This Towering Passion

by Valerie Sherwood

  “Faith, I think you mean that,” he murmured, and her senses swam as his lips came down on hers in a warm, compelling kiss. Probing, his tongue forced open her lips and quested within. Her breath came faster and she was trembling as he let her go. But still she stood firm and straight as a young sapling, not yielding in his arms.

  “A whole month we’ve been on the run, you and I,” he murmured as, lingeringly, he let her go. “Yet still you fight me. Why?”

  “I’m not yours,” she said unsteadily.

  “Think you not?” As abruptly as he had let her go he pounced on her again, and this time Lenore struggled almost in panic to be free of him. But this time there was no escape. He held her in a firm grip and with his free hand tugged at her bodice till it departed her shoulders and glided toward her waist. Her young breasts burst free of their bounds as her chemise ribbon broke, trembling as she twisted away from him.

  With an easy gesture he swept her back against him and buried his face in the soft white curve of her neck where it joined her smooth shoulder. Then downward inexorably his lips moved until they took possession of one trembling, snowy breast.

  Now he had lifted her skirts, and the moonlight silvered her long thrashing white legs. She made one last desperate effort to be free of him before they fell together, like falling leaves, to the soft forest grass in the shadow of a great gnarled oak.

  All the time they had ridden together, she had denied to herself the torrents of emotion that had been unleashed in her that first night Geoffrey had taken her in his arms. She had steadfastly refused to admit that she could feel the very pressure of his gaze, that his lightest touch thrilled her. But now her senses swayed and tumbled as his questing hands moved her to passion, and she felt herself yielding, yielding to the force of his will, the strength of his arm, the power of his desire for her.

  Then the floodgates within her burst, and torrents of emotion cascaded and roiled within her. Bright passion drove her recklessly forward, like a leaf tossed upon wild rapids that burst through high, narrow-walled cliffs. His every touch spurred her on, and the world slid away, forgotten, to be replaced by a dream landscape. There was no reality but this—this wild, sweet rapture she had found in his arms as their bodies locked together and strained and tumbled on the soft earth.

  She clung to him, every sense alive, flaming with desire, wanting him, needing him, yearning toward him. And she murmured small incoherent things as her body quivered and her back arched and she was borne up in ecstasy to some high bright world beyond the lacy treetops where summer never ended and winter never came.

  And when at last she floated down and lay beside him. in the dappled moonlight, she knew that her love for Jamie had been young love, a young girl’s love born of dreams and hoping, but that what she felt for Geoffrey was something else, a woman’s full-blown passion that burned white-hot and constricted her chest and interfered with her breathing and shook her slender body as if a hurricane battered at her and heightened all her sensations to wild and reckless peaks.

  As she rested there in languorous silken bliss, something perverse and as old as Eve made her sigh, “You promised you would not take me against my will.”

  Geoffrey rolled over on one lean arm to consider her gravely, in the moonlight. “Tell me,” he challenged, “that what I did was against your will.”

  “No,” she murmured honestly, amethyst lights flickering from her shadowed violet eyes. “It was not against my will, Geoffrey.”

  He laughed softly and dragged light triumphant fingers across the pink tips of her breasts, and when she quivered and her eyelids fluttered shut, he planted a kiss on each trembling nipple and lay back in luxurious contentment alongside her.

  Beside him, Lenore shivered—but not from cold.

  She knew that tonight she had found her lover, the one man out of all the world designed for her alone.

  When at last he rose with a sigh and offered her his hand that she might rise, too, when he bent and very tenderly kissed the top of her head, and wrapped her in his cloak against the dew, and lay on his arm and gazed on her with a kind of wonder, it was more than handfasting, more than her reckless promise to Jamie, more than she had ever felt for any man.

  For to Lenore this was no trial-for-a-year marriage that would only be a true marriage if it lasted for a year and a day. She knew now why she’d fought him since the moment they met—it was her own overwhelming attraction for him she’d been fighting. She’d been fighting herself—and he knew it, had known it from the first. And now all her defenses were down and she was his. Utterly. Completely. Forever.

  Though the vows were unspoken, they were wed that night on the wild moors. Even though they were fugitives and dared not legalize it in a kirk, to Lenore it was a marriage that would outlast her life.

  CHAPTER 6

  For two days and nights they lingered in their sheltered camp in Dartmoor, Lenore and her lover. There beneath the frowning high tors with the strong west wind blowing, they sought each other’s arms and made love again and again—and Lenore had never felt so free—or so fulfilled.

  Geoffrey, whose gray eyes held a kindling light as he watched her performing even the smallest chores about their makeshift camp, asked her where she would like to go next—it was all one to him, and doubtless they’d be harried wherever they went, but winter was coming and they could not winter on the wild moors, for snow would soon be sifting down on the bogs and icy winds howling over the heath.

  “A bridal gift?” smiled Lenore. “A new place?”

  “A change of scene is all I can give you,” said Geoffrey huskily. “Though God willing, one day I’ll do much better by you.”

  “I am content with these scenes,” sighed Lenore, looking up at the gnarled oak above them, the great tree that had sheltered them on the night of their silken joining and past it to the high tors rearing into the sky. “But you are right, we cannot winter here. Still—I remember long winter nights in the Cotswolds when frost made a fairyland of the forest and my mother—oh, I was very little then—told me stories about King Arthur and his knights Are we not very near the coast? Think you we could visit Tintagel Castle where Arthur was born?”

  At this shy request, Geoffrey’s brows shot up. “I've been there. Tis some six or seven leagues west of Launceton. But would you not rather visit Camelford, which is but two or three leagues distant and which men say is ancient Camelot?”

  “No, there might be soldiers there,” she said hastily. “But surely not in a ruined castle.”

  “ ’Tis an easy wish to grant,” he smiled. “I had thought you might ask me to take you to Paris or to Rome—for which, unfortunately, I have not the passage money.”

  Lenore, unaccustomedly shy with him this morning, having shared one of the secret longings of her childhood with him, looked down and plucked at the hem of her worn skirt. She would never have asked Geoffrey for something beyond his reach; in time he would know that about her, of course.

  Leaving the tors and heath and treacherous bogs of Dartmoor behind them, they set out. Into the wild reaches of Cornwall they plunged, where the southwest coast of England reached out into the sea toward the Scilly Isles and ancient circles of crude stones stabbed stern fingers at the sky. Rugged Cornwall, whose roots were lost in antiquity, where the Phoenicians had sailed their frail craft to take on tin and copper, where men had worked the deep mines since time immemorial. Cornwall, which the Celts had wrested at last from the iron grip of Rome, only to yield it in the time of Athelstane to the Saxon axe.

  Moving by easy stages, camping on the way in quiet, out-of-the-way spots, they reached the cliffs at dusk and laid up in a small clump of stunted trees near Tintagel. Once again they had reached the coast.

  The next morning they rode down to the ancient ruins of Tintagel Castle and sat for a while on the cliffs overlooking the blue sea. Lenore, drifting in a honeymoon of contentment with her lover, smiled dreamily as she considered the ancient stones of Tintagel. This fortress str
onghold was the birthplace of Arthur, King of Britain, hero of a hundred legends. Husband to the lovely, faithless Guinevere...

  “Beyond is Ireland,” said Geoffrey with a careless wave of his hand.

  Lenore’s violet gaze spun over the gull-swept sky and the distant reaches of the wild seas. I love him, she thought, turning a tender, shadowed glance toward the dark, stalwart man who bestrode the bay horse beside her. This melting feeling I have whenever I look at him is called Love. It has melted the ice around my cold heart, and I will never be cold again....

  She did not say that, of course. She said simply, “It is lovely.”

  Geoffrey nodded. How could he know that inwardly Lenore was likening herself to lost Guinevere, who had turned from golden safety to a dark, exciting stranger— Lancelot. Geoffrey was her Lancelot and she his Guinevere . . . and she longed to hold him in her arms this very moment and tell him how many ways she loved him.

  With luminous eyes, she eased from Snowfire’s back. Geoffrey, sensing her soft mood, smiled down at her and dismounted, leading the horses to a sheltered place among the ancient lichened stones, a place where soft grasses blew invitingly in the sea wind. And while their horses cropped the clumpy grass, they made love there, touching each other tenderly and with love in their eyes and in their hearts. Quivering, thrilling, a sob caught in Lenore’s throat as her twined arms pulled him fiercely to her and they lay in a trembling tangle of arms and legs on the soft grass. Lenore’s body pressed vibrantly against Geoffrey’s, and her love was as soaring as Guinevere’s—and tinged with guilt, as Guinevere’s must have been, for she’d been brought up in the kirk, and this man she’d taken for her own without benefit of clergy. Not even the half-status of handfasting was theirs to claim. . . .

  Later, with dreaming eyes, her body thrilling with memories of the time just past, she strolled with Geoffrey along the low stone wall that curved about the rugged windswept cliffs, looking out to sea where dragon ships once roamed. He matched his long stride to hers; her skirts whipped in the wind and her red-gold hair streamed out behind her. Lenore felt in her secret heart that she could have spent her life at Tintagel and was certain that the magic of the days just passed and her day here on the cliffs of Cornwall would be with her always.

  Completely in tune in every way, here in this storied countryside that had seen so much of England’s rich history, they forgot they were fugitives and walked hand in hand down to the base of the rocky cliffs. Lenore fresh from her lover’s arms, took long deep breaths of the bracing sea air, smiled down at starfish and sea urchins trapped in the tidepools, touched the algae-eating limpets that clung to the cliff’s rock face, and stretched out her arms for very joy.

  At dusk they bought a plump pilchard from a smiling, weatherbeaten fisherman and cooked it over a fire in a sheltered place among the rocks. The night wind blew her hair softly and scattered sparks like fireflies as she cooked it. She looked up to see Geoffrey watching her fondly.

  “What are your parents like?” she asked, pushing back the locks of hair that fell down around her flushed face.

  He laughed shortly. “My father is a stern, tall man with a voice like stones crunching together. ’Tis said I resemble him in nothing but his height. He disowned me for my dissolute ways—for wenching, for gaming, for following the King—all manner of reasons. But the real one’s that we disagreed on Cromwell. He’s sure Cromwell will hold the country, and he wants to be on the winning side. My older brother’s his darling—he’s everything I’m not.”

  “And your mother?” she pursued, frowning. “What does she say?”

  “I never knew my mother. She died when I was born, and my father never talks about her. He married again almost immediately, and I was brought up by his new wife. She’s childless but she too prefers my brother.”

  “But surely you have a portrait of your mother? You know what she looked like?”

  “No. To be sure, there was one, but my father burned it—along with all else that would remind him of her. It seems they had some falling out shortly before my birth and ’tis thought he pushed her down the stairs and brought on my birth prematurely. Anyway, he drove her out and ’tis said she died then or shortly after. Mayhap she cuckolded him. I’ll never know, because his new wife made a clean sweep of the servants.”

  “Oh, I cannot think she cuckolded him,” protested Lenore, shocked.

  “ ’Tis possible,” he shrugged. “My father in a rage once told me ’twas where I’d gotten my bad blood. I’ve always assumed I resembled her—which could have contributed to his dislike of me.”

  “You might have asked her people what she was like,” said Lenore, feeling sorry for this abused and cast-off wife whose forbidding husband had a voice like gravel.

  “She had no living kin. Only a guardian, and he was an old man who died before I was three years old. She was from Northumberland. A dour country. I’d not blame her if she flirted a bit, coming from a bleak place and marrying a man old enough to be her father and as grim as her native hills!”

  “You don’t hate your father,” smiled Lenore, reaching out fondly to touch his coat sleeve. “You only pretend to.”

  “No, I don’t hate him.” He sighed. “ ’Tis the other way around. Watch out, you’ll drop the fish in the fire.”

  “Never,” said Lenore, with a deft gesture holding it just the right height above the flames. “ ’Twould have been better if we could have wrapped it and packed it between the hot coals.”

  “I’d starve if we waited for that. Faith, I’m hungry enough to eat it raw!”

  She laughed and deftly served him his portion on a trencher of clean-washed flat rock. “Careful, ’tis hot,” she warned.

  “Ye’ve taken well to the roving life,” he approved her, taking the food from her with some care, testing it with an experimental finger and drawing it quickly away “Some women might have died from the hardships of our journey. You,” he added with a grin, “seem to thrive on it!”

  Lenore leaned back against the rocks, letting her portion cool a bit. “And would you have liked me better, she challenged, “had I been some simpering French lady you met while serving your King?”

  He gave her a startled look. “Why d’ye ask that Lenore?”

  She shrugged and tucked her feet up under her. “I but wondered if you preferred breeding to health,” she said tartly.

  “I prefer you,” he said in a grave voice. But he was silent as they ate. Lenore, watching him covertly as she picked at her fish, realized his father’s disavowal must have hurt Geoffrey more than he cared to say. She would make it up to him, she promised herself.

  After they’d eaten, with the fire burning low there in their sheltered place in the rocks, with the shapes of the grazing horses dark against a starlit sky, they moved like the incoming tide into each other’s arms, and Lenore’s wild spirit responded fiercely as Geoffrey made love to her.

  There was an unleashed violence in him tonight, a rough possessiveness, and she guessed it was brought on by this talk of home. His fierce caresses twanged through her like the quivering strings of a mighty harp, and she fitted her body to his as a scabbard fits a sword and tried to show him in every little way that she was his . . , his forever... his alone.

  Remembering how he had cursed their pursuit and often wished himself across the Channel with the King, she murmured against his dark hair, “I would go with you anywhere, Geoffrey. To France, if that is your wish.”

  As if she had flicked a raw place, she thought he winced. Then he seized her in so fierce a grip that words were forgotten as, thoughts aswirl, bodies locked, they spun toward the distant stars in a fiery eternity of passion and fulfillment.

  Afterward, she lay dreaming within the magic circle his arms, her being full and contented. She would have something to tell Geoffrey soon, something that only she knew, but there was no hurry.

  I am going to have a child, she thought as she drifted off to sleep. A son. And I will name him Geoffrey.

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nbsp; CHAPTER 7

  They roved northeast again, gloriously in love, shunning the towns and taking pleasure only in each other’s company. They skirted Bridgwater and Taunton and rode on a day of blue skies with the shadows of clouds tinting the landscape, past ancient Glastonbury Abbey.

  Here was the famous Glastonbury thorn which bloomed at midnight on Christmas Day. Here was the fabled Isle of Avalon. It pained Lenore to see men busily quarrying stone from the beautiful hulk of the Abbey, where Henry VIII had ordered the last abbot hanged. Entombed somewhere beneath its stone floor, legend said, lay Guinevere with her golden hair—and Arthur, the King she had loved and deceived. And where was Lancelot? A cold feeling invaded Lenore, though the sun was warm. Those golden lovers had seemed so real to her at Tintagel. Now, staring soberly at the lichened stones, she was reminded that even lovers die.

  “There is a hawthorn here,” she said moodily, “that blooms at midnight on Christmas Day.”

  She turned away disconsolate when Geoffrey told her the Puritans had cut down the thorn tree during the Civil War.

  “It will bloom again,” Geoffrey comforted her. “It will send up sprouts. Thorns are hard to kill.”

  “I’ve seen enough of ruins,” sighed Lenore. “Sometimes it seems to me all England is a ruin—all the tops nocked off the crossroads markers, houses blown up and burned and looted.”

  “Your mood will improve with a good dinner,” predicted Geoffrey cheerfully. “We’ll push on. There’s a market town up ahead.”

  They pushed on, but Lenore’s mood of depression did not improve. She was beginning to feel sick in the mornings now and sometimes queasy at odd times through the day. Her morning sickness confirmed her belief in what she had not yet told Geoffrey—that she was pregnant.

  They pressed east, toward Salisbury. They were more impudent now, less afraid, for England was tiring of its witchhunt for Royalists, and this was evidenced by fewer soldiery on the road, less interest in strangers. At a market town they paused and, because Snowfire was fast, Geoffrey raced him in an impromptu race that was held. He was beaten by a slender lad on a big black gelding.