At the King's Command

by Susan Wiggs

  The gypsy horse’s mane and tail were braided with bright ribbons that streamed back in the wind. Stephen had no idea what destination she planned, yet he could no more keep himself from following than the tide could resist the pull of the moon. With a soft clicking of his tongue, he sent Capria in pursuit.

  Juliana’s laughter floated back as she shot across the broad meadow between the south wood and the Chippenham road. The grass glistened with dew, risen in secret in the lightless moments between evening and night. Like diamonds, droplets flew up in the wake of pounding hooves. Faster and faster she rode, as skilled a rider as he had ever seen.

  To his surprise, he found the he enjoyed the challenge of a race. Catching her, snaring her, would not be easy.

  He loved the speed, the wind screaming past his ears, the rapid heartbeat of hooves striking the earth, the hiss and snort of the horses’ panting. He felt the animal beneath him, hot and lathered, her perfectly conditioned body extending and contracting in sinewy rhythm.

  He watched his own shadow racing across the moonlit ground, swift as a storm-driven cloud, toward Juliana.

  Too late, he realized where she was headed.

  She had chosen a path that led to a hidden byway known only to a very few, and a half mile from that was—

  He pounded in the spurs. Capria charged forward and sallied up beside Juliana. Her head whipped toward him and he saw the flash of a dazzling smile.

  He nearly pressed his chest to Capria’s pumping neck in his effort to coax the mare to greater speed. He passed Juliana, then prayed his mare would respond to the maneuver.

  He angled in close to Juliana. With his hands high on the neck and the reins choked short, he tugged at one side. Capria neatly severed the path of the stallion.

  The gypsy-trained horse behaved differently from an ordinary one. Rather than veering off on a new path, the stallion reared.

  Polished hooves raked the night air. The animal’s eyes rolled, showing white. Its lips peeled back and it let out a squeal.

  “Juliana!” Stephen yelled, sawing at the reins to stop his mare.

  Juliana clung like a limpet as the stallion rose up to his full vertical height. When the horse came down, Stephen heard a whoosh of breath as the impact emptied her lungs.

  “Hang on,” he called, dismounting and pounding across the field toward her. “Jesu, please hang on. Keep your seat.”

  The stallion’s blood was up, though. The instant its forelegs touched the ground, its rear legs took to the air, snapping up and out. Back and forth it went, like a slender tree harried by a gale force.

  Each time Stephen moved toward the tearing hooves, he was forced back. The stallion was like a warhorse of old, trained to fight as fiercely as its master in battle.

  An eternity seemed to pass, not merely seconds, yet Stephen died a hundred shameful deaths as he watched his wife fighting for her life. He called her name again and again while helplessness clawed at him.

  Have you done in this one, too? King Henry’s mocking words echoed in his memory.

  And then, like a storm skirling out to sea, the tumult subsided. Juliana’s quick, clever hands worked the reins, and the stallion settled, head down and sides fanning like a smithy’s bellows.

  She brushed the flying hair out of her face and looked at Stephen. He braced himself for the tempest of her anger.

  Instead, she laughed. Her hearty shouts of mirth rang out as she spread her arms, reaching out to embrace the very air around her.

  “That was marvelous,” she called. “I had no idea you could be such fun, my lord.”

  “Fun!” he exploded. His emotions were like the horse—out of control despite his efforts to grapple them into submission.

  She dismounted gracefully, her skirts billowing around her and settling on the dew-wet grass. “In Novgorod, we played such a game. Papa insisted it was a war game suited only for boys, but the horse master often let me join in.”

  Stephen stalked across the grass, grabbed her by the shoulders, and hauled her close against his pounding heart. She lifted her smiling face to his.

  And then, with a passion heated by long-denied yearning, he kissed her. Even as he touched his lips to hers, he told himself to resist. Yet he felt such a powerful need that caution flew upward and disappeared like sparks in the sky.

  She brought her arms around his neck and sighed against his mouth. This only sharpened his wild hunger, and he traced her lips with his tongue, tantalizing himself with the shape and the softness of her mouth, tasting the wine she had drunk and drawing small urgent cries from the back of her throat.

  He sank down on one knee, pulling her with him. She came willingly, seeming to melt in warm compliance, as if she had been awaiting this moment.

  “You’ve set me on fire,” he whispered against her mouth. The confession came easily. He kissed her again, harder, and they sank onto the dewy grass, peppery with the scent of wildflowers. No pallet of swansdown could have felt more sumptuous.

  Stephen reveled in the warmth radiating through him, causing the tension in his chest to ease. His tongue probed her soft mouth as if the intimate search would yield the key to her soul. His need ran far deeper than fleshly cravings. He wanted to revere her, to cherish her, to give her pleasure.

  She clung to him, and her almost desperate intensity intrigued him. She was a creature of many facets, and at her core dwelt a reserve of wild passion he wanted to explore. He touched her hair, indulging an urge he had often fought. Like silk it was, fine as gossamer and unbelievably soft, spilling like warm liquid through his outspread fingers.

  “Smoother than sable,” he whispered, drawing a wavy lock across his lips. “I knew it would be.”

  Her head fell back and moonlight showered the arc of her throat. He touched his lips to the pulse leaping there, tasted her skin with his tongue. He loosened the laces of her blouse, and a brush of his fingers pushed it off her shoulders. Her breasts were bathed in pale starlight. Stephen felt a jolt of astonishment tinged with a deliciously forbidden edge of superstition, for no woman had ever looked so beautiful to him. His hand shook as he cupped it first over one breast and then the other.

  God. He had forgotten the satiny weight of a woman’s breast in his hand. The sensation was alien and exotic to a man made of hard muscle and tanned flesh, a man accustomed to keeping himself numb to all feeling.

  He felt the peak draw tight, and he bent his head, brushing his lips gently back and forth, feeling the delicate, velvety texture and glorying in her gasp of surprise and delight.

  Her back arched, and in the moonglow she looked like a pagan offering, mysterious, delectable, irresistible. He took the bud of her breast into his mouth and whisked it with his tongue. And even as desire burned hot at his core, he felt an unbidden tenderness wash over him. He knew with fierce and satisfying certainty that he was the first to bring her to this state of breath-held, bewildered anticipation.

  And through it all, a part of him sat back in judgment and warned that he was going too far with his in-name-only wife. Yet he ignored the caution and control he had schooled into himself over the past years. He was bringing a new part of Juliana to life. He sensed that part had been slumbering inside her for years: the dark passion, the sexual yearning, the womanly desire she had kept at bay … until he had come into her life. And into her arms. It was a wonder she could want him.

  “Stephen?” she said, her hands clutching his shoulders. “What are you … are we …”

  “Hush.” It almost hurt to speak; his throat ached so. He lifted the corner of his mouth in a half smile. “You choose an awkward moment to protest, Baroness.”

  She touched her finger to his lower lip where the taste of her still lingered. “But we both agreed it would be best to—”

  “Hush,” he said again, not wanting to hear his own cold rationality flung back in his face. “There are things I will not take from you, Juliana. And I will not do anything that can’t be undone.” He hoped she understood. “But
let me …” He nuzzled her neck while his leg brushed against hers. “I can give you something.”

  “I do not understand.”

  “I’m not sure I myself understand.” And I need to touch you, he admitted, but only to himself. For weeks, the tension had been building between them, and it was time to ease it. At least for her.

  She did not argue further, this woman who usually would dispute with him whether it was day or night. She turned her head to kiss him, and she was so sweet and pliant that he forgot his vow. Forgot they were adversaries in a marriage of convenience, forgot what had brought them together and what would ultimately tear them apart.

  For now, she was the woman in his arms, and he gave in to his urge to please her. He fondled and suckled her breasts until he heard her breath come in short gasps, felt her legs stir restlessly with need. Catching her moist, open mouth with his, he moved his hand lower, finding the hem of her skirts. He brushed aside the dew-damp fabric and slid his hand upward, finding the shape of her knee and the soft firm flesh of her thigh.

  She gasped, and though she could not know it, he smiled against her lips. It no longer mattered to him whether she was a conniving gypsy or vagabond princess. Right now, she was a woman who desperately wanted the sweet release he could give her.

  He shushed her with soothing whispers. His hands caressed, and she responded with a willingness that renewed his faith in the honesty of physical lust. He pressed her thighs apart and found the nest of curls, the flesh there tender with her wanting. He knew he had pushed her past maidenly modesty, past caring about why she was here and what the future would hold. In her naïveté, she could not know where his touch would take her.

  Ah, but he knew. He knew and he craved it for her. In all ways but one, this would be the death of her innocence. After tonight she would know the dark velvety byways of carnal pleasure. The endless moment of beautiful dying and the breath-held burst of pleasure. There was something selfish in giving her this; he needed to know, at last, that he had never forgotten the brief but fiery power of intimacy.

  He knew instinctively where to please her, where to ease the pressure and where to apply it. She held her entire body taut as a drawn bow, quivering. He found himself holding his breath with her as if he awaited the same rapture.

  And then, just as suddenly, a convulsive movement rocked her, and he felt the rush of her pleasure, heard the half-bewildered, half-exultant cry of her completion. She seemed to melt in his arms as if her bones had turned to water, and Stephen let out his breath, held her close, listened with inexplicable satisfaction to the beating of their hearts.

  “Stephen?” she asked, her voice thready and uncertain.

  He stretched out in the grass beside her, brushed his lips over her damp temple, and tried to ignore the searing pain of self-denial. “Hmm?”

  “What did you … did we … ?”

  He smiled into her soft hair. “What do you think, Juliana?”

  She stirred beside him, pulling up her blouse, pulling down her skirts. But she stayed beside him, pushing her shoulder into the crook of his arm. “I did not know … had no idea. I think you just made love to me. But it seemed a bit … one-sided. Perhaps I should—”

  “Juliana, no.” He made himself stop kissing her hair, stop stroking her shoulder, and forced a mocking laugh. “My dear, you read entirely too much into our little tumble.”

  She propped herself on her elbows and stared straight into his eyes, searching so deeply that he felt certain she could see down to his core, to the shivering soul that hid there behind the bluff facade.

  “Do I?” she asked, never blinking, never taking her eyes off him.

  “Aye,” he lied, dry-mouthed. “There was that tension between us.” He touched her cheek, pretending it was a casual, almost dismissive gesture, knowing it was not. “You pleased me, Juliana, with your idea for turning the abbey into a weaving house. There was a wildness in us both but—”

  “Yes?”

  He could see her holding her breath, waiting for him to declare his true feelings, silently begging him not to hurt her. “But no more,” he said, looking away. “The moment has passed.”

  “No,” she said, striking him lightly on the chest and forcing his gaze back to hers. “Stephen, you know my body better than I do. You knew just how to touch me, just when. Something happened here. I do not begin to understand it, for Laszlo has been very protective of me. I’ve not been privy to the intimacies between a man and a woman. But I refuse to believe you would use this as a way of—of rewarding me or pleasing me.”

  “For God’s sake.” She was getting too close, seeing too much. He thrust her aside and jumped up. “You make much of this when in truth it is so trivial.”

  “Trivial?” She sat up and drew her knees to her chest.

  “So small,” he said, pacing, trying not to wince at the mocking ache in his loins. “Unimportant.”

  She tilted her head to glare up at him. “After tonight I will never look at you—at myself—in quite the same way. That is small? Unimportant?”

  “To me it is,” he snapped. Then he put his fingers to his mouth and whistled for his horse. In truth he wanted her so much that his blood was aflame. He was so hard that it created a burning pain in every nerve, every cell. He wanted her so much that his very teeth ached with it.

  He snared Capria’s trailing reins. “Look. Men and women do this all the time. How could you think I would possibly be moved by a few moments of idle lust?”

  She jumped to her feet. “Damn you, Stephen de Lacey!”

  “No,” he said. “Damn you, Baroness. Damn you for seeking meaning where none was intended.” He would not look at her as he boosted her onto his horse and mounted behind, trying not to wince at the fiery discomfort. He did not want to see her face, for he knew she would read the lies in his own.

  It was a day of dappled sunshine and clouds melting into the green horizon, yet Juliana’s heart felt as cold as winter, as barren as a blighted field. Lost in bewilderment, she watched her husband at work by the river. The large, squarish hands that had brought her such unspeakable pleasure last night now labored over his latest invention.

  “Right ingenious is his lordship,” Jillie said. “Why, with that contraption, we’ll be able to bring the wool to the weavers twice as fast.”

  “Do you think so?” Juliana asked absently. She leaned her elbows on the fence rail and propped her chin in her hands.

  Some yards away, Stephen and William Stumpe, Laszlo and Rodion worked the seines for bundling wool. The seines would be put in the river and drawn downstream from the sheepfolds to the abbey. In that fashion, the raw wool would get a preliminary washing, and the oils could be collected for making soaps and salves.

  “The best ideas are always simple,” said Jillie.

  “Really?” Juliana asked, only half attending. She kept her attention fixed on her husband, and while her body responded with a warm spasm of remembered pleasure, her mind brooded on his harsh dismissal.

  He had lied to her about his feelings. Surely he had. No man could bring a woman so close to heaven and feel nothing himself.

  She held the thought to her heart and caressed him with her gaze. He wore rough workman’s garb—a tunic and jerkin and knee-high boots. Watching him work, she felt a sense of contentment. The feeling took her by surprise, for she had always thought that happiness could never be hers until she avenged her family.

  Jillie was still speaking, but Juliana stopped even pretending to listen. Stephen de Lacey held a never-ending fascination for her. No matter how long she looked at him, she never ceased to see something fresh, some bright new facet.

  Though the group of workmen made bluff and merry company, she sensed a melancholy about her husband. Subtle as the undercurrents beneath a placid stream, his discontent lay hidden, visible only to those who looked for it.

  As she watched, he put aside his bundled seines and stopped to watch a group of children at play. With tattered tunics, skinn
y brown legs, and dirty faces, they careened along the riverbank. Their laughter rose like swifts to the sun-dappled treetops, and they chased a pig-bladder ball with the determined abandon of a horde of barbarians.

  With no notion he was being watched, he had let down his guard. What she glimpsed was the ache of loss, or perhaps the sadness of a promise betrayed, tinged with the winter hues of hopelessness. It was that almost hidden mournfulness that held him apart from others even when he stood in their midst. He had built his anguish into a wall no one could breach.

  And perhaps in the end, Juliana thought, stepping through the fence gate and moving slowly toward her husband, this was what made her care for him, what made her forgive the harsh lashing of his words. Not just the heat of his kisses, the gentleness of his caresses, the explosive ecstasy he had shown her. Those made her hunger for him. But the other qualities awakened her tenderness—the challenge of his melancholy, the mystique of his isolation.

  The lure of his secrets.

  “Stephen.” She spoke his name quietly.

  Startled, he looked away from the children. For a second, pleasure flickered in his eyes; then he fixed a polite expression on his face and gave a courteous nod. “My lady.”

  My lady. How formal he was. How distant. As if he had never chased her across a moonlit field and kissed her. As if he had never lain with her upon the dew-wet grass and brought her to a state of insane completion.

  Her cheeks heated. “I wanted to applaud your work here, my lord.”

  “I work not to win admiration,” he said, glancing at the laborers, “but for those who had their lands taken when the king enclosed the forest.”

  “Of course.” She searched his face for a sign of the man who had held her the night before. The man who had looked at her with his heart in his eyes.

  Instead she saw a cold stranger. “My lord, yestereve—”

  “ ’Tis best forgotten,” he snapped.

  She drew him away from the workmen. His arm felt hard and slick with sweat, and the tenseness of the muscles beneath her fingers brought a fresh wave of remembrance. Beneath the low, spreading branches of an ancient oak tree, she planted herself in front of him, standing on tiptoe to bring herself nose to nose with him. “Tell me you have forgotten.”