Don’t let him sense your discomfort, she counseled herself. Don’t let him know you care. All you’ve got left is your dignity.
He cleared his throat softly. “Milo is better, I take it?”
It helped her composure that he seemed to find nothing awkward in the situation. “Aye,” she whispered, trying not to disturb Milo.
He looked back and forth between them again, his expression almost grim. “I’ll be gone for most of the morning. I’m going to saddle up Milo’s horse and give myself that tour of Peverell.”
“Ask Gaspar to go with you.”
He grimaced. “I plan to keep my distance from that blackguard. You’d best do the same.”
“Blackguard? I admit he’s rather rough, but he’s always been trustworthy.”
“I think he’s changed.” Alex looked as if he wanted to say more, but he merely shook his head. “Just stay away from him.”
“Alex...”
“Good day, Nicki.”
He closed the curtain and she heard his soft footfalls fading away.
* * *
“Here you are, milady.” Gaspar handed Lady Nicolette the goblet of wine he’d dosed with his strongest headache remedy. “This’ll set his lordship straight.” How he loathed playing the servile attendant. But it was fitting enough, considering how badly he’d bungled things last night. He knew Milo liked to drink from his wife’s cup; he should have taken that into account.
She put aside the boiled onion she’d been holding under the nose of her husband as he lay in his bed by the hearth. “Thank you, Gaspar,” she said as she took the goblet.
“Yes, a thousand thanks,” Milo rasped, “for making her take that nauseating thing away from my face. Stinks like the very bowels of hell.”
Peering into the goblet, Nicolette frowned. “Did you have to put it in wine?”
“Wine?” Milo perked up for the first time all day. He’d been listless since awakening, lying unmoving in his bed while his wife bathed him and changed his clothes. She hadn’t left his side all morning except to attend to her own toilette in the solar while Milo’s manservant, Beal, shaved his chin and held the chamber pot for him. She’d eaten her dinner at his bedside while he took a mid-day nap. Now, at the mention of wine, he struggled upright, his wife hurriedly bolstering his back with pillows. “Where?”
“I asked you to put the headache powder in juice,” she reminded Gaspar tersely.
“His lordship asked for wine, milady.” A patent lie; Milo had been too consumed all morning by his aching head and terrible lethargy to ask for anything.
“Did you?” Nicolette asked her husband.
“I suppose I must have.” Milo reached for the goblet, but his hand quaked so badly that his wife had to hold it to his mouth so he could drink.
“He’s having trouble remembering things,” she told Gaspar as Milo sipped from the goblet. “He can recall nothing of last night. I had to tell him he’d been sick.”
Gaspar smiled, elated by this news. In a way, it was a stroke of luck, Milo having drunk the potion intended for his wife. Now he knew that it did, indeed, affect the memory. This evening, when he dosed Nicolette—and this time he’d make damned sure she drank the stuff herself—he’d have the peace of mind that came from knowing she’d remember nothing that transpired in her solar during the night.
She was looking at him strangely.
“Is something amiss, milady?”
“I was just wondering,” she said evenly, “what it is about my husband’s condition could prompt you to smile.”
Gaspar thought fast. “He underwent a terrible experience last night, milady. Who would want to remember it? Forgetfulness can sometimes be a blessing, don’t you think?”
She waited too long before answering; it made him nervous. “I suppose.” She returned her attention to her husband, setting aside the half-emptied goblet and holding a bowl of eel soup to his mouth. “Your favorite, Milo. I had Cook make it up just for you.”
Her apparent distrust sat ill with Gaspar. Regardless of her coolness in the past, she’d always had the utmost faith and confidence in him, of that he was sure. What had changed to influence her? Could it be the presence of her husband’s cousin at Peverell? On the surface, Alex de Périgeaux treated him civilly enough, but there could be no mistaking the resentment that seethed beneath the surface—no doubt a result of the clobbering Gaspar and his men had dealt him nine years ago. Most likely his antipathy toward Gaspar was rubbing off on Nicolette. Gaspar knew that bastard would be trouble. Perhaps he was still sweet on her—and she on him. Best to keep an eye on those two, the better to foil any budding romantic intrigue before it had the chance to spoil his plans.
He didn’t deserve her, the conniving little whoreson. She was rightfully Gaspar’s. Gaspar had waited years for her, biding his time while he planned and positioned himself. Now that his machinations were on the verge of yielding fruit, he’d be damned if he’d let that cocky young upstart steal the object of his fixation out from under him.
Milo sipped obediently from the bowl, to his wife’s obvious delight. “This is just what you need to help you get your strength back.”
An idiotic sentiment, to Gaspar’s way of thinking. It had been years since Milo could lay claim to strength of any kind.
“I’m going to stay by your side until you’re completely better,” she promised him, tilting the bowl carefully to his mouth.
Milo turned his face to the side, letting soup spill down his chin for his wife to wipe up. “I don’t want you to.”
“But you need me to—”
“Whatever I need, Gaspar can attend to. Isn’t that right, Gaspar?”
Gaspar bowed his head in the servile way that he despised, but which the highborn seemed to find reassuring. “Of course, milord.”
Lady Nicolette cut her gaze briefly toward Gaspar. “But what if he’s not here when you—”
“Then some other servant can help me.”
Gaspar’s hackles rose at being lumped in with the other servants.
“I know you want to feel indispensable, my dear,” Milo said soothingly, “but you do have other duties to attend to.”
“Naught of any importance.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be giving lessons to Alex in the afternoons?” he asked. “You should be doing that right now instead of pouring soup down my throat, which anyone could do.”
“Alex wasn’t at dinner,” she said. “I assume he’s still touring Peverell.”
“Perhaps he’s waiting for you, eager to begin his studies.”
She caught her bottom lip between her teeth. Gaspar liked that nice, wide mouth of hers; he wondered if she’d ever used it the way he’d make her use it tonight.
“Go,” Milo urged, patting her cheek with a jittery hand. “I’m really much better. And, in truth, I’d rather enjoy the solitude.”
“All right,” she said, her eyes lighting with devilment. “But only if you finish the soup.”
He groaned. “My belly’s in a—”
“Your belly’s always in a twist.” She brought the bowl to his mouth again, smiling when he drank from it. “It’s probably because you don’t eat enough.”
Milo finished the soup with surprising speed, whereupon he ordered her gone.
“Stay with him for a bit, won’t you?” she asked Gaspar as she tidied up.
“As you wish, milady.”
“You won this bout,” she informed her complacent husband, “but there’s no way you can keep me from sleeping down here on the pallet until you’re entirely well again.”
Down here? “That’s not necessary, milady,” Gaspar said.
They both turned to look at him.
Bloody hell. His plans depended upon the privacy of her solar. “Beal can sleep on the pallet. ‘Tis too much of a burden for your ladyship.”
“Gaspar’s right,” Milo put in. “You’ll be more comfortable upstairs.”
“It’s not a matter of comfort,” she
said crossly. “You’re my husband! Does no one understand that?”
Neither Gaspar nor Milo could offer a response to that.
“I’m sleeping down here tonight,” she declared as she turned to leave. “And every night until you’re better.”
Gaspar ground his teeth as he watched her go. This was a vexing development. He could drug her wine, but he couldn’t very well tup her on a pallet in the great hall! He’d have to wait to make his move. He’d do it the very first night she went back to the solar.
But damn it all, he’d waited long enough. He was sick to death with waiting for her. His craving for her had become a live thing, a beast that needed to be fed. It strained at his seams, threatening to split him wide open.
“Bloody hell,” he muttered as he glared at the turret doorway, through which she’d disappeared. “Bloody, bloody hell.”
“Anything wrong?” Milo inquired.
Gaspar grabbed the goblet off the table and thrust it at the pathetic bastard. “Here. Drink.”
* * *
Nicki dismounted in her usual place, at the apex of the waterfall, and tethered her beloved dappled mare, Marjolaina, next to Milo’s sorrel gelding. If Atlantes was here, it meant Alex was, too. He had come after all, although it was already mid-afternoon, and they’d agreed to meet every day right after the noon meal. She wondered if he’d been waiting for her all this time.
She untied her saddlebags, which contained a blanket, a tablet, a stylus, a Latin primer and some leftovers from dinner, and carried them down the rugged slope toward where they’d agreed to meet. She squinted through the trees. There was no sign of him up ahead, in the designated spot. Frowning, she turned in a circle, scanning the woods and the stream.
And saw him.
The saddlebags thudded to the ground. He was standing under the waterfall with his back to her, skimming his hands over his hair.
And he was naked.
Chapter 13
Nicki watched in shock as Alex turned toward her, his eyes closed, his head tilted back into the water that crashed behind him, scrubbing at his face. The stream came up only to his calves, so she could see nearly all of him, and, God help her, she couldn’t wrest her gaze from the sight.
She’d never seen a man entirely naked before, even in bed. Milo had always blown the candle out and kept his nightshirt on. And thinking back before that, to Phillipe—well, their joinings had been clandestine and frantic. He’d untie his chausses and throw her skirts up, and it would be over within moments.
Water coursed over Alex’s broad shoulders and chest, meandered in rivulets over the densely packed muscles of his stomach. He stood with his weight on his good hip, the damage to his injured one all the more striking for his nudity. It was as if God, having judged him too perfect, had ripped a piece from him to make him as flawed as the rest of mankind.
Watching him like this recalled all the times she’s stolen into Uncle Henri’s chamber to dig the Roman statue out of his chest of valuables, which she’d learned to unlock with her eating knife. She’d sit cross-legged in the rushes and turn the little marble soldier over and over in her hands, marveling at its masculine proportions, its air of virility...and wondering what the devil was hidden underneath that tiny leaf.
Alex’s vital part could never fit under a leaf of any kind—and it was at rest. Nicki shuddered with a certain nervous fascination, imagining what it must be like to lie with such a man. She’d almost found out nine years ago. Would it have been a union of pain or pleasure? Pain most likely, despite her lack of a maidenhead; he’d been young and inexperienced.
Not so anymore.
He opened his eyes and looked at her.
She wheeled around and stumbled over her saddlebags.
“Nicki!”
Gaining her feet, she seized the saddlebags with one hand and her skirts with the other and fled toward her horse. She passed a boulder she hadn’t noticed before, on which his clothes were carelessly tossed.
“Wait!”
She heard the ripple of water as he waded out of the stream, and quickened her pace.
“Nicki, don’t go.” He was closer.
She threw the saddlebags over Marjolaina’s back and stepped into the stirrup.
He gripped her shoulders from behind. “Please, Nicki, don’t go.” His breathing was harsh in her ears.
She felt the heat of him at her back, the dampness of his hands through the thin wool of her tunic.
“I’d decided you weren’t coming,” he said breathlessly, without unhanding her. “I was just trying to wash off the sweat from my ride.” He kneaded her shoulders, moved infinitesimally closer. “I was so glad to see you. Please stay.”
He was holding onto her, totally and completely naked, begging her to not to go. Nicki’s heart pounded wildly when he reached around her to gently grip her foot, guiding it out of the stirrup and onto the ground.
“You don’t want to go.” His warm breath tickled her ear.
She closed her eyes. A riot of images bombarded her—things she wanted and shouldn’t want, things she’d almost had but could never have. “Alex...”
His hands slid down to encircle her waist. He moved closer. She felt him pressed up against her from behind, solid and wet and so very warm.
“Put some clothes on,” she said unsteadily.
“Take yours off,” he murmured.
She shoved her foot into the stirrup again and tried to hoist herself into the saddle, but he held on tight to her waist.
“No, don’t! Don’t! Please, Nicki. I won’t touch you.” He backed away from her. “I promise. I swear to God and the saints that I’ll keep my hands off you this afternoon. You know I never break my oaths.”
She slid her foot out of the stirrup, rested her forehead against the cool, smooth leather of the saddle. “It can’t be like that between us, Alex.” Christ, if only it could. If only it could. She wanted him—body and soul—unbearably. If he wanted her the same way—wanted her heart and not just her favors—she might even be tempted to yield to him, despite all the risks and the sinfulness of it. But he didn’t, and that gave her strength.
“I just...” he began. “I just wanted—”
“I know what you wanted,” she said. “The same thing you wanted nine years ago. But you can offer me no more now than you could then. Less, for I’m a wedded woman. And at least then, you loved me. Now, all you feel for me is lust.”
“Nicki—”
“Tell me I’m wrong.” She turned to face him, forgetting for the moment his state of undress. Cheeks stinging, she spun back around. “Tell me you want more, that the Lone Wolf has changed his ways, that he wants the attachments he used to scorn. That he’s ruled by his heart, and not his cock.” She bit her lip, astounded that she’d uttered such a coarse word.
She waited for Alex to laugh at her, but he didn’t. He was silent—too silent. No protestations, no denials, no promises.
“I thought so,” she said soberly.
He fell silent for a long moment. “Are you still willing to teach me to read and write?”
“‘Tisn’t just an excuse to get me alone, and...”
“Nay, I promise it’s not. Didn’t I just vow not to touch you? Please stay, Nicki. Please.”
She rubbed at a scratch on her saddle. “Get dressed.”
“All right.”
She heard him retreat to the boulder on which his clothes were heaped. Presently he said, amusement in his voice, “It’s safe to turn around now.” She did. He tied off his underdrawers and smiled at her. “Better?”
“Completely dressed.”
“Come, now. You’ve seen me in my drawers, and there’s no one else here. And I’m wet. I’d really rather wait—”
“Then I’d really rather leave.” She turned around.
“All right!” From the direction of the boulder came the soft sounds of clothing being donned. “You don’t mind if I dispense with the tunic, I hope. It’s turned hot.”
�
��Of course not.” She dragged the saddlebags off her mount and strode toward him, dismayed at the way his shirt and braies clung to his damp body. How would she keep from staring?
“Here, let me carry that.” Alex took the saddlebags from her and brought them to a sea of ferns shaded by ancient oaks. “This seems like a good spot.” He pulled out the blanket and whipped it open, laying it on the ferns and smoothing it down. Looking up, he met her gaze and smiled. “Soft as a feather bed.”
Nicki groaned inwardly. Perhaps conceding to the teaching wasn’t such a wise idea, after all.
* * *
Idiot. Alex lay on his stomach, carefully inscribing the Latin alphabet onto his wax tablet. Did you have to tell her to take her clothes off, for pity’s sake?
He may as well have ordered her to lie down and spread her legs. Milo had praised his reputed finesse with the fairer sex, and here he was trying to seduce the delicate and refined Nicolette de St. Clair by manhandling her—stark naked, no less. What was the matter with him?
He was overeager, that’s what—impatient to do the deed and be gone, having fulfilled his oath to Milo and saved Nicki from ruin, but his impatience had made him clumsy as a spotty youth taking a stab at his first kitchen wench.
He’d have to change his tactics. He’d have to slow down, ingratiate himself with her, make her trust him. Make her like him.
He stole a glance at her as she lay on her back gazing at the trees overhead, bathed in shadow spattered with wavering patches of sunlight. Christ, she took his breath away. She always had.
Just as she had always, he reminded himself, been other than what she seemed. An undercurrent of deceit had governed not just her actions, but her very being. How could he have known, as he wooed her so ardently in Périgeaux, that she’d squandered her precious virtue long before he’d ever met her? At sixteen, she’d lain beneath some faceless man and surrendered to his lechery, let him plant his bastard in her belly, yet now she had the temerity to play the blushing lady of virtue.
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