Beloved

by Stella Cameron

  Perhaps he was safe.

  But he was dead. Pressure on his chest pushed the last air from his lungs. His own sweat broke to run and mingle with the blood that burned his eyes.

  Screaming. Oh, God, screaming again. They had all held their breath, just as he had, hoping their lives would be spared. Why? Why pray for a life that was all pain, a life that would end soon, anyway?

  He wasn’t dead.

  He could try to get away, to get help—for himself and his wounded men.

  They screamed.

  More horses. Thundering again—coming this way. Men’s voices raised. Shouting. They had returned to finish what they started.

  “No. Leave them. No!”

  An arm clamped tightly about him, clawed at him, pawed at him. Warm breath puffed against his spine. He felt his enemy’s face.

  “Get off. Get off, I tell you!”

  He rolled toward his assailant and struck out with his good right arm. “Damn you! You’ve done your worst.”

  “Stop it!”

  “Not again,” he yelled. His sweat made his hands slick. He needed a knife. “Never again, do you hear me?”

  “Please!”

  “Beg, you bastard!” Saber scrambled over the other’s body, searching for his knife, for any knife. There had been one close by. “Beg.”

  “Please! Oh, please.”

  His fingers found the place where the knife would be. He remembered now. He’d placed it where he could always find it. Sobbing his relief, he grabbed the cold handle and sat astride the body of his tormentor.

  Fists pummeled his belly.

  He lashed back, striking an unseen face, and raised the knife.

  “Saber!”

  Saber. His name. He pinned the other’s neck. “Saber! Please. What is it? Saber!”

  He grew still. He was cool again.

  Looking around, he saw moonlight, moonlight through un-draped windows. Moonlight on tumbled white sheets.

  The rain had stopped. “It isn’t raining,” he murmured. “It was raining.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Saber looked down at his “enemy.”

  Crushed beneath his weight, her great dark eyes glittering in the moonlight, lay Ella.

  She looked not at him, but at the knife poised to strike at her heart.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Ella.

  He opened his mouth, heard her name within his mind, but could make no sound.

  Beloved.

  She would be his only beloved for as long as he lived. Slowly, as if in a trance, she raised her arms and wrapped the fingers of both hands over his on the handle of the dagger. For an instant he didn’t guess her intention, didn’t guess that she meant to help him take her life….

  “No!” He wrenched the gleaming weapon away and threw it across the chamber.

  “You want to kill me,” Ella whispered. “So kill me.”

  “No, no, no. Don’t say it.”

  “You hate me. I am disgusting in your eyes.”

  He fell down beside her and gathered her in his arms. “You are beautiful in my eyes. You are beautiful. You are my only beloved one.”

  She sobbed silently, her slim body heaving. Her dress and petticoats had been removed, but she wore a modest chemise of some fine stuff.

  “All my life I have been a mistake,” she said into his chest. “I caused my mother pain. For me she was forced to do things she hated to do—to keep me, and Max. I am worthless.”

  My God! This was his fault. He had known how fragile his Ella was. He’d known from the first moment they spent alone. Then she’d trusted him with those secrets that tore at her heart, and he’d felt disgust. Yes, then he’d felt disgust—or disappointment so deep it could not be ignored. But now he felt only his need for this girl. He needed her so desperately that he could not conceive of drawing another breath once he left her presence for the last time. And he would leave her eventually, and forever—once he had dispatched his duty and made certain she was under the protection of a man who would love and care for her.

  “Why do you hate me, Saber?” Her voice was indistinct. He stroked her tumbled hair. How could he not? “I don’t hate you. I told you, I love you.”

  Her tears wetted his chest. He rolled to his back, pulling her on top of him, and covered them both with the sheets.

  Gradually her sobbing eased. As she relaxed she grew heavier, and warmer—and Saber became very aware of his nakedness, and the flimsy nature of her chemise.

  “If you love me,” she said. “If you love me, keep me. I ask nothing of you but that you let me stay with you.”

  Saber pressed her face into his neck and squeezed his eyes shut. “No.”

  “But you said—”

  “I cannot.”

  “Stop it!” Her fists descended on his shoulders and she forced her head up until she could look down at him in the moonlight. “Over and over you have said we cannot be together. Tell me why we cannot be together. I love you. You say you love me. Please. Do not send me away again. I can have no life except with you.”

  “I might have killed you.” He spoke the words aloud, heard them in the night—and died inside. “Why must I say more to make you understand? Another instant and you would have been dead.” Sickened, he turned his face from her.

  “But you didn’t kill me,” Ella said. “And you did not intend to kill me.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “You were asleep when I came to you. I was wrong to do such a thing. You thought I was an enemy and that I had attacked you. You fought back.”

  How close she came to the truth. “You do not understand. Think what you saw. What manner of man did you see when I held you down and raised a knife against you?”

  Her thick hair fell forward. Firelight and shadow played over the fine bones of her face, over her shoulders and the deeper plane between her breasts. The white chemise gleamed, as did her skin where it blossomed above her bodice.

  Ella held motionless, her elbows locked, her fists still clenched on his shoulders.

  “This is not seemly,” he told her quietly. Try as he might, he could not contain his body’s response to her. She would feel him. “How did you come here?”

  Her fists unfurled and she slipped her hands around his neck. “Max helped me. He diverted Bigun while I slipped in. We were wrong, but I don’t care. I want to stay with you, Saber.”

  He grimaced. Her belly, her sharp hipbones, her thighs pressed his body. She was a slight enough creature, yet her weight was a burning presence.

  “I don’t care what anyone thinks anymore,” she said. “I am nothing anyway. Only let me be where you are.”

  “Nothing?” He tried to concentrate. “You are everything. I asked you a question. What did you see when I attacked you?”

  “A man surprised,” she told him, settling her breasts against his chest once more and nuzzling her face to his neck. She kissed him there. “Had you been accustomed to my presence, you would not have behaved so. You thought you were alone, but then there was a stranger in your bed.”

  She could not know the truth. He would not, could not tell her all of it, but she must learn enough to make her leave and never want to come back.

  “I wrote to Max. We have shared so much and he guessed I was unhappy. Today he came from Eton and pretended sickness to be allowed to remain with me. When he suggested we come to you tonight I was afraid, I thought it a poor idea. Now I’m glad. Hold me, Saber. Does it make you feel as it makes me feel?”

  “Ah …” His wretched brain refused to do battle with the demands of his body.

  She wiggled on top of him.

  “N-n-no,” he moaned. “Don’t move, Ella.”

  “Oh, it makes the feelings for you too? The burning. The aching.” She took a hand from his neck and pushed it between them. “Here in my breasts there is the most extraordinary sensation. And down here.” Her fingers worked downward until they met his rod—and grew absolutely still. “We spoke once
before of how this part of you leaps. It leaps again—because of me. I want to feel it, to hold it to me. You touched my breasts before. You kissed them and sent a fire into me. I want you to kiss them again.”

  By God, he was only a man!

  He slipped his fingers through her hair and drew her face down to his. “Hush. Long ago you were a victim,” he said against her lips, and teased them open with his tongue. “You—had—no choice.” She pressed her mouth to his and he moved his head gently, brushing skin on skin, mingling breath with breath. Kisses that bound. Kisses that did nothing to quiet the clamoring urgency in his belly.

  Her breasts, innocently offered, teased him—the stiffness of her nipples warning him that the arousal was not his alone. In this he must have strength—for both of them.

  “Ella—”

  She kissed him to silence. Kissed him, copying the motions of his tongue, meeting each firm thrust of his with one of her own.

  He should stop.

  He should make both of them stop.

  Ella moaned. She still touched him most intimately, and he did not possess the will to stop her.

  The acts she’d performed with… A child forced. Acted upon but never instigating. It was a miracle she could respond to him, want to respond to him.

  “Show me what I should do,” she murmured. “Exactly what would please you?”

  He embraced her fiercely. Enough time would never pass to obliterate the memories entirely, yet she trusted him enough to want to please him. The others… Those creatures who had used her had done nothing other than take her. Now she wished to give—to him. She sought his teaching.

  “Kiss me, Ella,” he told her. “Kiss me again, my darling.”

  She sealed his lips with hers so sweetly, his belly grew tight and his throat constricted with tenderness. He raised his jaw, urging her mouth to open wider. With her head anchored in his hands, he deepened the kiss.

  Moments more and he would lose himself in her. “Ella”—he drew away, still holding her face close to his, but putting distance between their lips—“Ella, sweet, I asked you a question. You must answer.”

  He could not see her expression. Her hand moved upon him, exploring. Saber closed his eyes and said, “I should like you to put your arms around my neck.”

  Instantly she stopped. “You do not like me to touch you— there?”

  He swallowed and tried to will away all feeling. Impossible. “Your arms around my neck, please.”

  “Yes, Saber.” She did as he asked, and as she did so her breasts moved against his chest, and her hips pressed the harder into his—and he fought for control.

  “I will repeat my question. When I held you beneath me, what did you feel?”

  “Your legs and… that.”

  He frowned. “My—”

  “You have very strong legs. I should like to feel them about me like that again. And that, well, it is—”

  “Ella!” He was in danger of disgracing himself. No man could be expected to endure such provocation and yet to exert willpower enough to resist that provocation. “Ella, when you looked into my face, what did you see?”

  Her legs moved. Just as he had clamped her hips between his thighs, she now clamped his hips between hers.

  Nothing separated him from the entrance to her womanhood.

  Saber shifted. He released her face and slipped his hands down to lift her from him.

  Rather than her waist, his hands spanned her ribs—spanned the place where the soft undersides of her breasts swelled.

  A soft “ooh” sighed over his lips.

  So soft. So lovely. He sprang harder—a disaster. The tip of his penis met the maddening texture of hair, the inflaming smoothness of aroused flesh—and the sleekness of her readiness.

  Saber filled his hands with her breasts, played his fingertips over her budded nipples.

  And if he took her, and fell asleep with her in his arms, he could be claimed once more by the unspeakable—and the next time he might not awaken in time to stop his violence. The next time, he might wring the life from her before consciousness found him.

  “My God! No!” Twisting violently, Saber turned until Ella fell onto the mattress. “No, do you hear me? No.”

  “Saber, please—” “No.” He loomed over her, trapped her wrists against the bed. “I am not a man.”

  “You are a man. You are the best of men. You are—”

  “Stop it.” He shook her. “When you looked up at me after I awoke, you saw a man unworthy of trust.”

  “I saw you.” Her breasts rose and fell rapidly. “You are the dearest of men.”

  “We shall not discuss this further except for you to hear what I will say—once. There is a reason why I cannot love you.”

  “You already said you loved me,” she told him in a small voice.

  “As a sister,” he lied.

  She struggled against his grip—to no avail. “No brother loves a sister in such a way.”

  “The flesh has its own way,” he told her. “I cannot help my body’s betrayal. But it is not the betrayal of my mind. I shall never marry, Ella. Not you, not anyone. This is as I wish it. I have more important matters upon which to spend my life.” Such as mourning the loss of the treasure that might have been his.

  “I need you.”

  What if he had not fully awakened? What if a few more seconds had passed in that hot, bloody place to which he was doomed to return again and again? Saber looked down at Ella, grateful in the knowledge that the moonlight could not reveal the depth of his self-disgust.

  “Saber?”

  “I almost killed you.”

  Ella stopped struggling. He saw the glint of her eyes, of her teeth—the pale sheen over her cheekbones. Quiet enveloped them.

  “At this moment I am naked and holding you to my bed. You are little more than a girl, and you are not my wife. If anyone were to discover us, your reputation would be gone forever.”

  “That’s what Max …” Her voice faded to nothing.

  Saber peered at her more closely. “Max? Max wanted this to happen?”

  “He thought that if I was compromised, you would marry me and then I should be safe.”

  “He is fifteen,” Saber said, incredulous. “What would possibly make a lad of fifteen have such thoughts?”

  “You forget,” she said, her voice breaking. “You forget that we have not lived as people of your class live at such ages. And fifteen is not an infant, is it?”

  “No,” he said, remembering his own earlier years and the clamorous longings he suffered. “But for Max to plot against me—and with his own sister.”

  “You do not understand. We are afraid. And he believes you care for me—that you will keep me safe.”

  “Safe from what?”

  “I am afraid!” She began to cry, low, keening sobs as if wrenched from her. “He w-wants to hurt me, to destroy me. I don’t know why. Do you understand me, Saber? He wishes me ill and I don’t even know why!”

  Her body bucked upward. Immediately he released her wrists and caught her against him. Cold moisture coated her skin.

  “What are you telling me, Ella?” he said into her hair. “That Max wishes you ill? I don’t understand.”

  “Not Max. The other one.”

  “Explain yourself. Who wishes you ill?”

  “I don’t know, I tell you! But if there were no hope of his capturing me—if I belonged to you and he knew that if he hurt me he would answer to you—then he might leave me alone.”

  She panted, and clutched him. He grew hotter—and more desperate. “Please, Ella, hush. Oh, hush.” He heard his own harsh breathing. “If you do not know who this—who it is who wishes you harm, how can you be sure such a person exists? Surely you aren’t still worrying about the scraps of chiffon?”

  “Not that.”

  Saber shifted with her to the edge of the bed. He covered himself and cradled her in his lap, her head upon his shoulder. “More chiffon. Is that the trouble?”

>   “My dress,” she said. “In the pocket there is a letter. It was delivered earlier today. Finch said he found it on his tray. No member of the staff remembers taking delivery of it.”

  “All right,” Saber said, deliberately calm. “I’m going to find some clothes and light a lamp. You’re shivering.” He set her carefully aside and left the bed, conscious of his nakedness as he had not been in his memory.

  “You are very beautiful,” Ella remarked in a clear voice. He grabbed for trousers. “Close your eyes.”

  “I shall not.”

  “Do as you are told, miss. Quite enough has happened that should not have happened tonight.”

  She made a sound of disagreement and announced, “Not nearly enough has happened to please me, sir.”

  In other circumstances he would have laughed. Instead, he stepped into the trousers and fastened them rapidly.

  “I wish you would not dress, Saber.”

  “I wish you would hold your tongue, Ella. Either you are a designing minx, or a very foolish one. Be assured that to lose one’s reputation among the ton is anything but pretty. How should we hope to secure you a suitable husband under those circumstances?”

  “No one will have me.”

  He paused in the act of donning a shirt. “I beg your pardon?”

  “I said, no one will have me. He has all but promised as much.”

  Saber picked up a silk robe and carried it to Ella. He spread it around her shoulders and pulled it together in front of her. Then he lighted the lamp beside the bed.

  The burst of yellow light revealed what the moonlight had disguised. Ella’s face was pale, her hair a shiny, black mass that fell past her shoulders. Her eyes, as dark as her hair and filled with haunted intensity, followed his every move. When he went to move away, she shot out a hand to twine in one of his.

  “What is it?” he asked. “I cannot help you if you will not explain.”

  Still clutching him, she slid to stand on the floor and pulled him with her to the clothing she’d piled on a chair. She turned her dress until she could feel in a pocket and remove an envelope. This she offered him.

  Saber sensed how badly she needed to cling to him. He contrived to remove a piece of paper from the envelope.