sh
e sighed. “Do you hate me for it?”

  He stared overhead, water splashing too loud from the fountain.

  “I convinced myself you’d merely trifled with the man,” he said. “Ethelred’s niece and his common theyn—by the seventh angel, what more could it be?”

  Months after she’d said her final farewell to Eomond, she felt able to discuss it calmly. “What I felt for him was no trifle at the time. I knew him long before I met you—”

  “Did he want the child?”

  “He never even knew of it.”

  “Did it never occur to the man to wonder—?” he began scornfully, then pushed out a breath. “A child forges a bond between man and woman. Perhaps that’s enough to explain his lingering appeal. But I confess I grow weary of sharing your affection with another man.”

  Indignant, she pushed up to sit. “You bloody great idiot, I renounced him when I married you!”

  “Are you certain?” he said lightly, but this time she wasn’t deceived. She touched his arm, felt his wiry strength but also his vulnerability: blood and bone and sinew sheathing a lonely heart.

  “He’s not your rival anymore,” she said gently. “I’ve sworn to you, remember?”

  “But is it I whom you love? Does his memory lie between us? I can make you forget him for a time. I can make you forget anything in my arms, can’t I? All the angels know I forget my own name in yours…”

  Katrin bowed her head, hair falling forward to screen her vision. Her instinct was to mislead, say whatever she must to persuade him. Yet she must break down the barriers of deception between them.

  Smoothing back her hair, she looked up. “I received word from court last week. Lord Kildarren has married the widowed Edwynna of Crayke. He has moved on with his life, Rafael le Senay, and it’s you I love now.”

  “You married me from duty, not love, by your own admission.”

  “But then I fell in love with you. How could I prevent it? You were so far beyond my experience. You claim I bewitched you, but you beguiled me from the very hour we met.” Bewildered, she shook her head. “I can’t even conceive of knowing you and not loving you. You may believe me or not, as it suits you.”

  He was difficult to read, but as he searched her features, she knew he wanted to believe her. His eyes widened, guileless as a schoolboy’s. “If indeed you love me, you must show me beyond the words. Make me believe you, Katrin.”

  A fierce hope soared within her, like one of his raptors arrowing high against the sun’s white heat. “I’ll leave you no choice in the matter, husband.”

  “That is well, wife.” Gently, he spooled tendrils of her hair around his fingers. “Though I’ve waited long to make my confession, either to you or myself, I wouldn’t wish to love unrequited.”

  For a breathless moment she couldn’t be certain she’d understood. But the curious gleam in his eyes—both wary and exultant—couldn’t be misconstrued. Still, she scarcely dared to speak, lest she shatter the enchantment.

  “Why, Rafael, do you speak of love?”

  “I never before knew what it was to love. A rather extraordinary experience, I’m finding.” For one telling moment as he leaned over her, all his defenses fell away. “But I do speak of love. I swear to you on my soul, Katrin—you’re my life now.”

  A fierce joy surged through her, tears blurring her vision. “Then all is well. Now I can’t doubt it!”

  Swiftly he rolled them together in the bed, mouth hot and urgent on hers. Thrilling in the storm of desire he stirred in her so easily, she sank into the refuge of his strength. As his arms tightened protectively around her, Katrin knew she’d found her shelter at last.

  * * * * *

  Afterword

  The turbulent period of Anglo-Saxon England before the Norman Conquest has always been magical for me. England was struggling to rise from the long night of the Dark Ages, staggering beneath the onslaught of successive waves of Vikings who sought not only to plunder England, but to occupy and settle the entire island. The situation I describe in By Royal Command was a national calamity. More than half of England (the so-called Danelaw) was already ruled by the Danes, and Sweyn Forkbeard would go on to conquer the rest of the island in 1013. And then, of course, would come the Normans.

  Katrin’s uncle, King Ethelred of Wessex, was a real historical figure. He assumed the English throne at the tender age of thirteen (or thereabouts) after his brother’s murder, which cast a shadow over his reign. The details I provide about his marriage to Emma of Normandy and his family are mostly true, although his dark brilliance and sadistic tendencies in the story are my own invention. He began paying the Danegeld, an annual tribute to buy off the raiding Vikings, in 991. Ethelred’s dilemma was immortalized by Rudyard Kipling, who famously warned “that if once you have paid him the Danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane.”

  Despite its historical context, By Royal Command is of course a work of fiction. Katrin, Rafael, Eomond and Borovic are the children of my fertile imagination, along with the fairytale castle of Caerwyne where much of the story takes place. Ethelred’s dark and smoky palisade is a more historically faithful portrayal of an eleventh-century English stronghold. If you’re interested in delving deeper into Anglo-Saxon England, I heartily recommend Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon stories: a series of historical novels about the kings of Wessex which captures beautifully the authentic flavor of this dangerous and passionate period.

  About the Author

  In her other life, Laura Navarre is a diplomat who’s lived in Russia and works on weapons of mass destruction issues. In the line of duty, she’s been trapped in an elevator in a nuclear power plant and has stalked the corridors of facilities churning out nerve agent and other apocalyptic weapons. In this capacity, she meets many of the world’s most dangerous men.

  Inspired by the sinister realities of her real life, Laura writes dark medieval and Renaissance romance spiked with political intrigue. A member of Romance Writers of America and a 2009 Golden Heart Award finalist, she has won the Emily Award for Excellence, the First Coast Romance Writers Beacon Award, the Georgia Romance Writers Maggie Award, the Golden Pen, the Duel on the Delta, Hearts Through History’s Romance Through the Ages, and other awards. By Royal Command is her third published novel.

  Laura holds an M.F.A. in writing popular fiction from the University of Southern Maine, an M.A. in national security policy from The George Washington University and a B.A. in international relations from Michigan State University. Currently living in Seattle, she divides her time between her writing career and other adventures for U.S. government clients.

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  ISBN: 978-14268-9400-8

  Copyright © 2012 by Laura Navarre

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  All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired b
y any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.

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