Longing

by Mary Balogh

  “It is as well,” Alex said, smiling arctically. “By the time I have disciplined them at home, they will doubtless wish I had not shown up when I did.”

  The sergeant coughed again. “And the woman, my lord?” he asked.

  Alex turned, unsurprised, to find Siân standing close behind him. Damned woman. He kept the smile. “She is my—” he said, pausing suggestively. “She is mine.”

  The sergeant coughed once more. “Quite, my lord,” he said. “Begging your pardon for the interference, my lord,” And he and his men marched briskly back to the road.

  “You may lower your arms,” Alex said conversationally. “As you see, I have no gun. Only the three that the soldiers so obligingly left on the grass at my feet.”

  “Iestyn!” Siân flew toward him. “What has happened? Oh, your poor arm. It is broken?”

  The boy smiled weakly at her, but she covered her face with her hands before he could say anything. “Oh, you are all safe,” she said. “We have been searching for you all day. I imagined all the worst fates.”

  There was a chorus of voices. “We have been searching for you, fach,” Hywel Rhys said over them all. “Why do you think we are still this close to Newport at the end of the day? We have been worried sick about you.”

  “Iestyn’s arm was broken with a pike when he tried to swim against the tide of fleeing men, looking for you,” Huw said. “But he was too stubborn and stupid to go on home and let the rest of us look. He is as pale as a ghost but just as stubbornly refuses to faint.”

  Alex watched them all in silence. As usual when he was around, they were speaking English out of deference to him, though he was quite convinced they had forgotten his presence. Until Emrys Rhys looked at him and cleared his throat. They all fell into an uneasy and self-conscious silence.

  “I don’t know why you did it, sir,” Emrys said gruffly. “But thank you.”

  Alex nodded as the others followed suit. “There will be a price to pay,” he said quietly.

  They all eyed him warily, including Siân.

  “I will be calling another meeting after we return home,” Alex said. “I will expect you all to be there with your wives and your parents and your sisters and adult children and anyone else over whom you have any influence. Life at Cwmbran is going to become more livable and we are all going to have a hand in making it so.”

  “I will be there, sir,” Iestyn said faintly. “And I will bring my mam and dada.”

  “And I will do likewise, sir,” Emrys said.

  There was a general mumbling from the other men, which Alex took to be assent.

  “We have to have that arm attended to, boy,” Alex said to Iestyn. “At the inn, where all of you can dry off and have a good meal and a beer or two inside you—if chapel men drink beer, that is.”

  There was a gust of laughter, which sounded strange to all their ears.

  “We daren’t go there,” Hywel Rhys said, nodding rather wistfully in the direction of the inn.

  “My special constables can go anywhere I wish them to go,” Alex said. “And that arm needs to be set.”

  Siân hovered close to Iestyn as they all walked toward the inn and insisted on staying with him while, in the absence of a doctor, Alex himself set the arm as best he could and bound it into makeshift splints. She smoothed the boy’s hair back from his face and murmured endearments to him in Welsh as if he were still a child instead of a remarkably brave young man. The inexpert setting of the arm must hurt like a thousand devils, Alex thought, but the boy did not flinch even once and even looked at Siân with a half smile as she talked.

  Alex had reserved a room upstairs. He sent Siân up to get out of her wet clothes and have a hot bath while the men steamed before the fire downstairs and waited to be served with the meal Alex had ordered.

  But Siân turned when she had one foot on the bottom stair. “Owen is dead,” she said quietly, though the hush that followed her words was assurance enough that everyone had heard. “He was shot in the back outside the Westgate Inn while trying to hurry me to safety. He died in my arms.”

  She turned back and continued on her way up before anyone seemed able to think of anything to say.

  After they had eaten and drunk and even dozed a little by the fire and dried off, the men insisted on continuing on their way home. They seemed to feel guilty about being so comfortable.

  “The women will worry,” Hywel Rhys said. “Especially when some of the other men start arriving back and we are still missing. It would be a sin and a self-indulgence to worry our women unnecessarily. We walked through last night. We will walk through tonight as well. At least tonight it is not raining.”

  “Siân is staying here,” Alex said firmly. “She is exhausted and needs a good night’s rest.”

  The triumvirate of Hywel and Emrys Rhys and Huw Jones all looked hard at him, but none of them said anything. Hywel nodded and got to his feet.

  “Bring her safely home tomorrow,” was all he said.

  Even Iestyn Jones insisted on going. “The walk and the fresh air will do me good after all that food,” he said, laughing.

  Fortunately Alex thought of something before they left. He acquired paper, pen, and ink from the landlord and wrote a note naming each of the men and vouching for the fact that they were all special constables in the employ of the Marquess of Craille from Cwmbran.

  He watched them on their way from the doorway of the inn. It was dark already. Such was the nature of November evenings. Then he climbed the stairs to the room he had reserved, tapped on the door, and opened it.

  She was sitting beside the fire, wrapped in a blanket. Her hair, spread over her shoulders, was almost dry. The bath was half hidden behind a screen. The tray on which her meal had been brought to her was standing empty beside her.

  She turned her head and smiled at him as he stepped inside the room and closed the door quietly behind him.

  27

  IT was good-bye, she thought. She had hoped—part of her had hoped—to avoid him for the next two months, until she could take up her new teaching post. She had hoped to slip away without fuss to start a new life. She was looking forward to her new life.

  But after all there was to be a good-bye. A quite decisive one. And after all she could not be sorry. How could she be sorry? He had come for her. Despite the fact that she had been foolish to go herself, and despite the discomfort of the rain and the danger, he had come for her.

  He had saved her from captivity, from some unknown and dreadful fate. And he had done the like for her relatives, though he had had no reason to do so when they had defied him and ignored his warnings by coming—with the exception of Iestyn. He had set Iestyn’s broken arm when everyone else had been too squeamish to touch it, and he had ordered them all a meal. And he intended to go back to Cwmbran and organize another meeting.

  It was a great, great gift he had given her.

  Yes, it was fitting there be this good-bye. After it, she was going to ask her father if her leaving could be hastened forward. Perhaps she could go to her new school to observe for a month before she started drawing a salary. She would want to leave soon after this good-bye.

  She had bathed and eaten and was cozily warm before the fire. The landlady had taken her clothes away, promising to have them all washed, dried, and ironed by the morning.

  Perhaps he would not stay, Siân thought fleetingly. Or if he did, perhaps he would stay in a different room, especially if her relatives and friends stayed too. But it was only a fleeting thought. She knew with a near certainty that he would come and that they would have a whole night in which to say good-bye.

  A whole night. In a clean and quiet room and in a wide bed that looked cozy, though she had not lain on it.

  There was no sense of wrongness about the occasion. No sense that it would be sordid or that she would be sinning. She loved him. She was leav
ing him because of the total impossibility of any sort of relationship in which they could meet each other as equals. But there was a good-bye to be said, and they had been presented with this unexpected gift of a night together.

  She had no doubt that the problem of her grandfather and Emrys and Huw being at the inn would be solved.

  And so she turned her head and smiled at Alex when he tapped on the door and came inside. It had begun, their precious night together, and she would not look beyond it. She would live it intensely so that she would look back on the memory of it for the rest of her life.

  “They foolishly decided to walk through the night again,” he said. “Even Iestyn.”

  “Yes, they would,” she said. “They would not want to worry Gran and Mam and Mari for longer than necessary. Alexander, thank you.” She reached out one bare arm toward him.

  He came forward to take her hand and raise it to his lips. “You look cozy and sleepy,” he said.

  She smiled.

  “What are you wearing?” he asked.

  “A blanket,” she said.

  “The mayor and various soldiers we have spoken to in the course of the day would be delighted to witness this scene,” he said. “Except that you seem far too aquiescent, Siân.”

  “I am acquiescent,” she said.

  She heard him draw breath slowly. “I don’t suppose that bathwater is still warm,” he said.

  “I doubt it.” She hated the thought of a long delay while he ordered more heated and carried up.

  “I’ll use it anyway,” he said, pulling off his coat and tossing it aside. “Just to feel clean will be worth a little chilliness.”

  She climbed into the bed while he was behind the screen bathing. She left the blanket on the chair beside the fire. There was something seductively domestic about the scene, she thought as she drew the bedclothes up about her. She lay in bed waiting for her man and listening to the sounds of water being splashed over his back and head. There was no awkwardness between them, no embarrassment, no question of what would happen when he had dried himself off. He would come to bed.

  She ached at the impossibility of it all, at the knowledge that it was for this night only. But she suppressed the thought quite ruthlessly. There was this night.

  She had never before slept naked. There was something arousing about feeling sheets against her bare legs and breasts. She was tired, she thought, remembering that there had been no sleep at all the night before and constant exertion. She felt as if she could sleep for a week. But love first. Oh, yes, love first, and then sleep.

  He was naked when he came out from behind the screen. He did not even have a towel about his waist. “I thought you might be asleep,” he said.

  She shook her head. “Not yet.”

  He leaned over her, one hand on either side of her head. “What were you waiting for?” he asked. He was smiling and looking wonderfully handsome, his blond hair damp from the toweling he had given it, his eyes very blue.

  “For you,” she said.

  “To sing you lullabies?” He grinned.

  “You forget that you are wearing nothing,” she said. “I have been able to see that you know what I have been waiting for and that you want the same thing.”

  “For shame.” He rubbed his nose lightly across hers. “You peeked. Have you no modesty?”

  Her heart turned over rather painfully at this new teasing, affectionate Alexander. As if they belonged together. As if they were familiar and comfortable with each other. Ah, would it be a memory that she would ever be able to look back upon without pain?

  “None whatsoever,” she said. “Guess what I am wearing.”

  He frowned in thought. “A blanket?” he asked.

  “If you look over your shoulder,” she said, “you will see that I left it on the chair.”

  “You are never naked, Siân,” he said, his eyes laughing while he affected shock.

  “I am afraid so,” she said.

  “Well,” he said, “this could be dangerous. I have no sword, drawn or otherwise, to set between us on the bed.”

  “Oh, dear,” she said.

  “There is only one solution, as I see it,” he said, “short of my sleeping on the floor, which I absolutely refuse to do.”

  “What?” she asked.

  “There is going to have to be sexual intercourse between us,” he said.

  Her cheeks flamed foolishly at having it spoken so openly between them. “I could sleep on the floor,” she said, reaching up with both arms and linking them about his neck, “but I know you are too much the gentleman to allow it. Sexual intercourse it will have to be, then, I suppose.”

  They smiled at each other for a while longer, their eyes wandering hungrily over each other’s face before he lowered his own and touched her lips with his tongue, tracing first the upper one and then the lower, creating raw need deep in her breasts and her womb. But he did not kiss her.

  “Siân,” he said, raising his head a few inches to look into her eyes. “Siân, my love. It will be more than sexual intercourse. You know that.”

  “Yes,” she said. Yes, she knew it though she was not sure it was something that should be admitted aloud between them. But why not? Why not one glorious night with no barriers at all between them? One night—and one night only—to make dreams come true. “Yes, it will be far more than that, Alexander. Cariad.”

  “It will be nothing,” he said, grinning, “if we don’t do something about all these blankets between us.”

  “If we had thought,” she said as he stood up and pulled back the bedclothes, first to look at her appreciatively, and then to climb in beside her, “we might have used them instead of a drawn sword.”

  “Our trouble,” he said, sliding one arm beneath her neck and turning her over onto her side so that her body came against his along its full length, “is that we do not think.”

  Siân was having trouble with her breathing. “Praise be for thoughtlessness,” she said.

  “A fervent amen to that.” But his voice had lost its light, teasing tone. “Siân.” It was warm and husky against her ear. “You are more beautiful than I can put into words. I will worship you with my hands and my mouth and my body, but I will still not be able to show you how beautiful you are.”

  She whimpered as he began to suit action to words. He was all warm, hard, wonderful masculinity. Adam to her Eve. Antony to her Cleopatra. Romeo to her Juliet. Alexander. She wanted to draw him into herself, to lose herself in him. Forever and ever and ever.

  “In all eternity I could not love you enough to adequately worship your beauty,” he whispered into her mouth as his hand, down in the secret part of herself, found a most secret part and brought her to the precipice of need. “Come to me, Siân. Give it all to me. Give me your trust.”

  She came, giving him all that she most valued in her life—her independence, her personhood, herself, her soul. She shuddered against him, utterly helpless, utterly vulnerable, utterly pleasured.

  But he continued to worship her, to give everything, to demand everything in return. Several times he used his skill to make her shatter about him and against him and held her while she savored the pleasure and the wonder of it. But always his hands and his lips and his tongue went back to work until pleasure seemed not a single moment or experience, but a garden of endless delight.

  And finally she knew that it was a reciprocal thing, that there must be more pleasure for a man—for her man—than merely the releasing of his seed. She caressed him with her hands and her lips and tongue and teeth. She touched that part of him that she would have thought herself incapable of touching, holding it in her two hands, closing them about it, feeling its hardness and length, touching its tip with her thumb and pulsing lightly there until it grew slightly sticky and he groaned.

  She wanted it inside her. All the way deep inside, pum
ping into her so that pleasure could be finally a shared thing, united in the deepest core of her femininity. She wanted his seed. She wanted to feel it spring. She wanted it to take root. She wanted to be fruitful for him. And for herself. For them.

  “Please, please,” she was moaning against his mouth.

  Although there had been release over and over again and pleasures untold, she knew that she was still this side of the ultimate pleasure. The ultimate pleasure would not be for her alone. Or for him alone. The ultimate pleasure would be their final union. One body. One heart. One soul.

  His body was on hers, pressing it downward into the mattress. His legs pushed hers wide until she twined them about his and tilted herself for penetration. But he had far more control than she. He lifted his head and smiled down at her.

  “I think,” he said, “it is time for that sexual intercourse we talked about, Siân.”

  She had not thought it possible to be any more aroused than she already was, but his words proved her wrong. There was a gush of aching longing at the entrance to her body where he was pressing against her. He continued to smile at her as he came in, hard and long and deep, sliding into the slick heat of her need.

  “Most beautiful of all,” he said. “Hot, Siân, and wet. Ah, yes, and tight. Those are wonderful muscles. Is it all mine, my love? Just mine?”

  “Just yours,” she said. “Only and ever yours, Alexander. And this—is it all mine?”

  “Yours,” he said, “and yours only, Siân, from the moment I first set eyes on you. It is for your pleasure and for yours alone. Like this? Does this give pleasure?” He withdrew slowly to her entrance and thrust swiftly and firmly back inside.

  She exhaled through her mouth as her inner muscles clenched about him again and drew him deeper. “Yes,” she said. “But not mine alone, Alexander. It must be together. Please, it must be together.”

  “Together, then,” he said, and he watched her face as he began a slow rhythm, adjusting it to the rhythm of her own body until they moved together. His eyes grew heavy with passion. His face glistened with perspiration.