by Jill Barnett
But her feet and arms would not obey her mind. She did not move.
Neither of them moved. Neither of them spoke.
Tension spun its threads around them, then something else, something she could not name washed over her, kind of an excitement that was there in both her breath and her blood, a realization, and as the silence stretched onward, something else happened. Something changed. Whatever this thing was between them began to rise higher and higher, like the crescendo at the end of a madrigal, the climax to the tale being sung, the same tense moment when all in the room were on the edge of their seats, not breathing, but waiting.
They were as taut as if someone were twisting them together, forcing them closer and closer. Tighter and tighter. There was almost a sound or feel to what was between them, and it sped like fire through her, made the air between them thrum and sing in her ears, then stole her breath clean away.
It even drowned out the distant sounds of the crowd cheering on the races. It was making everything melt away like small drops of water under a hot, summer sun. The way there is suddenly nothing, just the heat beating down on you.
That was what this feeling was like. That was what she could not control. The outside world had withered away and there were only the two of them, standing in this dark niche and looking at each other as if they were trapped inside a cocoon of sudden, pounding desire.
She saw the same passion, or something like it, flicker in his eyes, and thought this must be the way of lovers, this thing that clouded her mind and her sense. He felt it, too. And she understood something of love then, of how when you looked at each other, it was as if you were looking into the same reflection. The same need. The same desire. They burned together, he and she.
She knew then and there that she would remember this moment forever, the way you remembered all the important moments that made up your life. This was love, pure and true. A grand desire and passion, things she thought she would never feel. But she felt them now, almost as if she were born with the feelings deep inside of her, where they had been waiting for him alone.
She would not run away. Not that it mattered much, for she could not have done so had she wanted to. Where she gathered the courage to do what she did next would amaze her for years to come.
But then pride was nothing compared to what she was feeling inside of her, between them, around them. Pride did not rush through your blood. Pride did not lift your heart and steal your breath. Oh-God-in-heaven-above but pride did not look like this man.
She was the first to move. She grabbed his head and pulled it down to her mouth, kissing him hard with her lips compressed and her mouth tightly closed.
And she tried to fool herself, to lie and think she was the one who started this, and she would be the one to end it
I shall give you your kiss. Your forfeit. I shall give it to you now, but on my terms. I will be the one in control.
Chapter 5
He knew the moment she lost control. It was in the way she kissed him. She thought it was her idea. It was not.
That single, tight-lipped kiss, the one she thought was paying her debt, changed the instant he ran his tongue slowly along the line of her lips. She opened her mouth and made a small, odd sound, as if all the secrets she had been keeping had just escaped.
She had no knowledge of this kind of desire. He knew that. While only three years older than she, he was years older in experience. But that was not what bothered him for that single moment in time, no longer than it took to stroke her mouth. What bothered him was something different, a strange, niggling feeling that he was losing something in this game he played. He could not name what it was, but he felt as if something were slipping away from him. Warriors were trained to respect their instinct as well as their knowledge and skill. This was pure instinct.
But he ignored it, because he could not define it. Whatever it was, it did not matter to him. It was likely a product of too many tankards of ale and too little sleep the night before.
He moved his hands from the wall and slid them under her, grasping her bottom in his hands and lifting her higher, before he slid one hand up to hold the back of her head, to keep her mouth where he wanted it, to keep in control. His tongue went deep inside her mouth, tasting those sweet secrets she spilled, and he knew the moment she was lost.
He could feel surrender in her whole body. The way she loosened her firm grip on his head and instead, rubbed one hand through his hair as if driven solely by her own desire, as if her active and quick little mind was no longer part of this.
It was in the way she shifted a little and pressed closer to his body, the way her tongue suddenly followed his. This young passionate girl with all her daring, with all her defiance and her bold front was truly burning for him.
It would be so easy to go farther.
Perhaps too easy.
His hand was moving toward her hem, to touch an ankle and move upward. He wanted to touch her legs, the soft backs of her knees, her thighs. He wanted her breasts in his hands, to feel the weight of them, to press his thumbs against the tips and feel them harden because he’d touched them. And he wanted to taste them. He wanted to taste all of her.
He bent slightly, and his palm was around her ankle. The thin leather ties on her slipper were crossed and knotted there. Tangled like confused emotions.
She was not stopping him. She made no move to do so. She was his for the taking.
Sofia Howard, who let no one near her and who chased away anyone who dared to try to even court her, had her tongue in his mouth and one leg almost hooked around his waist.
This was his plan.
But, too, he wanted her badly, and that was not part of what he had planned.
He broke away as swiftly as someone who had been kept captive, releasing her so abruptly a small, startled cry escaped her lips.
He took two steps back and away. For one small moment, he did not move. He did not know why, he just did not. His breath was not smooth and even. Neither was his heartbeat. He looked at her then.
She stood there, staring at him from wounded, puzzled eyes, like some small, confused animal that was just kicked or a bird that had fallen from its nest.
“I need to leave.” His voice? It sounded deeper than usual, as if it were coming from someone else, like his father.
She looked down as if she were trying to hide the fact that she looked so uncertain. He understood pride, understood his own anyway. But she was a woman, and a young woman, only five and ten. Pride was not important for a woman.
He raised his hand to her face, touched her pale cheek, then stroked her jaw and tilted her chin up with a knuckle.
Her eyes were huge, those eyes that a man could fall into too easily and so many already had, in spite of her need to send them running.
But any cynicism he felt seemed to wither away when he saw there was some moistness there. She was on the verge of crying. Tears seemed to be poised on the rims of her thick black lashes. It surprised him. He did not think Sofia Howard was one to succumb to fits of tears.
Ah, she truly was an innocent to feel a kiss so strongly. But that thought did not stop him. He ran his thumb along her swollen, moist lips. “Meet me in the Queen’s garden at the first bell of Vespers, Sweet Sofia. We will finish this.”
She shook her head.
He gave her a look meant to spark a challenge and added a laugh of derision. “You will not honor your debt?”
She said nothing, just looked at him for a long moment, the kind of tense and brittle moment when the air hung with something that would not let you turn away. She was gauging him, he knew, and searching for something in his face, but he knew well how to hide what he felt, knew it was most important with her, for she was clever and he did not doubt that she would use any weakness to her own advantage. He knew, too, that she would never find what she was looking for there.
He shrugged, then shook his head. He turned and opened the door, giving the final, parting shot. “I forgot who I wa
s dealing with.”
Her head snapped up quicker than a bowstring. “What do you mean by that?”
He faced her. “Only that you are a woman, and women know little of honor.” With that he stepped outside and pulled the door closed behind him, then walked a few feet away.
The door flew open and crashed against the stone wall.
He turned, cast a casual look over one shoulder.
She came charging through the open door with her head high and her look fiery. “I know of honor, Tobin de Clare.” She almost spat the words. “And I will be in the garden at Vespers.” Her hands were in tight, white fists in front of her. She seemed to realize it and relaxed her stance, then placed her hands on her cocked hips and gave him one of her direct looks. “Vespers. After the first bell. Then we shall settle this for good, you and I.”
He said nothing. He only turned and walked away.
He loved to win.
Sofia felt lost, almost as lost as she had felt on the day the Queen had brought her mother’s things to her. It had been three years since then, almost four, and yet she still stood in her bedchamber staring hopelessly down at the tester bed the same way she had that day.
There on the coverlet lay a long strand of exquisite pearls—her mother’s pearls—that were the same, soft color as pale skin under the glow of a full moon. She wondered how something that looked so lovely, so almost magical, could feel so wrong on her. They were her mother’s. Was there not some part of her mother in her?
But she did not feel lovely when she tried to wear them. What she felt instead was defeat and frustration. Just like she always felt when she was all alone and faced with the knowledge that she would, at some point in her future, be forced to act female, to behave like a woman.
She took a fragile step closer to the bed, where she dropped a handful of golden beads. They rolled together, pooling in the dip of the coverlet.
Until a few moments before, those beads had been whole—pretty little golden beads that shimmered when she held them up to the candlelight.
Now they were broken, single beads, loose, with no thread to hold them together, like the family she was born into.
She had tried to weave them into her hair. But they had broken, scattered in all directions. She had crawled around the entire room, until she found every last one of them, as if finding them would somehow heal her life.
But it didn’t.
The beads, the pearls, both lay on the bed next to a length of fine, embroidered raye, and a deep blue cloak made of the softest wool from Flanders with embroidery so fine the stitches were almost invisible.
These were her mother’s most precious things. A legacy passed on from mother to daughter, passed on from one woman to another. Her one link to the family she’d had for only a few years, before time and fate and God took them away so there was no one left but her.
She looked down at the jewels and the clothes, even placed her hands flat on them, then she closed her eyes as tightly as she could, wanting and needing at that moment to remember her mother’s face.
She could remember when she was small, standing at the top of the stairs at Torwick Castle. She could remember the cold chill of the floor tiles on her bare feet. She could remember the size of the great doors at the bottom of the staircase, doors so big they looked as if they opened into an enormous new world.
She could remember watching her mother and father walk down those steps that led toward the great doors of her family’s home, and all the way down, her mother’s long blue cloak would almost float along behind her.
But no matter what she did she could not remember her mother’s face. She opened her eyes and quickly took her hands away from the items on the bed, as if they had burned her. She knew the image of her mother was gone forever and nothing she could do would bring it back. Even late at night, those times when she lay there with her eyes closed, half in dreams, trying to see her, she only saw a blank outline of a woman, like a wall painting that was never finished.
Once in a while, when she looked into the polished metal that hung above her laver in her chamber, she would catch a small glimpse of something vaguely familiar in her own face, an expression, something in the brow or the chin, or perhaps in the shape of her eyes.
It seemed to her that there should be some kind of law of nature that would carve a mother’s face on the memory forever. She tried repeatedly to figure out how to wear her mother’s things, because she thought perhaps she could jar her memory if only she could somehow re-create her mother’s look.
But she could not.
The length of silken cloth looked odd, like some labarum worn by the Archbishop. The cloak looked just like any one of her own cloaks; it did not make her stand taller or walk down stairs as if she were floating. It only wrapped itself around her and provided some amount of warmth and a bright bit of color.
Whenever she tried to wear the pearls they looked out of place, the same way Sofia felt most of the time.
Frustrated, she sat down on the bed and rested her chin on one fist, swinging her feet in annoyance. Sometimes she wished the Queen had never given her mother’s things to her.
But she had, right after Sofia had started her first woman’s flow. For two entire days she had hidden in an old storage room in the barbican, frightened, crying, shaking, because she had thought she was dying and was afraid to tell anyone.
Queen Eleanor had found her, coaxed her into confessing all, then explained to her “those things women were supposed to know.”
Sofia had understood the importance of that day, what it should have been even before Eleanor told her it was a special time and that was why she was giving Sofia her mother’s possessions. She was now becoming a woman. Eleanor explained to her that girls who were betrothed could wed soon after the start of their flow. She explained why they could begin their own lives and their own families. She explained how things were between men and women and where babes came from. That day had been one of those times when mothers were supposed to pass on knowledge to their daughters.
Sofia had gone from girlhood to being a young woman in one single day. She was suddenly marriageable. She was no longer playing at being someone. And she felt the loss of her mother so keenly then, because she knew it was the time when mothers told their daughters about life and birth and love, but the Queen had to do it instead.
Eleanor had handed her the bundle of her mother’s possessions, wrapped inside of the blue woolen cloak with its golden threads and intricate embroidery, then left her alone.
She was all alone with her thoughts that night, and with her new body, one that was a woman’s body instead the of the old, comfortable one she had always known. It cramped and twinged. Pain rang in her belly like the sound of a snapping bow. It hurt. She had finally cried herself to sleep under that blue cloak, with the pearls and cloth hugged to her chest, because it made her feel as if some part of her mother was there with her.
And now, at this moment, another special day in a woman’s life: the first time her heart sang from something she thought might be true love, she stood in the same bedchamber, waiting for the bells to toll Vespers, looking down at her mother’s things, and she felt as lost and stupid and lonely now as she had on that day long ago.
She wanted to ask her mother about what she was feeling. Were her feelings what every girl felt? Did they mean what she thought they meant? Was this wild emotion that ran through her love? It felt like love. If not, it should be love. And somewhere deep down inside of her, she wanted to share the joy of what she felt with someone who was part of her, share the thrill and the excitement she felt with someone important, with her own mother.
Instead she looked at the pearls she did not know how to wear, the cloth that looked wrong when she pinned it to her gown, the broken beads, and Sofia felt that ever-present emptiness come over her again, that desolate feeling that she was living in a different world from everyone else, the same way she felt when she was all alone, and could not fool herse
lf the way she fooled the rest of the world.
She hid from the world her weaknesses and fears with a wall of false bravado. Her fierce need to strive to be something other than just a woman actually hid her deepest secret, the thing that shamed her and made her fight so hard to be different.
Sofia Howard did not know what a woman truly was.
Suddenly the bells tolled loudly. The sound made her jump. It was Vespers. She sat there, chewing her lip, staring at her hands and her gown and her slippers. She took a deep breath, then called herself a coward. It took a minute for her to straighten her shoulders, to find the courage to stand up and go after what she wanted.
She started for the door. She could almost feel her blood beginning to warm, to beat like tourney drums through her veins. Anticipation. It was something she had been feeling all day, this wonderful and wildly wicked thrill she felt inside of her just at the mere thought of Tobin de Clare.
She paused at the door to her bedchamber, her hand resting on the thick oak planking. Hope was an odd thing. Even the most cynical person in the world could not completely kill it off. Hope stayed in one’s mind, a small spark waiting for a whiff of wind to make it flame.
She glanced back at the bed, then ran over and snatched up the blue cloak. She held it for just one moment, then she threw it over her shoulders and tied the strings tightly under her chin.
A moment later she was running down the steps and heading for the Queen’s garden. She opened a door in the Gloriette and went outside into the bailey. She hugged the blue cloak around her shoulders; it was a part of her past.
But the eagerness inside of her, the moistness in her eyes and the tight feeling in her chest and her heart, well, that she was certain was her future.
Chapter 6
The sun went down slowly that evening, as if it didn’t want to leave but had no choice because the moon was chasing it down. The air grew cool and crisp. It was April, that complicated time of year when the night air hovered between the last, frosty remnants of winter and the warm beginnings of spring. It could be confusing after a day of warm sunshine; it could lull you into thinking you would not be cold again for a long, long time.